Drama Junkies

 

Many people live a life full of drama. There seems to be always some type of drama happening in their life. It is interesting to for me to observe people who live a life of drama. Outwardly people who live a life full of drama, claim to hate all of the drama and the stress that comes with it, however when you watch what is going on, you will often notice that they create much of the  drama in their life. It may sometimes be subtle, however the catalyst for this drama in their life, often is themselves!

Why would one create drama in their life? Isn’t there enough drama that just happens as part of life, why would we want more? When we look at what we are exposed to on a daily basis, through TV shows, Movies, the daily news, steamy novels, it’s easy to  discern why some people become drama junkies.  The news and most TV shows are built around drama. Drama is entertaining to us when it is “someone elses’s” drama.  That is why shows like “Desperate Housewife’s” and “Reality Shows” areso very popular, year’s ago it was “Dallas”  and “Dynasty”. Soap operas have been around for years and are totally based on drama. We eat these types of programs up, we anxiously tune in or pick up the next novel  to see the continuation of the drama, it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s also somewhat insidious in what affect it can have on our personal life.

We begin to think if we do not have drama in our life, then we simply must be missing something. Our life is boring, what do we have to talk about, if we don’t have something to bitch about in our life? What meaning would life have without all of the drama?  This is why many people become drama junkies. Even when a everything is going great, life is peaceful and everything is going our way, a “Drama Junkie” is looking for ways to create drama or at the very least manifesting drama by thinking, “okay, things have been going too smoothly for too long, something is going to happen, I can just feel it”. Guess what, with that thinking, a person will attract drama into their life. After all, despite what the drama junkie might outwardly say, they desired the drama in the first place.

This unneeded drama in life creates stress and unravels relationships. Even when a person does get to the point where they realize  they must break the pattern of drama in their life, they may mourn the drama. To reduce or to remove drama from some peoples life is a major change and it takes a period of adjustment. When the drama is gone then it must be replaced with some other type of emotions and activities. For a drama junkie, this is a very critical point of awareness.

Truth is our spiritual self  does not need the drama. Our spiritual self is peace, is love, is the light and the most powerful energy there is.  As we become more aware of our true self, we will have less and less desire for drama in our life. We will even get to the point where we develop a very low tolerance level for any drama.

To live in love is to live in peace and harmony.

What drama do you have in your life today?

 Are you doing, saying, thinking thoughts which contribute to the perpetuation of drama in your life?

What shift in your thoughts, words, actions need to change to reduce/eliminate the drama in your life?

It is important to ask these questions of yourself to create more self awareness.

Derailed by Our Emotions

 

You are doing great! Focused on the positive, visualizing what a wonderful day you will have, activity attracting what you need into your life and then … something negative happens and boom, you allow your emotions to derail you. 

What happened? Simple, you have conditioned yourself over the years to respond to certain things in specific ways. When someone cuts you off on the highway and gives you the finger, you may have taught yourself to get angry and possibly respond in kind. When someone yells at you for something, you may feel angry or resentful or sad because your feelings are hurt.  These are responses that you have learned and conditioned yourself to have over many years. These emotional responses are also reinforced by society, these responses are mostly accepted and even expected by most of society. By the way, the ego loves validation, the ego loves to say, “See, I have every right to be angry, upset, sad, etc, this is how I am supposed to react! Oh by the way, if you let me, I will stay like this all day and let it color everything else that you do today”. This is our ego in control, this is being disconnected from our source.

Truth is we don’t have to allow this to happen. We can re-train ourselves to operate from our spirit. We can choose to acknowledge that we allowed our emotions to derail us, to get upset. We can choose to be introspective and understand why this emotion took over at that moment. We can then choose to let the emotion go and continue to have the day that we planned, continue to live from our spirit and not our ego.

When you find that you have become derailed by your emotions, say to yourself, “that’s okay, that is my old way of reacting, thisis me, allowing my ego to take over. This is going to happen from time to time, however as I become more aware of myself, this will tend to happen less and less and I will live a less stressful more peaceful existence because I choose to live from my spirit, from my true self. I choose to stay connected with my source and my source gives me the power, strength and beauty to “BE”.

Abundance Or Excess

 

Abundance is spiritual, excess is food for the ego. It is important to make this distinction. Many people, depending on their background, may think of abundance and excess as the same thing.

Having abundance is a result of Universe providing what we need, where as having excess is having more than we need and continuing to selfishly accumulate more than we need to feed our ego.

Our ego loves excess, it says “look at how much I have, look how important and special I am becasue of all the things that I have”. Our ego is fed daily messages which say, “if you have more of _____, you will be happier, more beautiful, have more money, people will respect you more, etc. Many of todays cultures thrive on a consumer oriented culture which is designed to feed the ego a message that excess is good. The message of excess is built around the idea that we need external things to make us happy. These external things are usually, money and things which we purchase. The ego loves the external! The ego feeds on the external.

Our spirit in contrast loves and attracts abundance. Our spiritual self understands that happiness is internal and that we can never have an excess of happiness, love, health or knowledge. Our spiritual self also understands that even as we attract external material things, we do not need to attract things in excess, and when we do attract external things in excess that we are to spread the wealth, give to those who have less than us, use our abundant resources to help others, etc. We also know as we share what we have, the Universe will replenish us, give us more to give to others. This is a great cycle, loving cycle.

I once had a friend tell me that “money is like manure, it doesn’t do any good unless you spread it around”, this is a very true statement. This is a thought from the spirit and action of the soul. The ego would not say this. I picture the ego as the old Daffy the Duck cartoon,  where he  finds the hidden jewels and exclaims loudly “It’s mine, mine, all mine!”

Bottom line is it is wonderful to live a life of abundance!

Take an audit of your life today, in what are you abundant and in what do you have excess?

If you have excess in your life, think about how you can share your excess and then do it!

You will be amazed how much better you will feel when you de-clutter and remove the excesses from your life!

I want to thank Lisa’s recent comment for the inspiration for this article.

Picture Abundance

 

I want you to close your eyes and picture “abundance”.

What did you see? Did you see a picture of abundant health, money, knowledge, love, food, wealth, enlightenment …. Did you see yourself in that picture? You may have even struggled to picture abundance.

There is no right or wrong picture of abundance. Depending on which path you are on and depending on your life situation, will depend on what the word abundance brings to your mind.

The thought of abundance of anything in our life can be difficult for many people. We live and have grown up in a world that teaches us that we live in a world of limits rather that a Universe of abundance. We are reminded as children that there are limits on what we can achieve, how much money we can make, how smart we are, what type of lifestyle we should expect, even limits on how much love we can expect to receive. These ideas of limits are reinforced as we get older by teachers, people we work for, and even the people who should support us more than anyone, our life partners. We then perpetuate the myths of limits by teaching these limits to our children.

The truth is that we live in a Universe of abundance, where the only real limits are the limits which are self imposed. We live within the limits of our mind. We box ourselves in because of all that we have been taught. We limit ourselves by thinking about our limits with thoughts like, “I will never be able to afford that”, “I could never learn to dance like that”, “I am just not smart enough” etc. These are all thoughts of a person who lives in limits as opposed to living in abundance.

Living a life of abundance means you are thinking thoughts of abundance, thoughts like “All good things happen to me”, “Money comes to me as I need it”, “I live a very blessed life”, “I am very loved”, “I am loved by many”, “Love comes to me”, “I have an advance immune system”.

These thoughts/affirmations of abundance are keys to the abundance of the Universe. When you think these thoughts, your actions become aligned with these thoughts, the Universe receives the vibrations of these thoughts and your thoughts manifest.

 Choose to live  a life of abundance today, it’s all within you to do!

Amplifcation of Our Energy in A Drive Thru Culture

Most of us agree that we are energy and that by virtue of being energy, we transmit this energy in the form of vibrations. These energy vibrations have an impact on all things both living and inanimate. Our vibrations reach far beyond what we might initially imagine, that is, our vibrations create a ripple effect throughout the Universe, meaning that we have an impact on everything and our impact is timeless. I would also say that we can choose to amplify or defuse our transmission of energy through our thoughts and actions.

For instance we have all experienced the power of touch. We know that when someone puposefully touches us in a loving, caring manner that we feel better. The reason we feel better is because that person’s touch is a direct conduit of their energy. This conduit, touch, amplifies a persons energy. We instantly feel that energy of love and caring being transmitted to us by their touch. Think about how great a hug feels, or a gentle touch on the hand or the stroking of your hair, these all feel wonderful because you are receiving loving energy through a direct conduit, in this case touch.

Of course the touch is not the only conduit for the amplification of our energy. We also amplify our energy through our thoughts, feelings, voice, facial expressions and eye contact.  It is always preferable to meet with someone in person. When we do not meet with someone in person we often lose some of the amplification of energy which we want to convey.

In today’s society, technology and speed of process has given us many opportunities not to directly interact with other people face to face. This certainly has it’s advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that we can touch many more people directly with our energy. At this very moment you are reading what I wrote, and you are being affected by my energy, however if you and I were to talk on the phone, you would certainly feel an increased impact of my energy, as I would be more impacted by your energy. If we were to meet in person and have this same discussion we would both be even more impacted by each others energy! You get the point.

 One of the downsides of our modern culture is we have devised ways to avoid interacting directly with people and therefore we are not as impacted by each others energy as we could be.  For instance, we have in many areas become a drive-thru culture. When we drive to the bank, a fast food restaurant or a pharmacy, we can choose to go through the drive up window. Although this often convenient, we do miss out on the opportunity to walk into the establishment, stretch our legs, meet and greet people along the way and have a face to face interaction with the person who is serving us. We miss an opportunity to amplify our energy and receive amplified energy from the people we meet. We also sometimes do this at work, we e-mail someone who is one or two cubes away, rather then gettingup and having  a face to face conversation.

It is important to take every opportunity to place ourselves in position where our energy can optimally impact others and their energy can optimally impact us.

Challenge yourself today to have more face to face contact with others, to extend a warm touch, to give hugs when you can! Challenge yourself to radiate your energy and amplify your energy as much as can!

What Does Our Energy Affect?

 

Does our energy have an impact on inanimate objects, such as a piece of furniture or a house? I am sure many people would at first say no, our presence, our energy does not have an impact on inanimate objects.

I realized many years ago that our energy does have an impact on inanimate objects. I can remember going  on house hunting adventures and going into houses which had not been lived in for a while and feeling and seeing the difference of how the house looked and felt. I did not give it too much thought back then, however this weekend I was out looking at houses for sale again. As I walked through houses that were lived in and ones that had not been lived in for a while, this realization happened again.

Houses that were not occupied, even for a very short time, quickly showed signs of deterioration. Now, this deterioration that I noted was usually not major, however the longer the house was unoccupied the more severe the deterioration was. Now some of this could be attributed to lack of upkeep, however the majority of what I observed was a deterioration because of the lack of human energy.

I am convinced that the energy that we emit, the vibrations which we send out have a powerful impact on all things around us, both living and the inanimate. When ourenergy is not present, the inanimate objects around us begin to deteriorate. When we are present, our energy feeds the things, people, animals around us. Our energy nourishes not only us, but all things within our field of energy.

Note, “inanimate object” is something of a misnomer. When we think of something of being inanimate we think of that thing as  not having movement. The reality is that everything has movement. If you were able to microscopically view a piece of wood or a slab of stone, you would see that at it’s deepest level that there is movement happening all of the time.

You may be saying so what, even if this is true, what does that mean to me? The fact that our energy, both positive and negative has an impact on everything, illustrates that we are all connected, not simply with each other but also with everything within the Universe. With this realization and understanding of the power of our thoughts, our feelings, our passions, we develop an even deeper awareness and understanding of the part we play in the development of our world and the Universe. With this awareness, we begin to understand that we are not alone and that each one of us have an impact on the events of the Universe.

You may feel as though you are a lone voice and that you can not possibly have an impact on such things as starvation in third world countries or war on the other side of the globe, however with the understanding of the  power of our energy, you begin to know that with every thought you do have impact on everything and everybody.

You do make a difference! It is up to you to determine what that difference is.

Feeling Unworthy …

I was recently asked, “Does feeling unworthy attract the wrong type of relationships?”

 

 Let’s think about this, if you are thinking that you are unworthy and you feel for some reason that you are unworthy of love, happiness, respect, then it is very likely that you will attract people into your life who will not unconditionally love you, respect you or treat you the way you would want to be treated. These feelings of unworthiness will cause vibrations of unworthiness to emanate from your being and you will attract more unworthiness into your life and this includes the people which you attract into your life. So, yes, feeling unworthy can attract the wrong relationships.

One of the keys to attracting the right kind of relationships into our life, is to first be able to love yourself unconditionaly, respect yourself and know that you deserve to be loved and respected for who you are.

Most feelings of unworthiness stem from our past. We typically feel unworthy because of who we have been, not because of who we are at the present moment. This may be difficult to emotionally and mentally separate, for we feel unworthy at the moment. It is important to be able to step outside of yourself and be able to determine why you feel unworthy. Most of the time you will find that you  are basing your feeling of unworthiness on something that happened in your past, it may be something that you did that you feel guilty for or it could be because some controlling person in your life said and did things that made you feel unworthy. You may discover that there is someone in your life now that is telling you that you are unworthy in one way or another. There are controlling personalities out there who will purposely make another person feel unworthy in order to control them. This devisive behavior happens in many relationships.

If you discover that your feelings of unworthiness stem from your past then the next step is to forgive yourself, release the guilt and let go of your past. Decide to live in the present and decide to love yourself for who you are. See yourself as the person you want to be. This change in thought and feeling patterns will change what and who you attract into your life.

If you discover that your feelings of unworthiness are because you are in a current relationship with a controlling person who says and does things to make you feel unworthy, then you have some very big and often difficult decisions to make about your future in this relationship. Often to stay in this type of relationship is to perpetuate your current feelings of unworthiness. To stay in a controlling relationship and change your feelings of unworthiness is going to take much strength from you and will require that the other person is willing to make changes as well. To make the changes in this situation often takes the help of a third party such as a therapist.

It is critical to our well being to understand how wonderful and deserving each of us are! We must learn to forgive ourselves and love ourselves unconditionally. Then and only then can we reasonably expect to attract the person of our dreams into our life!

Listening – A Core Element of Successful Relationships

 

Take a look at successful relationships and you will note that one of the things that is very evident is that people in a successful relationship have very good communication skills. They are very proficient at a core skill, that skill is the art of listening.  Even though, listening is a core skill of maintaining any relationship, in romantic, long term relationships, this skill is often overlooked and under used.

Why do we sometimes neglect our listening skills in a relationship. There are many reasons, one, is some people in a romantic relationship may believe that listening to each other should be automatic, that if we are in “love” with each other that we will automatically know and understand what the other person is feeling and saying. We often do get this feeling when a relationship is new. When a relationship is new, it appears as though are listening skills are very good, we feel very tuned into each other. Of course a large part of this is due to the fact that everything is new, we are in the information gathering stage of a relationship. We want to know everything about each other so that we can make decisions on where this relationship is going. Of course, after a while,  we feel that we have gained enough information to know each other and then our listening skills can tend to taper off a little. The longer we are in a relationship, the more normalcy of day to day life sets in which may diminish our opportunities and desire to listen to each other. We become more distracted. Throw work, children, etc into the relationship and our window of opportunity to communicate with each other gets smaller and smaller.

If this persists then you can very easily end up with two people in a relationship, who have not really listened to each other for months, sometimes years and then you essentially have two strangers in a relationship with each other.  This is when you will hear people say, “I don’t even know who you are anymore” or “You never listen to me” or “He/She dosen’t understand me”, etc.

This does not have to happen and if it has you can turn it around.

Listening is a skill and as with any skill it requires awareness and practice. We love to be listened to! Listening equals caring. If someone is listening to us, we believe that they care about us. Of course, in a relationship, we want to be cared about, we want to valued. By simply listening to each other, we can show how much we care.

Listening is much different then hearing. As I sit here typing this, I hear many noises around me, however I am not actively listening to them. When people talk to us, the same thing can happen, we hear them, however we are not giving them our full attention and therefore we are not listening to them. We are surrounded by many distractions, radios, cell phones, Ipods, TV, other people, children the constant internal self chatter that we each have. When we talk with each other it is essential to remove as many distractions as we can. This means that we need to turn off the cell phone, pull the Ipod out of our ear, mute the TV or hit the pause button on the DVR, put down the newspaper or book that we are reading, pull the blue tooth out of your ear (who would have thought that statement would have ever made sense 10 years ago, ha), etc. You get the point, remove any distraction that you may have, turn to the person who is speaking to you, make eye contact and give them your full attention and prepare to listen.

When you listen, really listen, listen without forming judgements. Listen without sitting there thinking about what you will say next. Simply listen, it is okay after the other person is done talking to take a moment to contemplate what they just said before you respond.

Become an active listener. Active listening means that you are making eye contact, you are giving the other person verbal clues that indicate you are listening. You may also paraphrase back what the other person said, example, “So what I hear you saying is …”.

Practice this in all of your relationships and you will be amazed at the response you get. People will love talking with you, they will know that you truly care about them, what they think, what they have to say. You will see that your relationship will improve very quickly.

You may be reading this and say, this all sounds good, however my life is extremely busy, it is difficult to find time to talk with each other. This is an excuse, you can make time if you really want to! Believe me, people do and many people who don’t have “time” to listen to each other, often find “time” to have an affair. Think about it, we can always make time, even if you have to schedule that time into your calender.

Some people may say, Mark, I hear what you are saying, however, we have been together for many years and we have just run out of things to talk about. This is an excuse, with all that is happening in the world there is no reason that you would ever run out of things to talk about. You can talk about what happened to this mornings news, talk about your day at work, talk about your children, talk about your dreams, your aspirations, the list goes on and on.

Take a sincere interest in each others interests, listen to each other. 

Listening is not limited to verbal communication, you also need to listen to each others non-verbal communication. We will talk more about non-verbal communication in another article.

Are You Ready For It?

“That which we need, comes to us, the wisdom is in recognizing it”

 

All which we need, does indeed come to us, the question is are we aware enough to recognize it? We determine what we want, we think about what we want, we put everything into play to manifest what we want, yet it doesn’t happen. The truth is that it very well may have happened, however we were not aware of it because what we manifested may have came in a different form than we expected. While we were vigilantly looking for the Universe to deliver what we asked for, it came in a form that we had not envisioned and we missed it. For instance maybe we were manifesting money into our life, as we were waiting for this money to show up, we were also given the opportunity to interview for a new position, however that position would have caused us to relocate, so we dismissed the opportunity. The position that we dismissed would have been at a higher salary rate. This of course was the “more money” that we were manifesting.

There is an old story that illustrates this very well, it goes like this:

One day a terrible storm hit.  The whole community was told to evacuate because of the danger from the nearby river.

The police went from house to house telling people to leave.

This one man, George refused to leave.

George just said, “God will protect me.”

The storm got worse and worse.  The water began to rise.   Afraid the dam would break, George climbed up onto his roof.

The dam did break.  Soon the waters were rising even higher.

A rescue boat finally worked its way out to him, “Hop in, buddy,” they shouted over the roar of the water.

“God will save me.”

Authorities were really concerned now.  They sent a helicopter to take him off the roof.

Again he refused, saying “God will save me!”

The waters finally swept him away.

When he came to the gates of heaven he was stunned to find that he had died.

“Why didn’t God save me?”

“What do you mean?  What more did you want?

“He sent the police, a boat, and a helicopter!”

The key is to be fully aware, to look at all things with an expecting eye. The Universe will provide what you ask for. You must be wise enough and aware enough to recognize it when it comes.

When we are not aware, life is like looking down a long, dimly lit hallway, and all you can see is a dimly lit door at the end of the hallway.

When you are aware, life is like looking down a long, brightly lit hallway, beautiful murals adorn the walls, you can see a wondrous light at the end of the hallway and there are thousands of unlocked doors on each side of the hallway. These doors are all of the opportunities, all of your desires illuminated.

The interesting thing is, the doors were always there, nothing changes accept your awareness!

So the question is, are you ready for what you really want?

Analysis Paralysis

“I just don’t know what to do! I need to do more research! I can’t make a decision yet!” What If I make the wrong decision? 

 

When we are making a decision it is sometimes easy to get caught up in “analysis paralysis”, this is when we analyze a decision to the point where we can’t make a decision.

We have all been there, there is a decision that we have to make and we get caught up in a game of mental tennis as we weigh out all of our options, all of the negatives and positives, all of the possible outcomes. We analyze our possible decision to the point where we get stuck. To try to get unstuck, we may even conduct a straw poll among our family and friends. By the way this tactic rarely helps, it often muddies the water even more, because you are likely to get more opinions which will further confuse your decision making process.

What brings us to this point, where we get stuck, seemingly unable to move forward? The primary reason is fear. Fear of making the wrong decision, fear of what the impact of our decision might be, fear of how are decision may change our life, fear of what our decision may reveal about us, fear of what other people will say about our decision.

The truth is that we almost always know what the “right” decision for us to make is! We intuitively know the decision that we need to make. The problem for many of us, is that we have lost touch with our inner voice, our intuition. We have forgotten how to listen to that inner voice that tells us what we should do. We have allowed our ego to have a louder voice. Our ego as we know is very fragile. Our ego is fragile to the point where it conjures up all of our fears. It is our ego which puts us into analysis overdrive. This is a tool for the ego to say, if I don’ t make a decision, then everything will stay as it is and that’s where I feel comfortable.

The key to breaking free from analysisis paralyasis is to put your ego aside and tune into your inner voice, listen to that gut feeling and summon up the courage and trust in your true self that you are making the best possible decision with a clear understanding that there are no guarantees on any decision that we make.

Of course the key to mitigating possible negative impacts of your decision is to focus on the possible positive impacts of your decision. Remember our thoughts are very powerful, our thoughts, i.e. what we focus on becomes things.

Choose to decide today! Make a decision, right or wrong, you will be moving forward, not standing still!