Session 022: Healing Our Pain Body

Healing Our Pain Body

Dhamma Talk + Guided Meditation Session 022: June 3rd, 2020, by Sophia Ojha Ensslin and Cristof Ensslin

Banner Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash

Introduction

It is no news that there is deep pain and suffering in our society and in our communities. Being part of the minority community and as a first generation immigrant who grew up in New Jersey, recent events have been personally intensely disturbing. But all of us are deeply affected because we are all human beings, first and foremost, and we are designed to live in peace and love with our fellow human beings.

We, each, need to step up to make efforts to build harmony and socio-economic justice. Taking care of our emotional and spiritual well-being is a powerful way to be a source and inspiration for love and equality. Everyday we need to make greater efforts towards peace and mutual love and respect, both within ourselves and towards our brothers and sisters. On the spiritual path, meditation is one of the ways to do that and being in nature is another.

It has not been easy to prepare for today’s meditation class with our usual light-heartedness. Any topic I reviewed seemed to come up short. It felt like I was looking for a solution to this unease, shock and heartbreak that I have been feeling inside.

You may be feeling these as well. There may be anger, disbelief, shock, sorrow, and even helplessness and confusion; and may be you’ve cycled through all of these emotions and a host of others.

Dhamma Talk (Sophia)

Guided Meditation (Cristof):

Handout

This week we have a 5-page handout. It is posted below as blog content for you. Plus, you can download it as PDF by clicking on the button below:

Leading From Within

You may look to leaders in the community or to people you love and respect in the limelight or friends and family for support. There are no easy answers to solve the current crisis we are facing as a society. Deep ruts of injustice seem immovable and permanent with a historical pillar supporting them going back hundreds of years. Yes, there are things we need to do as a society: changing laws and changing institutions.

But it is easy to ignore the deep inner-work we all need to do within, regardless of which race and ethnic background we belong to. This is an important part of our healing process. What is a society made of? A society is made up of a group of individuals who have agreed to live together in peace. It is not a monolith. It is individuals, then families, then groups and then communities. Our communities are based on a series of interlocking actions and transactions that we take on a daily basis.

Society Is Made Up of Strings of Individual Actions

These interactions are nothing but a string of tiny individual actions we take each day that influence what kind of a family and community we build. And before each of these actions, comes a string of thoughts. Often these thoughts are in response to actions of others. Yes, many of these thoughts are of love, compassion and forgiveness. But largely these thoughts are defiled, stained, poisoned. These thoughts are made up of jealousy, impatience, irritation, frustration about everyday small things. These thoughts are made up of comparison, of complaints, of negativity, of judging others, of finding the bad in others.

But even before it comes to others, these thoughts are a result of an unharnessed fault-finding mind. These thoughts are made up of expectations for the self that are overwhelming and unrealistic. The self-violence and mini-war that we rage within ourselves involves hurtful, unkind thoughts towards ourselves. They are about how much weight we have gained, it’s about how our hair looks, it’s about how far one should have come in life by now, it’s about these long lists of expectations that are not truly in harmony with what is kind and compassionate. We are far from kind and compassionate towards ourselves. How can we even begin to be kind and compassionate towards others.

We fill up our schedules with more activities and more projects than we can handle. Not giving time to ourselves to rest and restore, to heal and relax, to reflect and ponder. It’s like we are reverse Robin Hood; we are stealing time from ourselves and giving it to all these projects and activities. We are stealing our sense of worth by bothering about how others will judge our homes and our clothes.

Mine, Your and Our Pain Bodies

Whether you know it or not, you have what Eckhart Tolle calls a pain body. There’s the pain-body of slavery and being descendants of people who were enslaved , there’s the pain body of having ancestors who owned people as slaves. There’s the pain body of being a minority and not having access to socio-economic justice. There’s the pain body of being a freedom-loving person living in a democratic country but seeing laws and political actions that look more like fascism. The pain body of systemic injustice and immunity to the authorities who commit blatant brutal violence towards people simply because they happen to be Black. There’s the pain body of being female and being persecuted and abused based on gender. There’s the pain body of being male and having to deal with all that comes with it. There’s pain body of being persecuted in Europe and having to find safer life in America. There’s the pain body of colonization. There’s the pain body of being descendent of colonizers. There’s the pain body of being born in post-world war Germany. The pain body of being Jewish and being a holocaust survivor or descendant of those who perished in the holocaust. 

There’s the pain body of being untouchables in India and the caste system. There’s the pain body of being Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and persecution and marginalization based on your sexual orientation. The pain body of being born into poverty and having to struggle to feed, clothe and house yourself and your family. There is the pain body of being born in an underdeveloped country and seeing the impact of unsurmountable IMF and World Bank loans. There is the pain body of being born in abundance and in an industrialized nation. Pain body of civil war. We have not even begun speaking about the pain body of childhood trauma, emotional trauma and growing up in dysfunctional family. The pain body of being Native American. We all collectively have the pain body of suffering from environmental decay and destruction of our Mother Earth because of corporate greed and abuse of power. There’s so many others that I have not even begun to mention.

We are stealing our own need to release our pain-bodies, our deep ancestral sorrow and suffering that we carry from generation to generation, regardless of what race and ethnicity we come from, we all have ancestral pain-body of hurt, marginalization, subordination and persecution. If we have not healed any of that as individuals, we cannot heal any of that as a society. Peace and reconciliation in our communities will be even more greatly successful if we have also prepared the ground within ourselves to heal those energetic wounds of the past.

So, How Do We Heal Our Pain Body?

Oprah did an amazing online masterclass with Eckhart Tolle back in 2008 which I watched live. It was the first of its kind - an online event streamed live around the world for eight weeks or so. Eckhart Tolle as you may know is the author of many books such as the Power of Now and A New Earth. In his book, The New Earth, he talks about the Pain Body and how we can heal it. A very useful video clip from Oprah’s website shows an excerpt of Tolle describing how to heal our pain body. You can watch it here: http://www.oprah.com/own-a-new-earth/how-to-identify-and-stop-your-pain-body-video

And I am transcribing it below for those who would like to read.

”The important thing is to catch it as it first arises, before it takes over your mind, when it is there as an emotion. Usually it’s the pain body when the emotional reaction is out of proportion to the triggering event. So a relatively minor thing triggers an enormous amount of unhappiness in whatever form. So then, after a while, you realize the kind of situation that triggers your pain body. And then you can be actually more vigilant when such a situation happens because if you are able to bring consciousness into the body, you can more easily feel an arising emotion inside you, whether it is a very heavy emotion like deep sadness or whether it is a fiery emotion of anger, or whatever it is, or the emotion of intense fear. There are so many people these days that are completely out of touch with their emotions because they live only in the head. Being able to feel an emotion as it arises and then recognizing it as the beginning of the pain body - my pain body. And as long as you know this is the pain body, you are not identified with it because the knowing is the awareness.

One thing that doesn’t happen is that the pain body controls your thinking because you are shining the light of consciousness on it. It cannot then creep into your mind and suddenly make your mind think what it wants to think. So remain there in the awareness for it and say, ‘Oh, there’s the pain body’. Then it cannot renew itself and it also cannot control your behavior and your actions. All it is that you’ve contained it, not through holding it down. You’ve contained it there, through your presence.”

Learning To Be Present Is Healing

By being present with our feelings, we allow them to dissolve. For that, we need to slow down and allow time for us to be present to ourselves.

Let’s do that now in practice.

Let’s take time for inner-healing and spiritual restoration and send a giant wave of loving-kindness across the United States and to all the people who call this land their home.

Peace to all.