PMS = Women’s Collective Pain Body

I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now.

He introduces the idea of a Pain Body. The Pain Body is also discussed in great detail in his other book A New Earth.

Basically, he says that one part of the human condition is a pain body. We have personal pain bodies that result from things that happen specifically to us. But, we also have collective pain bodies that come from being members of a group – women, for instance.

Tolle says that because of several thousand years of oppression, repression, violence, rape, battery, harassment, slavery and sexism baby girls are born with a collective pain body associated with being female. Carl Jung spoke of a collective consciousness, a similar idea.

PMS and menstruation is when women tend to identify with or lose ourselves in our pain body, Tolle says. This results in physical symptoms like cramps or headaches for some women, but also in bad attitudes, negativity, anger or frustration in many women.

In other words – one explanation of PMS would be psychic pain for all crimes against femininity throughout history – starting with Eve. There’s a great deal to be pissed about.

The degree to which this affects women is determined by how much they identify with the collective pain body of women or being a woman.

Feminists, for example, might identify with the pain body deeper because their identity as women is stronger and they are aware of and focus on crimes against women in general. Feminists identify strongly with “what men have done to us” and the resulting pain.

Likewise, a “submissive wife” would feel a high degree of the feminine pain body as she associates a large part of her identity with “the curse of Eve” and taking care not to step out of her “proper role.”

Both are a version of a “victim identity” and keep women in bondage to the past. But, there is true power and peace available to women in the present moment, says Tolle.

The cure for PMS and identification of the Collective Feminine Pain Body, Tolle says, is to stay present during our PMS or our menstruation cycles and recognize our bad attitudes, cramps, emotional roller-coaster as “just the pain body” and try to dissolve and “transmute” the anger, pain, unforgiveness into forgiveness, love and peace for the crimes against womanhood historically.

Thus transforming our psychic pain into true psychic and spiritual power.