Addiction and the Pain Body

“”Pain is but the sign you have misunderstood yourself.”
– A Course in Miracles

I feel that those who suffer with addiction are caught by what Eckhart Tolle refers to as the ‘pain body’. The pain body is an expression of the Separation Program, and a main factor in all suffering and addiction. The pain of separation has become the experience of who we feel ourselves to be. In spite of how painful, or maybe because of how painful it is, it has become our identity.

I first became aware of the pain body when I read Eckhart’s ‘The Power of Now’ about 14 years ago. It was one of the most illuminating turning points of my life. Before that time, I had a ‘pain body from hell’ and had been tormented by it on nearly a daily, constant basis most of my life. When I read about it for the first time, I found myself saying out loud: “You are so busted!” to the pain body. After that major ‘ah ha!’ moment, with the ongoing cultivation of awareness, I have long periods of time being free of it. However, I am still occasionally taken over by it if I get lazy.

“The pain body is the accumulated pain, a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain body.

On a personal level, the pain that is carried over from your childhood does not go away completely; it leaves energetic residues of pain, energy fields. Emotional pain gathers into one mass of pain, contracted energy, that isn’t flowing freely that I call the “pain body” that humans carry inside. It is an energy field of pain from the past that lives on in you.

The pain body feeds on your thinking, and on others reactions. It creates a mind pattern of the “unhappy me”, a mind pattern that people are identified with an unhappy sense of self.  This mind pattern, when the pain is active becomes amplified. The pain body moves into that mind pattern that already is telling you “your life hasn’t been good enough” and ‘you may not make it’, “life has passed me by”, and so on.

If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you, and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in. I call it Presence.

You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have found your own inner strength. You have accessed the power of Now. Unconsciousness creates it; consciousness transmutes it into itself.” – Eckhart Tolle

Eckhart says that one is lucky to have a strong pain body as, “One is more likely to awaken if in a nightmare than within the ups and downs of an ordinary dream”. Eckhart attributes his own awakening to the severity of the pain he experienced with his own pain body. I feel that Byron Katie and Lester Levenson also had similar awakenings through severe pain. All three of these people were average human beings with little or no spiritual awareness, who had what I refer to as ‘pain bodies from hell’ and experienced awakening as a result of it.

Along with this line of thinking, it is my perception that addiction is in actuality an opportunity to awaken. I feel this is what is meant by being a grateful alcoholic or addict. I feel the pain body is an insidious aspect of the core program of Separation perpetuating itself. It is incomprehensibly insidious and devious. It is the subtle manifestations of it that can be particularly devious.

Simply becoming aware of the Pain Body is a huge step forward in coming to terms with any kind of addiction.