Part 4 Of My Weightloss Story- Enter The Pain Body

I’m Baaaaccckkkkk!!!!! ;)  My family has passed the flu around for a few weeks and I began choreographing a musical! Go figure! All that and trying to start home schooling back up again has had me with no time to do the fun stuff- write!  But glorious Sunday mornings... the kids were playing, the hubby still sleeping and I had a few moments to myself to continue the saga.

I know some of you may be eager for some formula that I used to lose my weight.  It didn’t work that way for me. Because my out of control eating was of an emotional nature, I believe it wasn’t  until I got my emotional ‘house’ in order that I began to make real and lasting progress. We all know how to lose weight. So, please bear with me as I tell the story.   

When we left off, I had become frustrated with the track I was on. I was meditating every day, reading many books, praying for guidance, and I was making real progress in my inner work.  I was beginning to understand myself and how I was allowing my past to shadow my future. I knew I didn’t want that. I wanted to let that hurt little girl go...but she kept showing up over and over again. Why?

  Without jumping totally onto the spirituality track, I have come to realize our true selves are never apart from God. Because we are having a human experience, we have a brain and with that a mind. This mind creates your ego/identity and with that a false reality that makes you feel separate from God. You feel all ‘alone’ in the world and apart from everyone, instead of a part of everyone. This is ‘reality’. 

Enter, the “pain body” which is a term Eckhart Tolle uses to describe the accumulation of all our past pains. Without going into great detail (if you want that, please read "A New Earth" and "The Power of Now" by Tolle), every time we experience pain or disappointment our pain body, or all the emotional baggage from the past, will rear its ugly head and get us to identify with IT, not with the way things really are. 

The pain body doesn’t want you to recognize your constant connection to God, because then you would not identify with IT anymore and it would cease to be needed.   So, instead you say, “That is me. I am a victim. My pain is my story.  It is what I am about. Without it, who am I?”  So, your pain body continues to survive on your recycled pain. Any kind of discomfort, anger, emotional drama, etc. will  keep you focused on that pain.  Once again, you become the victim and relinquish control for how you feel to the pain body. You get into the mode of “I can’t help the way I feel!  Just look at all I have to deal with!”  

Your thinking begins to revolve around all the things that make you unhappy. You forget to be grateful for the good in your life, because the bad has now been coddled, magnified and dramatized.  It is also a comfortable feeling.  Kurt Cobain wrote, “I miss the comfort in being sad.”  You have lived most of your life in this state and it feels right.  You may even feel uneasy if things get too good in your life and create drama just so you can feel that comfortable feeling again.  It’s another sick cycle.

So, you get out the china cups and sit and have a nice little tea party with Mr. Pity. He is invited often, but will show up uninvited regularly to make sure you don’t forget that you are a victim and feel helplessly controlled by your feelings. Mr. Pity and your Pain Body are great friends! They have a common goal. As long as they are in control, they run the show. Kind of like the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. Except we want to to pay attention to the ‘man behind the curtain,’ because once we do, we can begin our journey back home, where you once more recognize your constant connection to God. It never ceases to be. We only think it does because we are too busy getting caught up in ‘our story’ written by our pain.  This also causes our bodies to stay in a constant stressed out state. We are always either fuming about yesterday, worried about tomorrow, afraid of what might happen, nervous, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but we seldom find a place of peace and gratitude that causes that chatter of our minds to stop, long enough to actually feel that connection.  It’s not coincidence that the word disease = dis ease. The physical and the spiritual are ultimately interwoven.

As you begin to see the pain body for what it is,  you begin to see the false reality you have constructed.  The ‘watcher’ is a term long used by meditators to describe the phenomenon of standing outside yourself 'watching' yourself as if detached from the situation, like a bystander.  It is the way to dis-identify with your ego and your pain body and see that they are not your true self.  

As I meditated more, I learned how to watch myself and when I would have a meltdown, I began to see things in a different light. So many times I would act in a way contrary to what I said I believed.  As I watched myself, many times I didn't like the way I acted and wanted to change.  But why was it so hard to make any lasting or permanent change?  In addition to improving my relationship with myself and others, I also knew if I was going to get my emotional eating under control, I needed to get my emotions under control first! 

And here is where a huge “Aha! Moment” came for me. I began to see the difference between how I acted and who I truly was deep down inside.  As I watched myself when I had a meltdown, I could see it was me there having the meltdown, but then there is me here watching... who is whom? Who is really me??? The one having the fit or the one doing the watching because I couldn't have the fit and watch it at the same time.  I could 'see' my pain body in action, drawing on every painful experience I had in the moment, to feed itself and grow stronger. You know kind of like when you and your significant other get into a fight and you suddenly remember every instance of disappointment and have no problem recalling each one in great detail, like “back in 1998, I asked you if I looked fat in my jeans and you never even answered me! You think I’m fat!”

I could go from zero to an insecure mess with one comment... Heck, one look.

This was the 'me' I thought I was.  But it is not the real me. I began to see that I was acting in a way that was contrary to my actual nature. My nature was good. My nature was Godly. So why was it so easy for me to act so ungodly??   We come from God right?  If you believe the creation story, even metaphorically, we come from God and the Earth.   How can we be anything other than that of which we are made.  

I think I will end this here for now. It’s getting a little lengthy. 

More tomorrow. Promise. :)