The Painbody – Truth #7 from A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

I keep thinking back to the last weekend while I was considering my good friends and their spectrum of emotions. One was bringing a new life into the world. One is on the verge of possibly entering a fight for their life. Others are getting hit with the unforeseen while others are just working their asses off just to free up some moments and feel like they have a life. Oh, yeah, and my own fears and stresses…

A lot of it was weighing on me when I started arguing with the third party who I felt was doing the classic project management techniques of pushing back on the others in email and getting others to do their work for them while they free up a few moments to themselves and clean out they inbox so they feel like they’ve accomplished something. It was infuriating. It was unprofessional. It made us look like a bunch of hacks and, worst of all, they made it feel like it was our fault. I’m as tactical as they come so I’ll plan my rants carefully, especially when speaking up on behalf of this case study but it had gone on long enough. This phase of the case study should have been done a month ago.

Somewhere along the line I got lucky enough to realize I was reacting. I was reacting to those who were being selfish and rude. It’s one of my triggers: I get affected by selfish people. ‘Have a father selfish enough to choose his vices over his family instead of sticking it out when the chips were low and you get those left-behind moments. It’s when I realized that the painbodies that stem from my fear of abandonment were active and spirited.

The Painbody: What are Painbodies?

According to A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, The Pain Body…well, truth told I always think of them as Jacob Marley’s chains in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. They’re echoes, traces of negative energy left behind from emotional pain. The theory is that once you acknowledge them they run like scavengers but if you aren’t conscious of them then they feed off of fears and angers like vultures on carcasses. According to the book, the way to deal with them is to become conscious of your presence – enter zen or what have you – acknowledge the pain and the painbodies start to fade away.

Now, the explanation seems a little too-good-to-be-true and the name, “PainBody,” just seems like it’s a branded name on a whitelabel concept, but the techniques have been helping my stress.

We have a little reconciling with the third party. And thanks to Gumballhead I’m zen enough to admit that the reconciliation might become a recoknin’, but that said it’s the first time I had to use the concept in a real-life situation, in the moment. I was a little slow on the draw but so it goes with making things habit. And in the end I think I might have lashed out at the 3rd party because of my painbodies. He probably deserved 99% of it, but it’s always that 1% that gets in the way.

The details. Always in the details

So, yeah, I’ll try it again and again. I’ve loved the results to this point.

How crazy does it sound?

photo credit: Niecieden via Fickr

Last updated by Finn at August 4, 2020.