I believe that negativity doesn’t work.
That’s why one of my favorite meditations is dissolving negative energy in my body and mind. It helps me to prevent an undesirable reaction instead of dealing with its consequences later on.
But only few of us know about this type of meditation, let alone practice it on a regular basis. Eventually, many people allow challenging situations and unconscious people affect their inner energy field, which leads to the growth of what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls “emotional pain-body.” Here’s what he writes about it in his book “The Power of Now”:
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As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. … This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind.
If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on.
Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.
He further elaborates his point in the audiobook “The Journey into Yourself” by comparing our emotional pain-body to a sleeping cat:
The pain-body — even the dormant pain-body in humans — dormant meaning it’s not actively using your mind at the moment, just lingering in the background — can still influence you. You might not even be aware it’s there. But people with relatively heavy pain-bodies, even their dormant ones, are like sleeping cats.
If you’ve ever observed sleeping cats, you’ll know they’re amazing creatures. A sleeping cat is never fully asleep. A cat always knows what’s going on. It can distinguish between familiar, non-threatening noises and the slightest unfamiliar sound — something that could be a mouse.
So the cat lies there while you wash the dishes and slam doors — nothing happens. But then comes the tiniest rustling sound… and suddenly the cat is alert.
Similarly, pain-bodies — there are many kinds — when dormant, are just like that cat. Many things can happen around them and they remain untriggered, sometimes even by major events. But they’re waiting. Waiting for that one specific trigger that sets them off.
The pain body is scanning — your surroundings, people’s remarks in conversation, their tone or facial expressions — looking for something to react to. And then, suddenly, someone says:
“Are you accusing me of…?”
“No, I just asked if you had taken out the garbage.”
“Are you accusing me of being lazy? Are you calling me a liar?”
The cat is awake.
Yes, they’re cunning little creatures.
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Complement this lighthearted contemplation from “The Journey into Yourself” with our articles on how to dissolve negative energy in your body and mind, what is mindful sense-restraint in Buddhism, and how to practice lovingkindness meditation.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others. Here are the three things you can do here:
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