The Pain Body — what Eckhart Tolle teaches us about anger
It had been a long day. I was standing at the tram stop on a brutally cold, dark winter evening in Budapest, with the beginnings of a fever looming, and I was desperate to get home. I had been through a long and hectic teaching day, followed by a busy parents’ evening, and all I wanted to do when I got home was to change switch off the lights, crawl into bed and not get out again until I had to wake up for work the next morning.
The tram finally arrived and I happened to be standing right at section where the platform where the doors open. Another commuter suddenly appeared right in front me, standing so close that I was staring right into the back of his jacket.
Before I even realised what I was saying, I heard myself yelling — ‘hey — I’m standing here!’ He said something possibly-not-very-pleasant back in Hungarian. The doors opened and I realised I must have really shown my anger because after we got on the tram, his girlfriend was yelling something back at me which probably also wasn’t very kind in Hungarian.
I was absolutely shaking with anger when I finally sat down. I could hear my calm, intuitive voice telling me that I wasn’t quite in my right mind at that moment: I needed to just get home and get some sleep. But that voice was well and truly stamped out by my rage.
I marched over and yell-spoke at the man that the reason why I was annoyed at him was because he was standing too close to me and he queue jumped. He sat across from his girlfriend and slowly looked up at me, rolled his eyes and said in a high-pitched, dismissive tone: ‘Thank you. Goodbye!’ I yelled back ‘Goodbye! Then I muttered loudly ‘Idiot!’ as I went back to my seat. Some of the passengers squirmed — others giggled; most ignored us and looked straight ahead.
As I got off the tram, I saw him and his girlfriend watch me as I walked past their carriage. Did they think I was some demented crazy old foreigner?
The anger dissipated by the time I got back home into my fear about how I had reacted. Why did I let something so silly and petty get to me like that? As a teacher and an expat, it’s probably not a great idea to get myself into those types of situations.
Then my fear turned into self-pity: I live alone and I’m far from my parents and siblings. I have friends here, but when I have an unpleasant experience like that — no matter how petty it is — it’s a blunt reminder that I can’t go home and rant to a loved one who would at least humour me by sitting mutely and listening. And then that triggered feelings of sadness about still being in the same position with my feelings, and my alone-ness.
Even sitting to first write about that incident brought about a strong physical response in me. I felt it in my body. I became more fidgety, and I had to get up and pace up and down to get out my pent-up sadness and frustration about an insignificant event that happened to me months ago. All the horrible feelings started layering on in my mind. That man triggered feelings from other times when I’d felt felt powerless and belittled. I started crying, even though a few minutes ago, when I started to write it, I was fine — and I don’t think I’m someone who cries easily.
A few weeks later I was chatting with a friend about how the worst things seem to happen when we’re already feeling ill, or unhappy. I mentioned that incident at the tram stop, and how it triggered all these uncontrollable emotions. My friend said that what I had told her, reminded her of Eckhart Tolle’s discussion of ‘the painbody.’
The concept as outlined by Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power of Now is about how we hold all of the emotional pain and sadness in our lives within our bodies which are triggered when another negative incident happens to us. As Tolle also explained in HuffPost: ‘the painbody is a ‘an energy entity consisting of old emotion… ‘it is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose.’
How does one begin to fully face it though? Tolle says that the best way to manage the painbody is to be fully present in our thoughts and emotions, but that is of course a difficult lifelong practice for most of us, especially when we are usually living in our heads and constantly planning for what’s ahead.
Meditation, a mindful yoga practice and counselling have helped me to be kinder to myself when I find myself being so emotionally triggered, that I react without thinking. But my new awareness of the painbody helps me so much as I can see it as an entity and I don’t need to let it control me.
