“Argue with your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

-Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah p. 75

Drama can be a great inspiration to grow. Life can be nice, calm, and move along, but where is the fun in that. When we start seeing drama as a teacher, we can appreciate the lesson and move on and away from it much faster. Sometimes it takes drama to get us to change. Drama likes to stick around us and get worse until we learn the lesson. How do we know when we learned it? The same situation can be there, but there is no more drama surrounding it. The situation changes or it goes away. It is as simple as that. If it still creates an emotional reaction, the lesson has not been learned.

I have an ex-husband. Our relationship was not pretty. It was full of drama, and it got worse and worse throughout our relationship. I had to come to a point where I said enough. Not enough to him, but enough to myself. I wasn’t getting peace at home because I had no idea what peace looked like within me. I was constantly a part of the drama. I was the person that people felt sorry for and was the victim of my world. I knew nothing about how to have a low drama life. I was an awful-izer. I knew how to make absolutely everything around me awful. My relationship, my kids, my friends, and my life. I was swimming in a pool of drama. I could see everyone’s toxicity around me, but I couldn’t see my own. I love all those saying about leaving the negative people and drama behind. The part I didn’t get, “I” had to leave it behind.

The drama in my life told me, I needed to change. For years, I tried to change the situation around me, my location, friends, jobs, and partners. The problem was that I didn’t change the source of the problem: ME. I kept expecting different results and the drama kept escalating. I wasn’t getting it, and the drama wouldn’t stop coming until I did.

After embracing a path that was about changing myself, everything in my life improved. Do I still struggle with drama from time to time? Yes. Yesterday was actually one of those days. I wrapped myself right up in it. My head was in a completely chaotic place about my daughter and where she was emotionally. I completely submersed myself in my story about how horrible things are for her and felt completely helpless about how I could help her. The drama was building up around her. Yesterday, I crashed. I hit the point I call it a breakdown to breakthrough moment.

I needed the drama to get me to do something different. I needed to stop talking about the problem and start embracing a solution. Once I was able to get to that place and see my part in the drama the miracles started happening. People started showing up to help. I got appointments in the small windows of space  I had open. The voice inside me said, “It’s time!”.

We can pretend the drama is not there by focusing on other people, doing for them what we don’t do for ourselves. We can gossip and read about all the other problems in the world and bitch and complain until we are blue in the face. We can blame our parents, brothers, sisters, friends, family, partners, and kids. You name it, we can do it. The problem is, we are just letting the drama grow and fester until the point of explosion. We can’t change it and make it better until we see our part in it. If we didn’t have a part in it, the drama wouldn’t affect us. It couldn’t effect us. Drama only has a life when we create it.

Are you engaged in someone else’s drama? We only engage in someone else’s when we are avoiding our own. Something inside us is stirred up and not getting attention. Otherwise, when someone else has something going on we know how to separate it and look at it from a constructive point of view. I’m amazed when people feel like they are putting their problems on me. Nobody can put their problems on me. If I pick up their problems and walk away with them, that is my stuff. I know when I am supporting a person, Their drama is their journey. I don’t take their situation personally. I don’t take it personally when they don’t agree with what I’m saying or the advice I am giving. It is not my drama, and I know it.

Is it more challenging when it is our own kids, partners, family and friends? Of course, because they are the best sources for our deepest and most powerful lessons. I was just there yesterday. The great news, the time it takes to learn from the drama gets shorter and shorter as we become aware and take less personally.

Here are a few of the resources I use to teach me the lesson in the drama:

1. Byron Katie. My favorite book is Loving What is  in the audiobook version because it has her in the live sessions. Nothing beats hearing her at work. What her work does is it gets me to question my thinking. She doesn’t say that I need to change it. She just makes the participant aware of it. You can also find her sessions on her Facebook page, The Work of Byron Katie.
2. Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.  This book is an easy read that educates the reader on how to free themselves from the drama that surrounds us. It helps us become the best versions of ourselves and not to take other people’s journeys personally. I can’t tell you how many times I have read this book!
3. Talk to drama free people. When I want change, I want people who are solution oriented. I’m not interested in getting advice from people who are jumping into the pot with me. If I go to advice from those people, I know I still have work to do.
4. Become aware of self-talk. I know that this will effect everything! If I am being hard on myself and have my “bad me” bat out, I will not find the best solution. I will take the fear and anger route and that never leads to good things. I only create more drama. The whole point is to learn from it and move on.
5. Get out the gratitude list. I will write every day about what I’m grateful for. Nothing gets me out of drama faster than realizing, I don’t need to be in it.
6. The positive play list. I created a play list on my phone that is full with songs that inspire me to feel better and move. I also have a library full of audiobooks and meditations.
7. Walk around the lake. I love walking around the lake and playing a meditation to get my head straight. I’m a big fan of the Oprah & Deepak 21-Day Meditation Experience. There are different experiences available for helping with a variety of topics. These are a great ways to stay centered. If you don’t have a lake or it is not accessible, find a peaceful place and use it.
8. Keep the Feed Clean. I love Facebook because I have liked so many wonderful pages that help to keep my positive thoughts on whenever I need a boost. I choose not to follow anything that is negative. You can find many of the pages that feed my thinking on my Facebook page: From A Loving Place

With Love and Gratitude,

Rachael Wolff

Please, come on this journey with me! Pick a post that calls to you from the menu on the top left corner of the title page on the From A Loving Place website and like me on Facebook. Send me a message, I would love to hear from you.

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Photo Credit: Rachael Wolff