Pain is felt in the body in the present. All pain is felt today. You cannot physically feel something yesterday or tomorrow. You can remember the pain of the past, and anticipate a pain in the future, but you can only feel pain in the present.

Emotional pain felt in your body can be shown on a pain time-line. Stress describes any negative emotion that you feel in your body. Every emotion is felt by individuals at a particular level of intensity; low, medium or high. Hurt is a negative emotion that you feel in the present. Anger or resentment is a feeling generated from memory of something in the past and anxiety from a situation you think may happen in the future. All emotional pain adds to your store of stress.

Negative emotion accumulates in the body and feels like emotional constipation. The more intensely you feel a negative emotion the greater your stress level.

The cycle of emotions is described by Deepak Chopra, in "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind". He explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses - pain or pleasure. "We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives."

Chopra explains the cycle of emotions that begins in the present (reality) " where only pain and pleasure are felt " and ends in complex emotions centred exclusively in the past or future - such as anxiety, guilt and depression (perceived reality). The cycle that gets repeated countless times in everyone's life is as follows:

* Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.

* Pain in the past is remembered as anger.

* Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety - a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.

* Unexpressed anger - redirected against yourself and held within - is called guilt.

* The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.

The cycle of emotion tells us that stored hurt is something we all have experience of to some degree, and is responsible for a wide range of emotional constipation. Chopra says, "Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression." To live in the present we need to learn to avoid the easy emotion - anger, and deal with the hurt that is more difficult to confront. Unresolved anger will only grow worse, feeding on itself.

Sometimes you can cause another person pain by what you do or say. This external event may be intentional or unintentional, and may also create a pain for you; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret - that is, stress. For example, people who use ineffective communication often drag up "history" in arguments to hurt their partner. Their perception is that their partner has hurt them or is "blaming" them in some way. They are using a conditioned response to ease their own pain felt in the present, not realizing the physiological impact their behavior is having on their own body.

Emotional constipation - emotional distress - is "dis-ease"; an illness of how you think. You are what you think. How you feel depends on how you think. The pain time-line helps you understand your emotional constipation and the physiological impact of negative emotions felt in your body.