Your Pain Body and Your Joy Body: Which One Will You Feed?

Almost everyone carries accumulations of old emotional pain, what Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain-body.” This pain-body feeds on what has happened in the past, and associates your current pain with all similar instances of pain. This pain-body feeds on negative thinking and drama in relationships. It is often fed by ancestral as well as personal experience. It may manifest as fear, defensiveness, loneliness, or a sense of separation. The pain-body is an energy field of its own, Tolle says, 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, what I call your “joy-body” contains all the love, wonderful experiences, and associated emotions that you collect over the years. Like the pain-body, your joy-body stores family, ancestral, and collective joy. It feeds on positive, transporting experience. The importance of this to your living energy, your power to promote change in your emotional responses, and your creativity is profound. Like the grandfather feeding the wolf in chapter 1, you have a choice about what you feed, what you eat, and how you digest what comes your way.

Your Pain And Mental Responses Are Not You

Every meditation practice teaches that your feelings and reactions arise, then change, then change again; your pain and mental responses are not you. This point of view offers you freedom to move in and out of feeling states with fluidity; to change your mind; and to avoid getting stuck in those “heavy” and redundant thoughts that occupy 75 percent of your thinking.

Working with energy helps you sidestep your mental responses and redundant thoughts like “I’m not good enough,” or “I’ll never find a mate.” It is not necessary to continually identify and label your emotions as happy, depressed, angry, harmonious, and so on (in the Buddhist view, all of our emotions and reactions are illusions).

It is not necessary to tell the stories behind your feelings, or the source and cause of them, over and over again. In general, such repetition cements the energetic memories in your mind, body, and energy field, making them more challenging to shift. It also draws others to you who share similar stories. This can be comforting in the short run but entangling over time.


innerself subscribe graphic


Even deep wounds can be released energetically. You may be more successful if you have support in this—help in identifying source and genesis, reminders to use energetic release, and guidance in learning which practices will work. (For further support, see megbeeler.com.)

You can choose to release energetically and shift your attention away from your pain-body and toward your joy-body; however, you cannot always do this alone.

Whatever your experience, because heaviness embeds in the body and rules your “cunning animal” (limbic brain) responses, using energetic shifting to move things around has profound effects. I have experienced this in my own life. Shifting out of my own habitual suffering and poor-me perceptions, teaching clients and students how to use these energy-shifting practices and perceptions, and seeing the inner joy of Q’ero wisdom keepers in the Andes have changed my world.

Imagining a Joyful Way

In Awakening Joy, James Baraz and Shoshona Alexander write

Joy is not for the lucky few. It’s a choice anyone can make. Joy is already there inside you. It is inherent in every one of us, an innate capacity, like the ability to learn a language or to love. As innocent babies we came into this world with a natural joy, and we can discover it again.

Fluid awareness, gratefulness, and joy can become your 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 radiance and open-heartedness … Imagine world leaders talking about how brilliant and wonderful other leaders, religions, cultures, and countries are …

You need not wait for the leaders; you are the one you’ve been waiting for.

You can notice your own thought patterns, topics of conversation, and the energies behind your words, and learn to shift the heavy doses of negativity you are used to.

You can learn to shift your focus from pain to joy.

You can learn to fill yourself with the vital energy that surrounds you.

You can visualize a peaceful, harmonious world.

You can feed your pragmatic shifts with inspiring, mystical experience.

You can set your intent to explore the universe, a potential source of refined energy, connection, and wisdom.

Practice and repetition embed transformation in your body, psyche, and habits. Noticing, releasing, filling, connecting, and opening help you move from pain-body to joy-body.

The more internally clear you become, the stronger a conduit you can be for balance, healing, and bringing light to the world.

Pushing the Boulders Aside: Releasing Habits, Attitudes, and Emotions

Your emotions and reactions, and the labels you give them, can feel like boulders in your path: big, heavy, and impossible to move. When your underlying perceptions and interpretations of events are fixed or rigid as rock, nothing can change. These boulders stand in the way of making your life and relationships more resonant, fulfilling, and joyous.

Working energetically, which entails leaving mental labels aside, lets you release dense, heavy stuff so you feel lighter, energized, and more in balance. This takes intent (wanting to let go) and action (doing a practice of energetic release).

When you learn to notice where your energy goes, you can figure out what, exactly, the boulder in your path is. To what emotions, thoughts, beliefs, habits, or stories do you give your attention? Is your mind clinging like Velcro to heavy boulders, small rocks—or hidden gems?

Noticing where your energy goes helps you replace habits of mind and fixed ideas about yourself that perpetuate what you think. Noticing where your energy goes also helps you replace memories stored in your body, particularly trauma and old pain. What if you could replace “no one loves me” with an inner, felt sense of being wonderful? What if you could replace “I am not good enough” with confidence in your ability to do what you set out to do? What if you could replace “I’ll never get what I want” with step-by-step experiences of accomplishment?

Releasing what doesn’t belong to you helps you be whole; it helps you to follow your heart, act with power, and access your wisdom. Releasing helps you flow with synchronicity. Releasing what doesn’t belong to you helps you discover what does belong to you: the path to your destiny.

As visionary healer Eda Zavala says, “If you have any pain or anger in yourself, you cannot help your community. You need lighter energy!” Putting this a different way, Q’ero wisdomkeeper Humberto Sonqo Quispé tells us, “Fear is something we build. Then it becomes collective. We have to release the fear.”

Energy practices are accumulative: the more you do, the more things change. Working with your energy contributes to both your personal healing and the healing of the world.

Energy Blockages

Imagine the energies you carry entangling with the emotions, reactions, difficulties, and challenges of your day. They become like small snarls in your hair, or a net caught on the rocks. Without attention, the tangles grow and worsen, blocking the smooth flow of energy that keeps you healthy on all levels. Over the years, the blockages can turn to disease. In the worst cases, your DNA coils and loses its ability to repair your cells.

With attention and intent, you can open the blockages, smooth the tangles, and bring in the healing light of the universe, allowing your natural energy flow to resume, both protecting and invigorating you.

You can get help with this because you live in an interconnected, multidimensional universe of living energy where we all (trees, water, stones, humans, butterflies, mountains) are part of one another. Moving your energy blockages (those boulders) effects physical healing by taking you into your essential self, where your cells listen and respond. As your energy body is healed, the physical cells in your body are able to shift and change as well.

In the morphic field of healing, intent plays an essential role. Your intent, trust, and openness to the process are crucial components. Ask yourself: What is my intent? What do I want to change in my life? Am I willing to move some boulders and take in something new?

Copyright 2017 by Meg Beeler. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Findhorn Press. www.findhornpress.com.

Article Source

Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy
by Meg Beeler

Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy by Meg BeelerShamanic teaching tells us that we live in a cosmos in which all things are connected. Through Energy Alchemy™?practices, insights, meditations and animist perceptions adapted to modern life?you will discover how to lift heaviness from your heart and open up to the beauty and harmony found in a true connection with the universe.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book.

About the Author

Meg Beeler M.A.Meg Beeler M.A. is an internationally known author, shamanic healer and Energy Alchemy™ expert. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Antioch College. A lifelong explorer of wholeness and consciousness, Meg traveled the world in search of traditional and shamanic wisdom. She is the founder of Earth Caretakers, dedicated to bringing to life our collective dream of a more beautiful world. Meg lives on Sonoma Mountain in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit her website at www.megbeeler.com