Healing the Pain Body

Acrylic and Water on Canvas

14ft x 14ft

2025

This painting is about healing the parts of ourselves that have been forgotten, the dismissed and suppressed. This is about accepting and healing the pain body. Echkary Tolle describes this part of ourselves as the emotional energy field we all carry. It is the collection of old emotional pain that has remained unhealed within us causing unconscious reactions in our lives. Other spiritual and psychological thought leaders have called it the shadow such as Carl Yung, Thich Nhat Hanh calls it embracing the inner child, Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk talk about the stored unprocessed trauma pain in our body that runs our lives, our patterns and internal narratives.

This is what I imagine when I pause to care for my personal pain body. Allowing her to feel heard and held. It is the space in which I can give her what she always needed but never received.

With awareness brings light where choice can happen. Where we can choose to pause and make a different choice in action that changes our patterns of reaction. With awareness brings presence, brings the capacity to speak directly to the unhealed versions of ourselves and to hold them in the process of healing what no longer belongs.

The practice is ongoing and with each pause comes more freedom, more peace and more self realization. It is not easy but it is the work of our evolution and soul growth.

May we all become our own healers.