The dance of connection and reflections on the pain body

I am sure many readers know of Eckardt Tolle’s concept of the pain body, that part of our psyche which is like a raw wound and can ark up on some days.  I notice with benefit of astrology that often when the transiting Moon hits my Chiron (core wound) Pluto opposition my pain body becomes fairly active.  I noticed it happening late last night in response to something someone said to me and I have written about it today but the sadder thing is that after I told the person how it affected me today and he apologised then his pain body began to kick in as he told me how he hated himself for hurting me.  I don’t think the intention to hurt was there, I think something was said that was just a bit dismissive.  I didn’t want to hold onto the anger when he asked me if I still was, I told him I was just really sad and then that made him feel bad and then when this happens I start to feel very guilty for having said anything, after all if I just stayed silent he wouldn’t have reacted to my reaction and ended up in pain himself.

Its easy to see how such a conflict could quickly transform into the proverbial serpent swallowing its own tail with pain actions and reactions repeating ad infinitum.   I tried to soothe my friends feelings saying that well sometimes being human we just hurt each other, just make amends learn from it and move on but he went silent after saying he was continuing to beat himself up.   Phew.

What can I do?  He was almost pleading.   I said “Just rest”.  Things like this we are powerless over are like sharp cuts that just need a bit of time for the pain to die down, but its sad as yesterday we were in a far calmer more restful and loving place and seeing how things can change scares me a bit as it reminds me of how in a past relationship periods of closeness would be followed by abrupt and often seeringly painful tear aparts, arguments or separations.

Contemplating the situation I  begin to see that maybe all relationships follow this backwards and forwards dance.  We cannot always be close and agree, sometimes we do and other times differences flair up, we find ourselves needing space, we get annoyed with the way someone responds to our spoken or unspoken needs, we then seek distance or just want a cool calm space outside the heat generated by too much togetherness.

I was reading in a book of love letters yesterday of the love affair a young Franz Kafka had with Felice Bauer which primarily occurred through letters a fact which tormented a young Kafka who never the less was terrified to have a more physically present relationship in the event that such a bond would interfere with his writing.   The courtship survived over a number of years and resulted in a proposal of marriage which never came to pass due to the fact Kafka finally chose his writing over a married fully embodied life with the women he loved, sadly Kafka died of TB about five years after the relationship’s ended which really made me wonder if on some level his body had a larger voice than his mind and spoke to the pain of being separated finally and irrevocably from the woman he loved.

The need for closeness and the need for distance, the need for connection and the need to be free to pursue our own destiny hopes and dreams, how often do the two tussle and clash in a life and how often is the pain of the pain body a cry from the soul of how it felt for us to both long for the experience of two hearts and minds beating as one while another more separated part knows such things may only happen rarely or in spurts?

Maybe I am just writing from my own experience here and from a life where there has been so much aloneness and so much disconnection.  I know the pain my own pain body feels when I feel a loved one’s heart and mind not meeting my own.   Its hard to put into words but my body feels it and so does the object of my desire who also longs for the same.  Which leads me to reflect how important it is to learn to show compassion for both sides when we undergo such conflicts and tussles in relationships.  I have learned lessons from the past relationship where self soothing never figured.  Now that I at least have some skills in self soothing I am able to offer them to others and I am grateful for that for it really hurts to have a temporary cut in a relationships turn into an unbreechable schism that neither party in the end is able to navigate across.