Why Old Pain Keeps Coming Back: The Pain-Body

Someone says one small thing. A comment about your work, a sigh, a message left on read. And something in you goes up like dry paper.

Later, when it's over, you can see it. The reaction was ten times bigger than the moment. And it didn't feel new. It felt old, and strangely familiar.

Eckhart Tolle has a name for the thing that does this. He calls it the pain-body. This essay follows it through one whole round: how it forms, why it sleeps, what wakes it and what it feeds on. Then comes how you catch it and how you stop feeding it. Along the way we hear from Michael Singer, David Hawkins, Bessel van der Kolk, Joe Dispenza and Brené Brown. They use different words, but they keep describing the same fire.

Coals that look cold

Start with how it forms. Tolle's idea is that a strong feeling which isn't fully felt doesn't simply vanish. It leaves something behind, what he calls "a remnant of pain." A hurt you swallowed as a child, a loss you never had time for, an insult you laughed off: each one leaves a small coal, and over the years those coals gather into one bed. Tolle describes the result as an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. That field is the pain-body.

Most of the time you'd never know it was there. Tolle says a pain-body may be dormant ninety percent of the time. The coals look grey, even cold. But they aren't out. They're banked, holding their heat.

Michael Singer describes the same thing with a term from yoga. He calls it a samskara, a Sanskrit word for an impression: an experience you resisted, so it never finished passing through you. It stays stored in your heart, he says, as an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.

The psychiatrist David Hawkins puts it more plainly. We carry a huge reservoir of feelings we pushed down, he says, and the pressure of it never goes away.

That's the bed of coals. Next, a gust of wind.

A loose joint

Griff makes chairs in a little workshop at the edge of town. His friend Olive works with him, and one afternoon she's checking an order before it ships. She picks up a chair, gives the back a wiggle and says the joint's a bit loose. That's all she says.

And Griff snaps. Something sharp comes out of him about who does the real work around here. Olive goes very still, then quietly puts the chair down.

That evening Griff sits by the stove on an old crate and goes over it again and again. She always does that. She never notices what I get right. He adds a few new lines to the argument, things he should have said. By the time he goes to bed he's angrier than he was in the workshop.

The joint really was loose, too. He'd have fixed it in two minutes. The moment was a spark and the reaction was a bonfire.

Tolle has a phrase for that gap. The pain-body's unhappiness, he writes, is always "clearly out of proportion to the apparent cause." The small thing isn't the real cause, only the trigger. So where did all that heat come from?

The gust that wakes it

Tolle says the pain-body wakes up in two ways. Sometimes it's simply hungry and it's time to feed. Sometimes an event triggers it. When it's ready, he says, it can use the most insignificant thing: something somebody says, a tone of voice, even a passing thought. Anything that rhymes with an old hurt can be the gust that lifts the coals.

Singer tells a story about a man who once saw what looked like his girlfriend's car, a light blue Mustang, with two people hugging inside. Five years later he's happily married to someone else. Then a light blue Mustang drives past, and the old jealousy floods back as if it were yesterday. The stored impression, Singer says, opens like a flower and releases what it's been holding. You can feel the fears of a five-year-old when you're sixty.

Bessel van der Kolk, who has spent his career studying trauma, describes the same jump in the brain. He calls the amygdala the smoke detector. It decides in a split second whether something is dangerous. A slower part of the brain, the watchtower, is meant to take a calm look: is the house on fire, or is that just the steak on the stove? When old hurt is involved, the smoke detector often fires before the watchtower gets a look, and the body reacts to the past as if it were happening now.

Hawkins goes one step further. We blame the event for the feeling, he says, but it's the other way round. The stored feelings are looking for a way out, and they use the event as the excuse. We're like pressure cookers, ready to let off steam whenever the chance comes. For Griff, the excuse was a loose joint.

Kindling for the fire

Once it's awake, the pain-body needs fuel, and Tolle says its first fuel is your own thinking. It can't feed on just any thought. A happy thought, he says, is indigestible to it. It only eats thoughts that match its own heat. She always does that. Nobody appreciates me. Here we go again. Every one of those is a stick of kindling.

Then a loop sets in. The feeling throws up thoughts, and the thoughts feed the feeling. Tolle calls it a vicious circle, in which the voice in your head has become the voice of the pain-body. Hawkins sees the same loop from the other side. To him the thoughts are rationalizations, the mind's way of explaining a feeling that was already there. That's why the angry story feels so reasonable while you're inside it.

Its second fuel is other people. Tolle says the pain-body will try to provoke the people closest to you so it can feed on the drama that follows. It does best in families and close relationships, because that's where the food is.

Joe Dispenza, who writes about the brain and the body, adds a clock. An emotional reaction has what he calls a refractory period, the time it takes to settle. Keep it going for hours or days and it becomes a mood. Keep it going for weeks or months and it becomes a temperament. Keep it going for years and it becomes part of your personality. Griff's evening on the crate was a reaction stretched into a mood.

Letting it all out doesn't empty it either. Hawkins says venting a feeling tends to spread it and give it more energy. Shouting at the fire is still feeding the fire.

The same old fire

The next morning Griff opens his notebook to write down the order, and he notices something on the earlier pages. Three times this season, the same heat: a late delivery, a borrowed plane, a loose joint. Different days, different people, the same fire.

He flips back much further, to a drawing of the first chair he ever made. The old carpenter he trained under picked it up, wiggled the back and laughed. Griff was very young and never said a word about it. He just decided to be so good that nobody could laugh again. Every comment about his work since then has landed on that same old coal.

So Griff makes a plan. He'll simply never get angry again. That afternoon a customer sends back a stool, and Griff smiles and swallows it whole. An hour later a drawer sticks and he slams it so hard the tools jump.

Hawkins has a word for what Griff tried: suppression. You push the feeling down and the pressure is still there. It just comes out somewhere else, as a slammed drawer or a sore neck. Fighting the fire is another way of staying busy with it.

Tolle warns against one more trap, which is deciding there's something wrong with you. I'm broken. I'm the angry one. As long as you make an identity out of the pain, he says, you can't be free of it. That story feeds it too.

So if venting feeds it, and fighting feeds it, what's left?

Catching it in the moment

What's left is the one thing the pain-body can't use: your attention.

Tolle says the beginning of freedom is realizing you have a pain-body at all, and then noticing it as it wakes, as a heavy rush of feeling in yourself. It doesn't want to be seen. The moment you observe it and feel its energy in you, he says, the spell is broken, and you become the watcher of the pain-body. He once had a client who put it this way: she was still unhappy, but now there was space around it, and it seemed to matter less.

While it's happening, there are three tells.

• The size. The feeling is far bigger than what just happened.
• The sameness. The story is one you've told before.
• The body. It often shows up in your chest, your jaw or your stomach before any words do.

Singer's instruction is to relax and release. The moment you feel yourself tighten, do the opposite of closing. Relax your shoulders, relax your heart, and let the energy pass through you. He calls it falling behind the energy instead of going into it.

Hawkins says nearly the same thing in clinical language. Let the feeling be there without judging it, venting it or arguing with it. Ignore the thoughts and stay with the feeling itself. A feeling that isn't resisted, he writes, will run out.

Van der Kolk adds a practical step: name what's happening in your body. Heat in the chest, tight jaw, fast breath. Naming the sensations helps the watchtower come back online. He also says that when the old hurt is very large, watching alone often isn't enough. That's what trauma-trained therapists are for, and going to one is part of this same work.

Brené Brown, who studies shame, offers one more way to let the air out. Shame gets its power from being unspoken, she says. Say it to someone you trust and it loses much of its grip.

Five teachers, five vocabularies, and they all land in the same place. None of them tries to stop the feeling from happening. What they take away is the fuel.

A loose joint, again

A week later Olive is checking another order. She picks up a chair, gives it a wiggle and says this one's loose too. And Griff feels it, the heat rising in his chest right on time.

This time he notices. He knows this one, the old fire. He doesn't argue with it and he doesn't push it down. He puts a hand on his chest and feels it: hot, tight, a little shaky. The story is already there, ready to go. She always does that. He lets the story sit without picking it up.

It takes about a minute. The heat swells, and then, with nothing new to burn, it starts to settle.

Then Griff looks at the chair and asks her to show him where. Olive blinks, and shows him. They fix it together in two minutes, and she stops bracing herself around him.

That evening there's no crate and no replay. The old coal is still there, but it's a little smaller than it was.

Letting it burn out

That's the whole round. Old pain that was never felt leaves coals behind. They sleep until something small blows on them. Then they feed on your thoughts and your arguments, and they grow.

The hopeful part comes from the same books. Tolle says that every time you're present when it rises, some of it burns up, and the pain-body becomes "fuel for consciousness." Singer says that every time you relax and release, a piece of the pain leaves forever.

You don't have to win in one night. Every round you watch instead of feed, the coals get a little smaller.

Something to try this week: the next time a reaction feels bigger than the moment, call it the old fire. Feel it in your body, and don't say anything for one slow minute. Then see how big it really is.