Creativity in the Workplace: Handling the Pain-Body with Emotional Intelligence, Part 1

What do we do when a co-worker, or even a boss, habitually criticizes us, steals our best ideas, maybe even has it in for us?  Two suggestions, one each from two of the best-selling authors in the world today, may be of service here.

First, Eckhart Tolle has described --- in his books, "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth" --- what he calls the pain-body.  This pain-body is the sum total of all the emotional (or physical) trauma we have experienced across our lives, especially during those sensitive years of early childhood and adolescent development.  Abuse and neglect, what psychology calls attachment injuries, get stored away in the emotional centers of our brains. 

For Tolle, the pain-body maintains its own homeostasis, or sense of equilibrium, by perpetuating various kinds of emotional armor: whether in attacking others, avoiding them, or even (usually quite unconsciously) inviting others' attacks and abuse.

In any case, the pain-body is universal; though its density, or what Tolle calls its "heaviness," obviously varies a lot between individuals.

Now what does this pain-body have to do with the workplace examples provided above?  Not only do we observe, if we're alert and vigilant, how it is that some co-workers carry particularly heavy, or intense, pain-bodies; but also that every individual maintains a certain quality, or felt sense, of their own unique pain-body.

The amount, and kind, of negativity any given individual's pain-body manifests is immediately observable; nowhere as visibly as when that pain-body, or emotional negativity, is turned toward us!

Part of the problem here is that we each carry our own set of reactivities and emotional vulnerabilities, all rooted in our own pain-bodies.  Any response to another co-worker’s negativity has first to be routed productively through the maze of our own subjectivity, including pain-body.