Dropping emotional drama is crucial because emotion is energy in motion. When we move energy, we create effect. If we move enough energy, we create matter. Emotion-charged thoughts manifest more quickly. Whatever it is we are feeling, is a perfect reflection of what is becoming.
With this in mind, it becomes important to simply feel good. We need to work out what makes us feel aligned and energized and be there – often. The more we feel good, the more of the same we will attract. People respond to our underlying energy, not just to what we say. If we are content, other content people feel drawn to us. If we feel tense, we will attract other tense people and therefore more tension into our lives.
Emotions are valuable thought monitors
We may be so unaware of our thought patterns that they only come into awareness through the emotion they create. Negative emotions come from ego-based thought. Fear, despair, guilt, jealousy, hatred, anger, blame, worry and frustration are all emotions that show us our negative thought patterns and tend to centre around what we don’t want. These thoughts are located in the belly. They drain us and cloud our vision. In this state, we end up creating what we don’t want.
Self-based thought creates hope, happiness, love, well-being, contentment, joy and appreciation. These feelings show us that our thoughts are in alignment with what we do want. They are centred in the heart. They energize us and we see what is actually going on. Then, with quiet clarity, we create what we do want.
We need to become conscious of our emotions. If we can’t feel especially the negative ones, they may show up as physical illness. Strong subconscious emotions may also manifest as an external event that seems to ‘just happen to us for no apparent reason’. For example, angry people are more likely to be attacked by other angry people. There is a triggering of mutual latent anger. We need to achnowledge the emotion and feel it long enough to extract its message. Then we act on that and move on.
No drama
On the road back to Self, we have let go of excessive emotional interpretation of our experiences, our attachment to emotional drama. There are two stages to dropping emotional drama. Firstly, we don’t involve other people in our dramas anymore, including the person who the drama is about.
Secondly, we drop the drama-seeking altogether. It is possible to be so attached to our emotional drama, that we keep re-creating certain types of relationships just to perpetuate it. In the process, we either continually re-create suffering for ourselves or continual sympathy for our story. The purpose of feeling our pain is to learn from it, not to market it to get mileage out of it.
To illustrate, here’s a short humourous exerpt called STOP IT! With Bob Newhart. If you haven’t seen it, click here
Feeling detached and peaceful takes practice. It starts with consistently choosing it over emotional drama. It’s got to be lived for a while to be experienced as the state of preference, the new ‘normal’ state of being. Living in complete acceptance of what is, is the end of all drama.
I am a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality ― Byron Katie
Emotions are part of illusion
Pain and loss are an illusion created by mind. I find that I am unhappy whenever I fall back into my old, emotional way of looking at things. I feel fear only when I think of the future. Once I am in the actual situation, I find it interesting and challenging and I enjoy dealing with it. I feel pain when I look back on my past, after I have assigned events in my life name, shape and meaning. While I was experiencing them, I found them likewise interesting and I enjoyed my ability to cope with them.
Both pain and fear are mental-emotional. They are not grounded in reality. It is possible to rise above emotional stuff like a plane rises above storm clouds. Beyond the turbulence is the clear sky of truth, love and peace.
The emotional space is not who we are, it’s a place we choose to be. I discovered this, when I realized, that I can pull myself out of my drama-state and feel and act completely normal when I have to. This shows me that it is not real. I can stop it at the drop of a hat and with that the external drama stops too. My mental-emotional state is superimposed on my natural state of being. I try not to engage with it beyond its usefulness of showing me where I am at. I do what I can to eliminate the cause and then divert my attention when I start to feel drawn into it again.
I really struggled with seeing animals and even plants neglected or suffering. It’s a fairly common feeling, but my reaction was so intense, that I felt capable of aggression to the point of violence against the perpretrator. Being powerless to help and yet unable to stop feeling the suffering, depleted me. I had little energy left for making a difference where I actually could.
I couldn’t understand what had caused this overdeveloped empathy until I realized that I was projecting my own unheard, unsupported inner child onto the situation. Every time I saw suffering, I re-lived my own undealt-with pain. Once and I started unpacking that pain, the intensity of my reactions subsided. It is important to get to the real cause of persistent, intense emotions.
Determined to find and deal with the cause of your emotional stuff? Click here.