Do you know where your pain-body is?
More importantly, do you know what it’s up to?
How can you recognize it?
By negativity. By drama and angst. These are the things the pain-body thrives on, and they are valuable signals for that reason. Those hopeless spy-lies? They are coming from the pain-body! They have no basis in truth. The pain-body is a snake-oil salesman, and it’s selling sorrow, despair, depression, and defeat. Frustration is on half-price special–get it while you can!
Why does it act this way? Why does it continually generate destructive beliefs and ideas? Because those mind-sets feed it. Its very existence depends on your believing the lies it tells you!
How do you prevail over the pain-body, and take back control of your life? It’s simple, but not easy. Recognize it. That is the first step. It is probably well-entrenched, and it will arise to challenge you. Every time you see it for what it is, however, and choose not to play along, it will be weakened. Remember that most of its operations are covert ones, and the ego often joins in, to double-team you. Wise up. Refuse to play the game. Eventually, as we practice this, our pain-bodies will heal.
Fine, I hear you saying, but what about the pain-bodies of others? How do we deal with them? (That guy who cut us off in traffic. That obnoxious in-law. That toxic person at the office.) By looking past them, the cavorting pain-body and ego, I mean, to the Real Person. You meet pain-bodies every day of your life, and egos playing at various levels, and they trick you into engaging with them, bringing out your own ego and pain-body in response to some perceived threat. This takes practice, because most of us have been buying into the Big Fat Lie for a long time. I suspect it’s rare to encounter an authentic self, rather than some convenient and transitory guise of the ego or the pain-body. The exceptions to this really stand out, by virtue of being so uncommon. “They’re special,” the pain-body tells us, in a conspiratorial whisper. Well, I say, that’s a LIE! They’re not special, my dear–they’re NORMAL.
Recently, someone said to me, “Life is suffering.” This is a pain-body in full control. Pain is inevitable, in every life, but suffering is a matter of choice. Suffering is the provence of the pain-body, with generous input from the ego. “This shouldn’t be happening to ME.” “I am a victim.” “It’s not fair!” (Hello. Expecting things to be fair is playground stuff. It’s infantile. Get over it. You’re in the show, and that means you’ll have low times as well as high ones. The effect ANY of these events have on you is a matter of your interpretation of them.)
Victor Frankel and Christopher Reeve immediately come to mind. There are thousands, if not millions, of other heros and heroines like this. Terrible things happened to them, but they overcame, setting a higher standard for all of us. They knew no circumstance really had power over them, as long as they held onto their divine right to interpret said circumstance from the highest mental and emotional ground they could get to. NOT, take note, from the place of Enlightenment, which few of us reach in physical form, but from the next best place to stand inside their own minds and hearts. That’s all we have to do to progress, you know. Just step into that next best place, that next best feeling.
It’s a process.
Let’s keep going.
So. It’s ten o’clock. Where is YOUR pain-body, and what mischief is it up to?
