No negative emotion that we don't face and recognize for what it is can truly dissolve completely. He leaves behind a trail of pain.
For children in particular, strong negative emotions are too overwhelming, which is why they tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully aware adult to guide them with love and compassion so that they can face the emotion directly, the only alternative left to the child is not to feel it. Unfortunately, that childhood defense mechanism often persists into adulthood. The emotion lives on and, being unrecognized, manifests itself indirectly in the form of anxiety, anger, violent reactions, sadness, and even physical illness. In some cases, it interferes with and sabotages all intimate relationships. Most psychotherapists have had patients who begin by stating that their childhood was completely happy and later end up saying the opposite. While those are the most extreme cases, no one gets through childhood without emotional pain. Although both parents have been enlightened people, the child grows up in a mainly unconscious world.
All the traces of pain left behind by strong negative emotions that are not faced and accepted and then left behind, end up joining together to form a resident energy field in the very cells of the body. It is constituted not only by the suffering of childhood, but also by the painful emotions that are added during adolescence and during adult life, most of them created by the voice of the ego. Emotional pain is our inevitable companion when the foundation of our lives is a false sense of self.
This energy field made up of old but still very much alive emotions in most people is the pain-body.
However, the body of pain is not only individual. It also participates in the suffering experienced by countless human beings throughout a history of tribal warfare, slavery, rapacity, rape, torture, and other forms of violence. That suffering remains alive in the collective psyche of humanity and increases day after day as we can see by watching the news or observing the drama of human relationships. The DNA of all human beings is surely codified in the collective body of pain, although it has not yet been possible to demonstrate it.
All beings that come into the world bring with them a body of emotional pain. In some it is heavier and denser than in others. Some babies are quite happy most of the time.
Others seem to harbor a great deal of sadness. It is true that some babies cry a lot because they do not receive enough attention and affection, but there are others who cry for no apparent reason, as if they wanted everyone around them to be as unhappy as they are, sometimes succeeding. They have come into the world with a heavy burden of human suffering. Other babies cry frequently because they detect the emanations of their parents' negative emotions, which enlarges their painbody by absorbing the energy of their parents' painbodies. Regardless of the reason, as the physical body grows, so does the painbody.
The baby born with a light painbody will not necessarily be a more “spiritually advanced” adult than the one born with a denser body. In fact, the opposite often happens. People whose pain-body is heavier generally have greater opportunities for spiritual awakening than those who arrive with a relatively light body. While some remain trapped in their dense bodies, many others reach a point where they can no longer tolerate their unhappiness, thus increasing their motivation to awaken.
Why is the image of the dying Christ with his face distorted by suffering and his body stained with the blood of his wounds so significant in the collective consciousness of humanity?
The millions of people, especially during the Middle Ages, would not have identified so deeply with that image if it had not resonated with something within them or if they had not unconsciously recognized it as a representation of their own internal reality, of their body. from pain. They weren't yet conscious enough to recognize it directly within themselves, but it was the first step in doing so. Christ can be considered as the human archetype in whom both pain and the possibility of transcendence are housed.
(A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle)