What's Your Drama?

Ok, I'll go first.

My drama has been to allow my pain-body to take over my thinking in the context of a love relationship.

No, that's too abstract. Let's try again. My drama has been to take things personally in the context of a love relationship. There, now that's something people can relate to, I think. 

Things said and done by my significant other would be felt as intense "emotional pain."

[Ok, now I've said the same thing in three different ways. Take a moment and look at those three descriptions of my drama and try to understand how they're all saying exactly the same thing.]

This "emotional pain" would cause me to react against the supposed source of this pain, my significant other. But of course, she wasn't impacting my physical body in any way, so how could she have been the source of my pain? She couldn't. In fact, it was my own thoughts that were causing this "emotional pain," so called. I was doing it to myself.

Your Outer World is a Reflection of Your Inner State

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a marital relationship. It's one thing to believe that the person sitting across from you at the dinner table is mean, a jerk, exhibits all sorts of negative unconscious behavior. That very well may be true, and you can work very hard to try to "fix" that person. That effort is unlikely to succeed, but you can try.

 The more important question is why? Not, "Why is this person like this?" Most people in bad relationships spend the bulk of their time pondering this question, both in their heads and out loud. It's a futile inquiry. The better "why" questions is, "Why is this person part of my world?" For the answer to this one you have to look inside yourself. That's where the title to this post comes in.

Introducing The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder Book Club

For those of you in the Lexington (Kentucky) area, I've decided to form an exploratory committee to gauge interest in what would be the first of its kind in the world: a loose-knit social organization I've pithily dubbed The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder Book Club, or the SIBCMBC for short.

The SIBCMBC would meet once a month to discuss one of the books featured in my novel, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, A New Earth, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Secret and others. We would start with The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder as a roadmap to the other books. And when we get through all the books, who knows where we'll go from there.

We would have food to eat (a potluck arrangement) lots of good conversation and games for the kids (I made this last one up, there will be no games and probably no kids).

If you think you might be interested and/or have ideas, please let me know. Feel free to leave a comment of send me an email at toddwrightnow@gmail.com.

Avoid Dramatic People

What a liberating feeling! I've learned to avoid dramatic people! I used to fall pray to their painful whimsy because I used to be dramatic myself. And this is really the key to getting past these people: recognizing and acknowledging your own drama.

Without a nice soft spot to sink their drama hook into, dramatic people have no hope of reeling you into their made-for-TV movies. Don't judge them and don't judge yourself, just recognize and acknowledge on both counts. And don't try to help them. The more you engage, the more you get sucked in.

The only way to help them is to avoid them altogether, leaving them to occupy a world of their own making, full of drama and other dramatic people. If this is not a formula for sufficient suffering that stands a chance of breaking them free of the self-inflicted burden they carry, I don't know what is. Perhaps by being forced to go ever deeper into their drama in this way they will emerge free on the other side of it.

One thing I've learned: Life plays chicken with you until you learn not to flinch. Drama is the bad habit of flinching at everything that life brings your way. And Life won't stop bringing these "opportunities" your way until you learn not to react to them, that is to say dramatize them.

And this is one of the many ways that we can understand that the Universe is truly a beneficent place. It will never give up on all of us drama queens.

You might also like: Dramaholic

Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 10

Start at the beginning: Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 1

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowledge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed, — "How can a man be concealed! How can a man be concealed!"

On the other hand, the hero fears not, that, if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace, and to nobleness of aim, which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.

A New Review for The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder on Amazon

Shopper writes:

From the first page of The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder I was hooked. I took the book on vacation to have something to read while I was gone but I couldn't put it down and finished it before reaching Greensboro, NC. Mr. Wright takes the theories behind self help books and brings them all together to develop an excellent murder mystery. I enjoyed the evolvement of the characters, how the detectives develop a tie between the individual books and the murder. Wright's knowledge of the self help books he uses as a basis for the novel is extremely detailed and intriguing. I find myself compelled to pick up a self help book. A must ready for anyone who has doubt of how to live in the here and now or if you just want to enjoy a good book.

Thanks, Shopper!

Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 9

Start at the beginning: Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 1

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of nature; they show the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs, — not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative, and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity, every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.