Dignifying the Pain
Greetings Fellow Travelers!
Public Service Announcement: this is a long essay! I just kept writing and writing. I tried to figure out how to break it up into several emails, but alas I am not so good at chopping things up to be more palatable. As I write that it comes to mind that I have been told that my soups and stews are 'Mega-Block'. Perhaps I suffer from the same affliction with carrots and rutabagas as I do with essays. If you wish, read on. It may be a bit dry, but I tried to be very accurate to my healing craft.
Over the past 13 years I have worked professionally with hundreds of people at all stages of self-inquiry. Last week I sat with someone living through a multiple day storm of self hatred—days numbed with hours of television and binge eating, battered by vicious, overwhelming internal violence and self-talk. This kind of hurricane force internal weather is neither rare nor personal—it’s the shared climate of much of humanity.
I spent years in an inner hurricane of this sort, leading up to and after a precipitous divorce. It felt like I had a giant mass of terribleness roiling and grinding away inside, like a concrete mixer filled with bowling balls and broken glass. In those early years daily meditation (sometimes up to 3 hours/day, no kidding) was absolutely necessary to regulate my mental health.
Retrospectively I have considered that the conventional route, given the state of my emotional and mental world, would have been antidepressants. The idea never occurred to me, and I wonder how my life would have unfolded differently if I had gone that path. I held a stigma around medication, completely unfounded, but nonetheless it dictated my actions. Perhaps I was meant to be driven into a steady practice of meditation, years of silent retreats with Adyashanti, and, a few years later, The Work of Byron Katie.
I was fortunate to learn about Eckhart Tolle’s pain body model during that time. I was amazed at how practical and applicable it was in facilitating a degree of separation between intense torment and emotion, and the truth of who we actually are. Amazingly practical and applicable, but a multi-year process to really begin to integrate into my life.
The pain body, in Eckhart Tolle words, ‘is an accumulation of old, unprocessed emotional pain, a semi-autonomous psychic entity feeding on negativity and seeking more suffering to sustain itself; it's essentially the addiction to unhappiness, made of trapped life energy that takes over your mind unless you bring conscious presence to it, realizing it's not you but a residual energy field from the past.’
I was out on a walk with an acquaintance and told her about the pain body, saying ‘you know when your insides are a writhing mass of horrible emotions and incessant voices of self-hatred, and it goes on for days? When that happens try looking at it through the lens of the pain body.’ She sort of peered at me (kindly I now see) and said ‘Thank you. If that ever happens to me, I will.’
‘If that ever happens to me!?’ I was dumbfounded. I assumed until then that everyone felt as I did. I could not imagine what it must be like to be inside of her mind and daily life without the constant torment.
Many (most?) of us travel through life dragging invisible chains—those heavy, unquestioned beliefs that our struggles, persistent habits, and swirling emotions are evidence of some inherent flaw, and, not only that, but it is who we ARE. This is the pain body.
This belief, the inner identification with the tangle of inherited wounding as who and what we are, simply isn’t true. The pain body lives so convincingly “inside” us—braided into our cells and thoughts—that our minds assume if it’s within, it must be who I am. It is a kind of optical illusion of the psyche.
Because we’ve carried this energy for so long—sometimes our entire lives, and certainly as an ancestral inheritance passed down through generations—it becomes familiar, almost second nature. Its constant presence convinces us that its voice is our own, its weight our natural state. Because we experience the pain body as inside of us, physically inside of our body and mind, we, based on a false logic, conclude it IS us.
And now, let’s make our way back to the client I referred to at the beginning of this essay.
At the start of every session, this client included, I focus on grounding and centering the nervous system. Over years of client work this has evolved into an essential first step. Until the storm settles a bit and a slip of inner calm is resourced, the default is to unintentionally put unhealed inner parts in charge of healing, and the outcome is never good.
In other words, without a modicum of separation from the pain body, some aspect of the pain body is put in charge of the healing.The pain body cannot heal itself; that which is unhealed is not the healer, it simply cannot do it, though it will try.
To encourage this shift out of the pain body, I invite the awareness and attention of a client to come back inward. Often our energy is scattered outward in thought, emotion, or reactivity, making us feel fragmented. This invitation is the first step: to gather everything that is leaking outward and turn back toward your center, initiating a rehydrating and replumping up of yourself into yourself.
Many people describe this as a subtle but tangible wave—a soft settling, a re-coalescing of themselves back into themselves. This initial grounding is both good practice and diagnostic: it gives me a read as to what the inner weather is in the client, and it gives each client a felt sense of their own presence and somatic experience.
This step is not just ritual; it is reconnaissance of the inner landscape, for some it is the first time their immediate experience has been treated as important, and throughout a session I’ll periodically check in to see if anything is getting stuck or something unexpected is surfacing.
One size never fits all, and I trust, above all else, that healing cannot be pushed beyond what is ready, and that which is ready is usually the most presenting energy or emotion in a person. There is an “order of operations” in the psyche. Usually there is a presenting energy—the part that is most obvious, the outermost layer of the onion. Sometimes that part is an anger guardian, standing staunch and blazing at the gate to shield old wounds. Other times, it’s grief, fear, or numbness.
My role is to let the psyche lead, never to force an agenda or bulldoze past a part that isn’t ready. I can’t stress this enough. I have seen and heard of many therapy sessions where the therapist is not attuned to the actual presenting part, and the resulting therapy is ineffective at best and retraumatizing at worst.
To explain this in terms of the pain body, if a practitioner ignores what is truly alive in the moment and tries to bypass or override the presenting part of the pain body, that part tends to contract, defend, or go further underground. The pain body cannot be coerced or rushed into healing; it must be met precisely where it is, with attunement and patience. Only then does it loosen its grip, allowing space for compassion, understanding, and—ultimately—transformation.
In this particular session, the client had called from a sunlit park, her bare toes in the grass, and the inward re-coalescing was deeply stabilizing. (This is not always the case, and sometimes the first session, or even a round of 11 sessions in a Healing Package are spent solely on thawing the pain body enough to begin to establish a reliable inner grounding and okayness before any trauma work is embarked upon. When the attention and awareness is habitually up and out of the body it is such for good reason, and points to a earlier wounding where it was dangerous or destabilizing to have somatic awareness (to be 'in the body').
She began to notice the quiet support of the land, the steadiness of trees, the peace that permeates open space. There’s a difference between talking about support and actually drinking it in. She was drinking deeply.
I can sense when someone is conceptually describing versus actually experiencing real support, peace, or calm. In her case it was genuine: she could truly feel the earth upholding her, the steadiness radiating from the trees.
At this point in a session, I intentionally allow extra time for someone to absorb this "medicine"—because it really is a kind of medicine. Exactly what this medicine is depends on the client. Everyone has a slightly different quality that they can access with guidance. For some it's stillness, some peace, for some it's a steady quiet. It's important as a therapist to be able to intuitively sense what the deep quality is for the client, and to be able to name it for them if they never have. When the healing is operating at this depth in the psyche any sense that the client has of not being perfectly attuned to can derail their ability to continue.
When the influx of medicine is active I become a sentry of patience (and an energetic role model of it being safe to sit quietly in a good place), giving the medicine the time it needs to percolate through the body, nervous system, and old pathways of the brain. This is where new wiring, new possibility, takes root. It’s energetic and physical, new neural pathways are being formed and reinforced in real time the longer a person can stay in this elixir of presence. Simply spending time with this sense of safety, groundedness, or stillness allows the brain to re-pattern itself, making the pathways of well-being and stability easier to access over time, and importantly, in times of stress.
In this way inner work is akin to going to the gym, no one expects to increase their fitness with one day at the gym and then go out and run a half marathon. It is the same with inner work, you have to spend time in a grounded and calm nervous system in order to ‘grow’ it and be able to access it in tumultuous times. I think our collective conciousness is just starting to appreciate this fact. We are quite aclimatized to appreciate time put in at the gym, less so the neccessary time required to grow the soul. It's coming.
Eventually there is a palpable shift: the person may speak, move, or simply feel ready to go deeper. That’s my cue to help them turn toward whatever is ready to be healed, the most presenting part. At this juncture in a healing session it can go several ways.
Sometimes resting in the aforementioned medicine is the only thing called for. When that is the case it is because the client needs to rest, replenish, and build up before any other inner work is embarked upon. To push here would be a mistake because what the psyche is asking for is to be filled up with restorative energy, to grow the energetic signature of what I call the adult presence (a natural counterpoint to the pain body).
Again, it is very important for the therapist to recognize if an extended stabilization in a grounded psyche and nervous system is what is needed. Otherwise the wounded parts get the message that there is no one ‘home’ to take care of them, and the adult presence is eroded. Ultimately the wounded parts, the pain body, want to not be in charge, but they will retain control as long as no one else is around that they absolutely trust.
Frequently at this point the unhealed part may present as one who wants to push, or just ‘figure it out’ so it doesn't feel so terrible. I have seen this often in the type of client who is very sincere in their work, but impatient, and just wants to get it over with and move on.
Incidentally this presentation often points to a childhood wound where it was unacceptablem dangerous, etc, to show emotional or physical pain. The child got the message that they had to deal with stress and pain on their own, and inevitably there is an inner part established in response to the lack of a competent care-giver whose job it is to keep it together, get over it, so the child can somehow carry on with their life.
While plenty of useful conceptual integration can happen when a client just wants to get it over with, true healing of the wounded parts cannot. This younger ‘get it together’ part (or any other part) should never be put in charge of its healing 1) because it is retraumatizing 2) it is completely ineffective and 3) perhaps most importantly, it is simply not that part's job. The healing in this case is to grow the adult presence, the true stable adult that can be with the pain.
After the client I was working with had spent time drinking in the beauty and support of the sunny park I sensed a shift in the connected presence on the call indicating she was ready for the next step. I asked what she was experiencing. She described a storm of violent anger in her stomach.
The pain body, when experienced as anger or rage, tends to express in one of two directions: outward or inward. For some, the energy erupts outward—yelling, punching, seething, lashing out at others. For others, it folds back inward, eating its own tail, slicing into itself with self-hatred, vicious self-talk, self-harm. The client’s pain body was of the latter expression; the violence was directed back at herself.
I offered a technique I’ve found universally effective: I invited the client to imagine that I have never felt anger or violence in my own body— to pretend I truly have no idea what it’s like—and to describe her experience in the most precise detail possible, so that I might imagine it in myself.
This instruction offers potential for a powerful shift: it helps the client step outside the experience, to articulate it rather than be overwhelmed. The small bit of distance is often the necessary wedge for healing to begin. By asking her to communicate it to me it signals to the fightened parts inside that someone is there, helping, making it a bit easier to stay with the intensity.
The client described the violence she was feeling in precise detail, not conceptually, but somatically. I could sense the subtle but crucial shift beginning: the movement from full identification with the pain body toward a quiet emergence of being the observer of the energy, the adult presence.
After allowing time for this shift to settle, I invited her to become very still. Knowing when the foundation is stable enough to move forward is its own art form, an intuitive sense, and a therapist is either innately gifted in this area or has to spend significant time in clinical practice to develop the ability.
When a therapist misses this readiness—or pushes ahead when the client is not ripe, the session risks losing its potency. Instead of an embodied, transformative experience, the process can devolve into mere intellectualizing, or worse, edge toward retraumatization. Careful attunement is what protects the subtle territory of true healing.
Rather than prompting her to analyze the feeling or figure out where the violent anger came from, I asked if she could simply listen for the words of the violent energy itself, as if she were listening to a radio or TV broadcast—letting the words arise naturally, without pretending or censoring. The invitation was to notice the tone, rhythm, emotion, the timbre of the voice itself.
In this client’s case, at first, when I asked her to describe the voice, she said, “Well, I think it sounds like things my mother or father might have said… but I’ve already worked through that.” She sounded discouraged—as if uncovering the ‘source’ had already happened, but the pain remained.
Sometimes it truly is a mother or father’s voice that is saying the words. In this case I realized intuitively that the client had overlaid her parent’s voice on the emotion because of previous therapy, and it was misdirected. I gently repeated the instruction, emphasizing the directive to simply tune into the sound itself, to hear what was actually being said as if it were a separate entity. With this approach she started to hear the real voice of the violence and began to repeat in short simple sentences what it was saying. It was a vicious bully.
There is power in listening directly to the energy and emotion itself. We get to take down the dictation in its pure form without censoring. Really really hearing what the voices inside of us say from a grounded and regulated nervous system is a powerful step in the healing process.
I wrote everything down so that I could read them back to her, word for word. They were terrible things.
You’re weak.
No one wants to be with you.
I hate you.
You’re a piece of shit.
You should just die.
No one else is this pathetic.
Hearing these words spoken out loud for the first time is sometimes as much as someone can process in a session. In this case, after she finished her list, she was lighter: not overwhelmed by the cruelty, but amazed to see it so clearly. There was a sense of relief and empowerment.
Another way to define this shift is that she became more firmly anchored in what she truly is: the observer, the adult presence, the adult with the regulated nervous system who is able to sit quietly, steady, and finally listen to the wounded one. For perhaps the first time there was an unshakeable presence willing to simply witness the pain that, until now, had never been met in this way. This is literal, when wounding is present it is safe to assume that there was not a regulated adult to be with the child when the wounding was occuring.
THE path to healing is growing an adult presence inside that can be with the pain. It is misguided to place the power to heal in another's hands, because ultimately the client the the one who is there, right now in their life. They are the one who is reliably available. In other words, one could wait a thousand years for the person's actual caregiver to get to the place in thier healing where they can be a trustworthy and regulated person capable of authentic repair. Holding out for that is not a good strategy as it outsourced the power to heal to another.
A core feature of wounding, almost universal, is that in the original moment of hurt, usually in childhood, and throughout all the years that follow, there has never been a grounded adult presence available to listen and be with the pain. The healing begins when such a presence finally arrives: the part of us that can watch, listen, and truly have the capacity to remain with what hurts.
Once the client was able to clearly hear the vicious anger's words Iintroduced another technique I’ve developed. I asked her, “Imagine if I, as your guide, were saying these things to you in this cruel, vicious tone. Would you stay on the phone with me?” Almost invariably clients laugh—a real, surprised laugh—and say, “Of course not!” The absurdity of it lands.
I take it one step further: “Would you ever hire someone, pay someone, who spoke to you this way to help you find joy and to help you heal your trauma?” The answer, inevitably, is no. It’s a funny moment, but a powerful one. The realization dawns: why take this unevolved instruction from the inner critic when you’d never accept it from a professional—or friend, or even a stranger?
Something in the client relaxed, and laughter bloomed where 45 minutes before there had been a knot of shame and rage. Ease entered the call. A palpable shift—the difference between one who is under siege and one who has spotted the assailant, and knows: "This is not me." She recognized herself as innocent, worthy, already dignified.
The pain body—now seen—lost so much of its power that it became externalized, and she experienced it as an energetic entity located just outside of herself. She described it as a presence hovering to her left—a force that seethed and pressed, it wanted to punch and kick, to grind her down to the ground now. She intuitiely knew that it wanted to punch and kick herebecause she had seen and heard it so clearly.
At this point the therapist’s discernment becomes crucial. It is essential to assess whether the client has the capacity and stability to be with an entity of this nature, or whether it is time to focus on forming a container of safety and distance.
I want to emphasize that what we are meeting here is a semi-autonomous energetic form—a phenomenon completely natural to human experience. Over time, as the trauma of the pain body is acknowledged and integrated, the energy that was bound up within it is gradually returned to the person. In this sense, it is not a frightening “possession,” but rather a temporary holding of one’s own life force—a resource that became entangled with pain inherited from the collective human story.
When the knot is untangled through conscious presence and acceptance, that energy is freed, the binding releases, and vitality and well-being can flow back into the system in ways that feel profoundly restorative.
The client was not frightened, she was curious, able to observe the pain body rather than collapse beneath it. (I reiterate, if a client gets frightened here, it is necessary to distance them from the entity and stabilize. But for her, there was enough distance, enough adult presence for her to continue safely.)
It is usually not advised to do a lot of teaching from a conceptual level in sessions that work on a deep level in the psyche like this one. However, there are times when the client is perfectly primed to integrate a perspective. I introduced Eckhart Tolle’s elegant model of the “pain body”. You, dear reader, have been hearing about it from me since the beginning of this essay.
To recap, the pain body, in Tolle’s words, is the dense field of old emotional pain living inside us—a kind of energetic residue made up of all the hurt, rage, terror, and grief we’ve been unable to fully allow or process. It is semi-autonomous, feeding off fresh pain and drama, and when triggered, it can temporarily take us over, seeking to perpetuate and re-experience the very suffering it’s made from. Most importantly, the pain body is not who you are, although it does use a person’s energy to stay ‘alive’. It is an old pattern, an ancient guest, a collection of historic energies.
The client instantly resonated with the model. This instant resonance is an important energetic marker for a therapist to attune to; it is trustworthy, and, if felt, the client is ready to keep going. She could see how this “mean presence” nearby was her pain body.
The words her pain body said—“You’re such a piece of shit. You’re useless. You’re weak.”—had, until that moment, felt like an inescapable truth. But now there was enough space to see, to catalog, to wonder: what if what is going on here isn’t weakness, but rather the fact that I have been living with a relentless invisible adversary for years?
Anyone living with an inner bully this vicious is anything but weak. In fact, it takes an almost unimaginable strength to carry on under such attack, day after day, more so because, as of yet, this sort of strength is not seen or appreciated by the greater part of humanity.
She saw, then, that these inner attacks were not weakness at all—they were proof of a powerful, invisible adversary that only the bravest could withstand. Together, we wondered: if every pain body were made visible, if the weight each person carried could be seen, we might recognize the quiet athletes everywhere, running marathons in the dark. Her old self-judgment softened into awe.
I have often wondered what would happen if we could see each other’s pain bodies, rendered visible by some futuristic technology. What if we could see the true bulk and terribleness of the pain body in color, shape, and visible mass? What if we could hear the awful words and voices that others were constantly subjectto? Might we recognize that those who appear “less accomplished” or “more troubled” are, in fact, doing Olympic-level heavy lifting, wrestling and negotiating with invisible titans that others never meet?
By the end of our time together, her sense of self had changed. What began as eviscerating self-hatred had evolved into self-respect and regard for her endurance. Dignity. She was not a “piece of shit,” not a “wimp.” She was a powerful person, and—perhaps for the first time—capable of accurately assessing and respecting the enormity of what she faced every day.
This is the living heart of real healing: not to dismiss pain as weakness, but to invite in dignity, to meet our wounded parts with self respect and acknowledgement.
May each of us be met with the dignity our journey deserves. When a person is able to step back and experience themselves as the adult presence, the pain body softens. What once felt like a truth about “me” is revealed as an entrenched echo from the past. When we meet ourself with patience, curiosity, and the steadiness of the adult self, identification dissolves and our own life force returns—experienced not as overwhelm, but as fresh energy and a subtle, hard-won peace.
This is the living core of my work and my message to you, dear reader: You are not your pain body, no matter how convincing the storm. While conceptual understanding is important, healing emerges from an unfolding dignity and willingness to let presence lead, one moment at a time. If you have read this far, you are already evoking deeper consciousness and embodied understanding for yourself. I hope you feel it.
