Being focused and aware is painful

[SaynotoKlaus]

 I red "The Power of now" , and i'm trying to be present at all times like the author suggests , but this has a bad side effect for me. I always feel this slight constant pain in my brain , and it exhausts my mind in a way that i have no control over my negative emotions. In the last week or so since i'm practicing this, i got a couple of times to extreme rage for insignificant reasons. I punched some things , started thinking of doing extreme acts , i even hurt myself once. Looking back at what happened i feel that i couldn't control myself at all in those moments.

This obviously makes me really worried about this enlightenment work , and i am seriously thinking to stop and regularly use distraction tools so this doesn't happen anymore.

I used to be a very angry person for a long time , but in the last two years i kept learning self improvement stuff , and i also meditate casually lately. This made me pretty good at controlling my anger and other negative emotions , i even got to a point where i could easily tolerate things that made me angry  before.

I was all good until i started to put effort into being present and focused at everything i do. Since then i keep feeling this brain pain , and it's like i damaged my brain or something , can't control myself anymore.

[jjer94]

That's the trap with reading Eckhart Tolle right off the bat. He tells you to "Be Present", but you only know how to do that in your current egoic paradigm, which is totally bogus! I fell into that trap too, where I thought that I had to stop my thinking completely and meditate for hours on end. I even got the 'pain in the brain' that you described. 

The key assumption you have to examine here is whether you can even try to be present. To try is to attempt to exert control over a situation. If there's no ego, who can control anything? 

If you're gung-ho about enlightenment work, you need to realize that you have no control over anything. Don't believe that statement; you have to see it for yourself in your direct experience. Leo's video on free will has some good exercises for acquiring a direct experience of this. 

It's not a matter of trying to be present, or be aware. It's a matter of un-trying to un-be present, and for that, you simply need to see through your own illusions. Seeing through the illusion of control is your first step.