There's an aspect of all of us that, especially when we are offered the opportunity of truly enjoying ourselves, whispers, "Be unhappy!"

Oh, we don't hear those words. But that's the theme we act out.

Eckhart Tolle calls this the pain-body. When the pain-body is in charge of our life, we are going to experience misery. This misery then manifests as drama.

Drama fools us because it gives the impression we are doing something about our situation—that we are somehow taking action and thereby improving things.

What we are in fact doing is worsening our situation. As Eckhart explains in both The Power of Now and A New Earth, we are actually feeding our pain-body when we engage in drama. This causes it to inflate, compounding our pain.

It used to be widely believed—and some still haven't awakened to the latest research on this issue—that if you felt a particular emotion, you ought to vent that emotion. Drama ensued.

So if you felt angry, you let your anger out. People thought of it as akin to a volcano in which pressure is building and needs to be released.

What research has taught us is that the analogy of pressure building up in a volcano is flawed.

An emotion like anger, when vented, is strengthened—just like a muscle gets larger when we exercise it. The analogy of a muscle being worked repeatedly is much more appropriate.

The more we vent, the more accustomed to venting we become, until we are constantly expressing rage about every least thing that bothers us. The same goes for jealousy, sadness, impatience, intolerance and other emotions.

Drama serves no positive purpose in our life.

At the roots of drama is the fact that our unhappy self—our pain-body—likes to feel unhappy. That's because it's accustomed to feeling this way, a state that was learned early in life from our family, teachers, and others who were important to us in those days including much of society in general.

Drama is a way of acting out our emotional state, a form of venting. This is the opposite of feeling our emotions.

If we are used to drama, to break the pattern requires sitting in stillness with what we are experiencing.

Our emotions may well up strongly, almost overwhelmingly, in our chest, throat, head, and even our musculature. We may feel tense, stressed, as if we are about to burst.

But instead of kicking into drama, we breathe and sit. In due course the emotion begins to subside and we return to our right mind.

It can be helpful to breathe in the way Michael Brown describes in The Presence Process, connecting our breaths. We breathe normally, but without pausing between the in-breath and the out-breath. It's a continuous form of breathing. There is nothing forced about it.

Sitting with our pain is often painful. But it frees up energy that's been invested in pain so that it becomes available to be invested in our creativity and enjoyment.

It takes effort on our part to quash our consciousness. To be unconscious is therefore enormously tiring. This is why drama often leaves us feeling exhausted, wiped out.

To be jubilant is the most normal condition for a human being.

To be sucked into drama is the most abnormal.

Yet it won't feel normal to be jubilant or abnormal to engage in drama initially because of what we have for much of our lifetime been accustomed to. Wholeness feels strange for a time to someone not used to being whole.

Opportunity for Self-inquiry and Sharing:

A.  Have you experienced an emotion arising that would have provoked you to drama, but been able to identify what was happening and stop it in its tracks?

B.  As you sit with emotion welling up in you, do you find that the time it takes to dissipate becomes less?

This ends Section 2 of Part 4

Section 3 will be posted on Monday, August 30