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The Pain Body and The Joy Body 6.13
Almost all of us carry accumulations of old emotional pain, what Eckhart Tolle calls the "pain-body." This pain body feeds on negative thinking and drama in relationships. It is an energy field of its own, with "...its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal...the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body."
Similarly, our "joy-body" (my term) contains all the love, wonderful experiences, and associated emotions that we collect over the years. Like the pain body, our joy-body stores family, ancestral, and collective joy. It feeds on positive, transporting experience. The importance of this to our living energy, our power to promote change in our emotional responses, and the creativity at the heart of our universe is profound. We have a choice about what we feed, what we eat, and how we digest what comes our way.
A Simple Proposal
Instead of identifying and labeling our emotions, instead of telling our stories of hurt and betrayal over and over again, we can work with the energy itself.
We can learn to notice energy that no longer serves us, release it, and fill with something lighter. When we view everything as just energy, there's no judgment. Just as we blow out one breath to take in another, we can release the heavy to make space for the light.
Every meditation practice teaches that our feelings and reactions arise, then change, then change again; our pain and mental responses are not us.
This point of view offers us freedom to move in and out of feeling states with fluidity; to change our energy; and to avoid getting stuck in those "heavy" and redundant thoughts that occupy 75% of our thinking.
Feeding Our Joy Body
Fluid awareness, gratefulness, and joy can become our state of mind. Imagine you and your friends focusing on each other's wonderful and joyful qualities...Imagine relating to your family--children, partner, parents--from a place of joy and radiance...Imagine the world when leaders begin talking about how brilliant and wonderful other leaders, religions, culture, and countries are...
We need not wait for the leaders; we are the ones we've been waiting for!
We can notice our own thought patterns, topics of conversation, and the energies behind our words, and learn to shift the heavy doses of negativity we are used to.
We can visualize a peaceful, harmonious world.
We can feed our pragmatic shifts with inspiring, mystical experience.
We can set our intent to explore cosmic sources of our inner wisdom.
Practice and repetition embeds transformation in our bodies, psyches, and habits. Noticing, releasing, and filling helps us move from pain body to joy body. The more clear we become internally, the stronger a conduit we can be for balance, healing, and bringing light to the world.
The Gift
As the mystic and Sufi poet Hafiz, advised over 600 years ago:
"We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.
Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.
We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
"O please, O please,
Come out and play."
For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom and
Light!"
"We have not come to take prisoners," from The Gift, versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky.
Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers
Copyright © 2013
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