Chapter

1

-

Why We Hurt: Seeking Peace But Creating Pain

Chapter Read Time -
15 mins

Want to read offline?

Everyone wants to be whole. We seek to feel connected, accepted, aligned and united — both within ourselves and with the larger worlds of experience and interaction we participate in.

Some call this sense of wholeness a feeling of wellness or inner peace. Others call it completion or contentment. Most people simply call it happiness. But we aren’t talking about the kind of happiness created by possessions or achievements or by getting what you want. Such moments of joy are wonderful, yet just the same, they are fleeting. Often these moments can even be disappointing or less-than-expected. No, the kind of happiness I want to discuss here is that deep abiding happiness that is a comforting, ever-present baseline of emotional wellness from which you can enjoy the spectrum of feeling. One might call it Unconditional Happiness. 

Yet the average person does not feel whole or happy. Most feel disconnected from others, split apart or at war with varying parts of themselves, and lost to immense anger, fear, anxiety, jealousy or grief. Most of all, they feel stuck. They don’t know what to do. Because whenever they try to improve their situation, despite their best intentions, some part of them sabotages the process. Or bad things happen. Or damaging patterns in relationships, career or health resurface.

Such people often feel betrayed by their unconscious behaviors, victimized by their unwanted emotions, and abandoned by the part of them that promised things would get better.

Some call this life. I call it the drama of rogue emotions. For it is the story of our human addiction to unhappiness.

Are You Addicted to Unhappiness?

Chances are good that the above experiences are not foreign to you. And it can be confusing — even devastating — when emotions outside of your control overwhelm you and hijack your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and words. 

While life brings moments of joy, happiness, gratitude, and excitement, you may have also experienced times when it feels as if your own emotions turn against you — when you can’t seem to get over the heartbreak, or the depression won’t lift; the anger or resentment won’t retreat.

Most people are used to feeling victimized by their emotions, or rather victims of life circumstances or other people that force them to feel emotional pain. It can be uncomfortable to consider then, that we ourselves are in some way encouraging and perpetuating our own emotional suffering.

I do not say this to cast blame, but rather to provide clarity and certainty: According to the latest science, we are each in control of our emotional experience, insofar as we understand how that experience affects and is affected by, the brain, nervous system, and subconscious mind.

Recent studies have revealed, for the first time, the brain mechanism that translates unpleasant experiences into long-lasting memories. These findings support a 65-year-old hypothesis called Hebbian plasticity, which is described by health and sciences journalist Christopher Wanjek as such: “That in the face of trauma… more neurons in the brain fire electrical impulses in unison and make stronger connections to each other than under normal situations. Stronger connections make stronger memories. The new findings are not only an important advance in researchers’ understanding of how Hebbian plasticity works, but they also may lead to treatments to help patients forget horrible memories.” 

Science is beginning to prove what counselors and therapists have noticed for decades: Bad memories that incite negative emotions stick around far better than memories that are neutral.

Though memories, in general, are prone to distortion over time, according to Boston College faculty member, Elizabeth A. Kesinger, recent evidence suggests that emotional memories are more resistant to the decay processes that wear away at all memories with time.

Is your brain wired for pain?

Why would your brain prioritize the preservation of emotional memories over neutral ones? Research suggests that memories retaining strong emotional energy do so because these emotions were not fully processed at the moment of the event.

Thus, it appears that our emotional operating system stores and protects all unprocessed emotional energy, and then continually attracts and triggers new experiences of that same unprocessed emotional pain.

Without looking deeper at why our neurological and emotional systems do this, at first glance it seems that we as human beings become literally addicted to unhappiness. But before you hurl this book at the wall and give up all hope, let me make clear that the ways we store and re-create emotional pain has an ultimately positive purpose. 

You are not a victim. Rather you are like an adventurer or explorer, being asked to see vital signposts leading you to the greatest truth of your own being. The glitch is that no one taught you what these signs look like, what they mean or what they point to.

Your brain and subconscious carefully preserve emotional memories and bring your awareness back to them so that you can locate unresolved emotions still stuck in your body, nervous system and psyche and allow their full expression and release. That is the essence of emotional healing. The emotions themselves - even the negative ones - are not the issue. Unresolved emotions that were not properly processed at the time, and hence get stuck, are the issue.

We were never supposed to get stuck in that pain, however. It was supposed to point the finger at the deeper culprit responsible for our unhappiness so that we could release them both forever to achieve genuine peace and joy.

This elusive final step — to find and release the deeper issue your negative emotions are pointing to — is the purpose of the Biko Method.

By the end of this guide, you will know how to reach true, lasting emotional peace, balance and wellness. You will be able to hit the delete button on that addiction to unhappiness. And you will have a powerful tool you can use at any time to immediately release any rogue emotion in as little as five minutes.

Plus, in Chapter 3 you will experience first-hand a ‘Quick Start Release’ to clear a rogue emotion, as well as the underlying program that perpetuates and triggers it, right away.

As you continue through this guide and begin using the Biko Method regularly, you will do more than release negative or painful emotions. I am going to show you how to upgrade your entire emotional operating system and level of consciousness to no longer store those painful emotions in the first place, creating space for the emotions you do desire to feel.

But first, let’s walk through a basic understanding of rogue emotions, where they come from, and how your emotional operating system functions to perpetuate emotional pain.

The Origin of Rogue Emotions

When you experience emotions that are more intense than the present moment would normally call for, or when you feel overwhelmed or controlled by your emotions, what you are experiencing are rogue emotions.

A rogue emotion is the result of emotional experiences you had long ago, even decades ago, that were not faced, accepted and released in the moment they arose.

Together, these old negative emotions accumulate into what the Tibetans call the Pain Body, discussed at length by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and made popular by the bestselling spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. All of that accumulated emotional pain gets stored in the emotional body and energy field and, if they are not released, will distort pathways in the brain and eventually become stored in the tissues and cells of the physical body.

So here you have all this stored emotional pain from the past bottled up inside you. Whenever you encounter an experience in the present moment that elicits a similar emotion, the entire cache of old emotional energy erupts forth and you become flooded with rogue emotions that have little to do with the present moment. For many, it can feel like a gale-force emotional storm that hijacks your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, words, and even your perception of reality. You might even feel like you become a different person, or you go unconscious, barely able to remember what you said or did once the emotion took over. It then becomes understandably difficult to respond to life in a healthy, positive and effective way.

But how does this happen? Even if our rogue emotions point the finger at a deeper cause of suffering, why do they seem to overwhelm or control us? How can you possibly release any emotion felt so strongly?

To answer this, we must look to the collective entity that is created by our accumulated emotional pain: The Pain Body.

The Pain Body: A Ghost in the Machine

According to the Tibetans, the Pain Body is its own semi-autonomous psychic entity, meaning that it develops a kind of limited consciousness. This is possible because it is made up of energy, particularly emotional energy, and all energy is conscious.

The Pain Body only has access to the levels of consciousness that created it, which are rooted in experiences of pain, suffering, and negative emotions such as anger, grief, guilt, hatred or jealousy.

When the Pain Body activates, its entire storehouse of negative emotions and their related thoughts, feelings and beliefs contained in the Pain Body’s consciousness explode to the surface and can at times completely take over. For the time that it is active, you can become imprisoned in its limited consciousness of pain and negative emotion, unable to access your larger perspective and normal levels of consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle describes it perfectly in his book The Power of Now, when he explains the nature of the Pain Body:

This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look at it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain-body. It has two modes: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their painbody, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it.

At its essence, the Pain Body is our addiction to unhappiness. Its existence is dependent upon suffering and is made of all our suffering and unprocessed negative emotions. For survival, it seeks to perpetuate its existence through additional experiences of its accumulated pain and emotions. But it is important to understand that the Pain Body is not evil nor does it seek to harm us.

Rather it is like a child, with limited consciousness and understanding, or like a computer application that can only operate from within the programming it’s been given - which is a programming limited to painful experiences and emotions.

Additionally, the Pain Body is a result of a larger program designed into your overall Emotional Operating System (or Emotional OS) that must stack and store negative emotions that could not be processed or released in the moment they were experienced. And that means there is a process for dissolving the Pain Body as you intentionally release all stored negative emotions and the programming created around them when they were originally stored.

Why You Are Programmed to Store Painful Emotions

Wouldn’t it be preferable to never have to feel a painful emotion? After experiencing an unwanted emotion the first time, why on earth would you want to then store that emotion and repeatedly trigger it again and again?

At first it can sound like a special brand of insanity. But I promise you, it all serves a higher purpose, which is your happiness and soul evolution. We develop an addiction to unhappiness. But we are designed for joy — and we live in joy when we live in our own truth.

The only reason you are programmed to store painful emotions is because they point to a lie you learned during one or more harmful experiences.

Perhaps you learned to believe that you are unlovable, or that you are a failure - hopeless or worthless. Or maybe you’ve suffered experiences that made you believe you are alone, not cut out for success or a loving relationship, or that the world is an unkind place and you must fear harm or betrayal at every turn.

These lies are stories that feel like truth. Your emotional system is designed to continually point to these lies by triggering their related emotions. The hope is that you will perceive the lie and release the related stored emotions. But there is a problem with this. Most of us are not taught emotional intelligence. We do not know how to process a difficult emotion while experiencing it at full throttle.

Worse yet, most people are taught to fear and resist such powerful emotions. Men are told to never cry. Women are encouraged to bury their anger. We learn to suppress emotion, hide emotion, bury and deny emotion.

Eventually our emotional suppression graduates to a prevention strategy that cuts us off from the fullness of life. We stop taking risks, we try to play it safe. We would rather abandon our hopes for love or success than chance betrayal, failure or heartbreak. Ironically such a strategy perpetuates the very emotions we’re fleeing from while simultaneously dampening our ability to feel the emotions we desire.

Part of my purpose in creating this guide is to show you that your emotions, even those you perceive to be negative, are not the enemy. Instead, they are signaling a deeper issue: The story or lie that, as long as you believe it to be true, prevents you from creating and living the life you desire.

These lies invalidate the truth: That you are loved, that you are enough, that you are connected to a higher power. To assist you in locating and releasing these lies, your emotional system creates programs to store and contain the unprocessed negative emotions created by the lie — programs I call Emotional Footprints — to act as repeating signposts so that you have opportunities to release the lie and experience your truth.

The Good News, and a Promise

While no one likes the idea that we are programmed to store painful emotions, the good news is that this programming can be fulfilled and any stored pain released. You can remove Emotional Footprints and their related emotions, patterns and behaviors. You can also upgrade your Emotional Operating System to no longer create Emotional Footprints and store negative emotions.

Through the Biko Method, you will upgrade your Emotional OS, releasing stored negative emotions forever and deleting the program that stored them in the first place. The process is simple and can be done in as little as 5 minutes at a time to achieve emotional peace.

As you begin using the Biko Method you will find that releasing Emotional Footprints creates so much more than a peaceful emotional state. Many people have found that when they release negative emotions and delete the underlying Emotional Footprints, they enjoy improved health and a reduction in physical pain or dis-ease.

These are often caused by chronic stress responses or structural distortions associated with emotional stress or suffering, and so the body naturally realigns and corrects itself when emotional distortions are no longer present.

They also find that they are able to communicate from a more authentic and balanced place and so their relationships improve. As they enjoy their freedom from anxiety, stress, anger and fear — the many emotions that often block progress and achievement of financial, business or health goals — they find that they can more easily earn that promotion, negotiate that deal, go after that dream and overcome that obstacle. All without skipping an emotional beat.

Best of all, upgrading your Emotional OS to restore positive feelings while releasing the pain is so simple. Through this guide you are going to learn exactly how to find and release stored negative emotions with a series of simple steps and statements. You’ll also learn how to test yourself to ensure the desired emotion has been released. Finally, with each use of the Biko Method, you will rewire your brain and Emotional OS to eventually no longer store and stack the negative emotions you’ve released. This is what brings you to true emotional freedom and wellness.

I’ve successfully taught this process to teenagers and children, to health practitioners and even to those who have never before meditated or used any kind of self-improvement technique. Anyone can learn the Biko Method. Anyone can achieve true emotional wellness and freedom.

You can do this. No matter how much you’ve suffered in the past, and no matter how intense your emotions may be, you can experience rapid and consistent emotional peace and freedom. No emotion is too big.

The only reason you are suffering negative and painful emotions is because you were never taught how your own emotional programming works and how to manage it. And so instead, your emotional system has been in the driver’s seat of you and your life. This guide is the user manual that gets you back into that driver’s seat and out of the pain.

Understand that the emotions from which you seek freedom: fear, anxiety, rage, grief or depression — these are not your fault and you are not to blame for their continued existence. This acceptance is important. Emotional wellness is not the absence of feeling, but rather the acceptance of feeling.