Pain-Body (Part Four): Remembering Winter

The best wishes in 2008 for you !
Originally uploaded by RijkV

…every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain.
It merges with past pain and lodges in your mind and body.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field, and if you look upon it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth…

The pain-body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect…
The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness…
Eckhart Tolle

My question is, “How is this possible?”
How is it possible to inherit what’s essentially a memory?
That should be impossible.
I should not actually “remember” what happened to my grandmother.
Yet, Tolle says we bear the scars and thus is some sense the memory.

Years ago my brother told me of a study in which mice were put on a zinc deficient diet. Their descendents had depressed immune systems for the next five generations – even when zinc was restored to normal levels.

To Andy, these results not only showed the importance of proper nutrition
but also had implications for all of us today.
Since there has probably never been a time when five generations have all received adequate nutrition, we must all still bear the marks of our ancestors’ deprivation.

Five generations.
That takes us back to great-great grandfathers.
In my case, these are the Bralley and Kearfotts who fought the Civil War.
In my case, when Andy mentioned the nutrition research, I was plagued by "flashback" of wars I hadn’t been alive to see.

So, I liked the idea of trans-generational memory even if it was just nutritional.
But then, it hit me.
“That is Lamarkism. And, That Can’t Be!”
Darwin shot that all to pieces.
“Acquired traits” like memories or nutritional status cannot be inherited,
and pain-bodies should not be possible.

Yes, I know. There is Nurture as well as Nature.
Psychological damage does get passed from one generation to the next.
But, Tolle seems to be describing something physical, something sounding almost genetic.
He is talking Nature.

So let’s lay aside for the moment the psychological impact our parents’ traumas.
Let’s also set aside the possibility that information may be “immaterial” - encoded “in our souls.”
Are there still factors creating an inheritable pain-body?

“Every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain”

I think this is what Tolle’s saying. There is something physical that gets created and inherited.

Which brings me back to, “How can this be?”

Maharishi, called it stress:
an emotional overload that changes our physiology and bodies.
Marahishi said that stress creates a knot. (A knot of what he did not say.)

Now we know that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder affects the hippocampus (seat of memory) and HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis - brain signals breaking out into the entire body).
PTSD also gives you flashbacks as memory replays in waking nightmares.

…But, how…
How could the traumatic memory be passed on to future generations?
How could I know what it was like to be a soldier in a war I never fought?
I could I develop PTSD from a war I was never in? (which is one way of describing my struggles for over twenty years after I awakened in 1975.)

I have mulled these questions over for several decades now.
It was only last month that I came across a journal article on plants entitled:
Remembering winter: toward a molecular understanding of vernalization.

Oh!
If plants “remember winter” then surely brains are not required.
But, of course! This is exactly the point in the PTSD refrain, “the body remembers.”

The article on plants went something along these lines:
Exposure to the cold of winter is an important cue for flowering in spring.
Flowering is due to cold-mediated modifications of proteins in the chromatin…
This process is known as vernalization…

which is just the technical way of saying plants recall the cold by modifying the proteins that entwine their DNA.
Memories don’t always require a brain.
And molecular information is not solely stored in the genes (which is the Darwinian position and the geneticist’s and my prejudice).

Information can be stored “epigenetically.”

Remember that word.

Epigenetics makes it possible to inherit acquired traits
(like the depressed immune systems of mice on low zinc diets.)
Epigenetics makes it possible to remember winter
(like a rose covered by the snow.)
Epigenetics can be trans-generational.
Epigenetics puts an end to protests of “Lamarkism!”
Epigenetics explains how “memory” can be inherited.

For Example:
Swedish men born in 1905 who experienced famine just before puberty, had grandsons who went through puberty earlier and had lengthened life spans.
Grandsons of the well fed had shortened life spans and increased diabetes.

For Example:
The World War II food embargo imposed by Germany on Holland caused 30,000 deaths.
The descendents of survivors suffered a range of health problems inlcuding: diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, cancer, as well as smaller-than-normal grandchildren.
Our bodies can remember that grandmother nearly starved.

The Pain Body (Part One)

Onions
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Mama used to say …I was especially sensitive to onions like my great-aunt, Tita. …when she [Tita] was still in great-grandmother’s belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha, the cook, who was half deaf, could hear them easily. Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labor… Tita made her entrance into this world…was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor…
Like Water for Chocolate, byLaura Esquirel.

I have been thinking about the pain body.
It is a term coined by Eckhart Tolle:

…every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain. It merges with past pain and lodges in your mind and body. This accumulated pain is a negative energy field, and if you look upon it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth.

So, there is a personal pain body that we acquire as we struggle to grow up.
There is also a pain body we inherit, simply by being human.
Here, Tolle describes social pain bodies. I think it only reasonable that there is also a pain body associated with our family history.
I look as this as so physically ingrained (albeit very subtly) that it is actually reasonable to consider it our inheritance through Nature rather than from Nurture. Although we are also shaped by inherited behavioral patterns. I am concerned more with physical and energetic inheritance.

The pain body usually has a collective as well as a personal aspect… The collective one is the pain accumulated in the collective human psyche over thousands of years through disease, torture, war, murder, cruelty, madness… Everyone’s personal pain body also partakes of this collective pain-body. There are different strands in the collective pain body. For example certain races or countries in which extreme forms of strife and violence occur have a heavier collective pain-body than others…every woman has her share in what could be described as the collective female pain-body… This consists of the accumulated pain suffered by women partly through…slavery, exploitation, rape, childbirth, child loss, and so on, over thousands of years.
The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

College age and still at home, one evening I was watching a movie on TV.
During a commercial break, I rummaged the refrigerator.
A bit amazed at what I came up with, I held my bowl out to Mom
as I passed her in the hallway.
“Look at this! Chocolate ice cream and a dill pickle. How weird! But, I want it!”
“Oh! I craved that when I was pregnant with you,” was Mom’s instant reply.

Tita, Tita, Tita.

I have another story, many stories really, regarding the pain body,
as I am just back from a weekend in Kentucky.
The memorial service for my mother’s brother, Uncle Eddie,
reunited eight of the eleven Kearfott cousins, the children of Mom and her two brothers.
I hadn’t seen a number of these people in over forty years.
And I was stunned by the parallels our lives had run.
My generation may not have interacted all that much,
but we share some of the same ghosts and grief.

The pain-body doesn’t want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is.
The moment you observe it, the identification is broken.
A higher dimension of consciousness has come in.
I call it presence.
You are now the witness, or the watcher of the pain-body.
It can no longer use you by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you.
You have found your own innermost strength.
You have accessed the power of Now.
Eckhart Tolle

Well, I don’t feel all that in the Now these days.
I am too aware of the pain my family carries.
As we cousins, the women really, talked around the table, with my mom, and through the weekend, it became obvious that each in her own way was trying to understand and heal.

And so in the next few days and pages, that is what I hope to do.
Heal and share and perhaps bring some Presence or at least the light of day
to my family’s shared pain,
for the next generation is upon us
and they are struggling too.

(Pain Body Part II: Grandfather)

Pain Body (Part Two): Grandfather

Bill's wash bowl
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

At the table Saturday night, five of the women cousins sat.
It wasn’t longer before someone mentioned the tradition of eating oysters for Christmas dinner and the ensuing problems the raised for a young child.
I asked them if they knew why they were eating oysters.
Turns out, neither of my uncles had ever mentioned the story Mom recounted to us every year.

“My father was born on Christmas day and so he got to choose his favorite food for Christmas dinner. And he loved oysters.”
And about then, Mom would start tearing up, because Grandfather had loved her and she had loved him, and one week after she returned from her honeymoon in 1946,
William Kearfott put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Mom had felt it coming. She had had a dream the night before and called her father early the next morning. His reassure proved untrue.
In a few hours he was dead.
Uncle Eddie, age 14, was pounding on the bathroom door when his father killed himself.

So this last Christmas, when I walked into Mom’s kitchen to find her dressed in her all in her Merry Christmas clothes with tears in her eyes, I was ready for a trauma.
But, I didn’t expect her to say that she’d just found out that Eddie was dead.
I didn’t expect her to say that she hadn’t called him last night because she wanted to call tomorrow on the twenty – forth.
And I didn’t expect her to say that this old man with Alzheimer’s, who hadn’t done a thing without my Aunt’s help in years, had gotten out of bed all by himself in the middle of the night to die of a heart attack
in the bathroom.

The bathroom.
I have to wonder if the room hadn’t haunted him throughout his life.
His daughter Kitty was en-route home for Christmas, had delayed a day to visit with friends a few hours away.
She says that night a single clap of thunder exploded through her lodgings.
The event shook everyone.
An hour later, the phone rang. Eddie was gone.
I have to wonder about the noise of that gun shot.

I asked Kitty if she’d seen the lightening bolt Mom wears around her neck.
She wears it to commemorate my father’s passing.
As we completed the sprinkling of his ashes into the Atlantic one lone cloud on the distant horizon had flashed with a bolt that made us all jump.
“Poppy!” Mom had cried referring to her comment in the hospital as we’d waited for them to prop his body.
“Poppy said that when he died he was going to be ‘an electrical thought impulse.’”
At the time this strange prediction had simply made me laugh.
Now, it makes me wonder. How many circles do we trace out.

Yet another Christmas and once again, Mom was in tears:
She had meant to call.
All the men in her life died so quickly, just like that, no warning.
“And Grandma wouldn’t let me cry at Dad’s funeral!”
At the age of 82, Mom is still angry at her mother.

By the time I was 10, I knew that Mom’s body gave her constant pain.
She would wrap her legs in ace bandages as she constantly had flares ups of phlebitis, the blood clotting in her inflamed veins.
Other explanations included, “The doctor told me I developed food allergies rather than having a nervous breakdown in the early 1950’s.”
And not long after that, I became aware that both my uncles waged a battle against alcohol,
as did Mom and Grandma to a lesser extent,
as have my cousins.

But, I was surprised and then intrigued to learn this past weekend that,
“Six family members have suffered psychotic episodes.”
Since I was pretty sure I was being included in this list, I chuckled and replied,
“You know, I think we might reframe that statistic into terms of spiritual awakening.”

After all, one man’s Psychotic is another’s Shaman.
Thus, not all psychotic episodes are pathology.
The term “spiritual emergency” has been coined since I had many of my experiences.
I myself have always learned fascinating stuff every time I’ve slipped off the end of that old Bell Curve of Normality.
Not that the fall wasn’t painful, difficult, and something I might choose to avoid if given half a chance.
But it has always been an eye opener.
And in all honesty, I have often wondered if the hunger, the intense longing for the grips of spiritual connection, even at the cost of worldly function, isn’t simply a deeper layer in a soul also at risk more superficially to addiction to alcohol and heroine.

And if the next generation is following our lead (which apparently they are),
perhaps they’d like to know a bit about the family tradition:
We are a Sensitive bunch.
We hunger deeply.
We have not always been allowed to claim our sensitivity
and thus not allowed to claim all the power of the Self, not allowed to satisfy our deepest hungers.
That denial has created our family pain body and we will replay the cycle until the body is dissolved.