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Writer's pictureShelley Klammer

Working With Emotional Triggers

The Activated Emotional Pain Body

According to spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, the pain body is a mass of accumulated negative energy occupying your body and mind. It feeds on the negative energy created when you get swept up in negative events, conversations, and thoughts. The emotional pain body especially gets activated when it resonates with a familiar pain pattern from the past. When your pain body gets triggered, it can cause you to become irritated, impatient, sad, ashamed, guilty, angry, or depressed.



Heightening Your Presence

Eckhart Tolle recommends heightening your presence as soon as you notice somebody close to you is being drawn into a deep identification with their pain body. Your intensity of presence needs to arise (through your strength of will) because the other person's unconscious pain will powerfully want you to react emotionally to their pain.


This does not mean you must close yourself down to the other person. With a stance of powerful alert presence, there is a high degree of openness. So whenever unconscious negativity tries to pull you in, you can choose to become more alert and awake. You can use the power of your will to turn the lights up in your mind and body to intensify your presence. This is the only way not to become triggered by somebody else's pain body.



Strengthening Your Will

You can use your will to build your strength of presence rather than being pulled into another person's negative unconsciousness. Once you realize this is possible, you will find that your presence can intensify whenever a negative situation challenges you.


So, how do you strengthen your will when another person's emotional pain body has the power to pull you into the depths of depression and despair? See yourself resisting the urge to descend into your negative emotional pain body. All personal power starts with imagining having it and rehearsing how it would feel to be powerful.


You can picture yourself vividly acting with focus and having the solid determination to stay calmly observing of yourself and others during a negative situation. Visualize yourself staying powerfully present whenever someone tries to trigger you into an adverse reaction.



Building Will Through Physical Exercise

If you are feeling overwhelmed by an emotional trigger, you might need to build more personal will. So you might consider how physical exercise can develop your will. Every intentional bodily movement is, in reality, an act of will. It is a command given to the body.


When you exercise, the deliberate repetition of your commands to move your body builds attention, effort, and endurance. To strengthen your will to stand up to your own negativity and that of others, physical exercise can be performed with the same firm intention that it takes to stay present for emotional pain.


Moving your body, even if you do not feel like it, can be helpful during an emotional trigger. Walking, dancing, stretching, or swimming can help you dissipate the negative charge from your body while strengthening your will to stay more present for your emotional pain.


With love,

Shelley

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