Drama & Trauma: How else then, shall I live?
This blog post is an adaptation from a weekly email from my yearlong group, with references to participants removed.
This week's email revolves around this nominalization we have come to call "drama". This word has been in my awareness for a while now, and I'm curious to explore it with you, within the context of the interconnectivity of the Crone that we each are, evolving.
Questions for you to ponder...
What does drama mean to you?
What are the nominalizations that you've attached to it?
What are you aware of, and what seems to be just out of the reach of your awareness?
What are the internal cues you've associated with drama?
Consider as you read this email:
Drama lives at all logical levels.
Drama at the environment behaviour level might be something like messing around in people's lives.
At the strategy level, drama looks like all the rage, fear, shame, hopelessness, etc.
At the beliefs, values and attitudes it could be things like righteousness or stagnation.
I wonder ... What does drama look like above the choice point?
As I read this blog post on “verbal decluttering” by Jennifer Hatt, I noticed all the choices she made to surrender and let go of the stories she held as real inside herself that allowed her to keep sustaining the default.
In that moment, I also became aware of the role "drama" plays in our lives. The drama we create and sustain and replicate, often out of our awareness and out of habit. It's rather easy to react in a habituated way, despite how painful it also is, because it is familiar. While reacting habitually isn't bad or wrong, I am aware that it also limits the potential for expansion ...
So many of us use drama as a strategy to keep sustaining the status quo of the life we have. We don't know what else to do so we keep doing the same thing, OR we oscillate to its extreme. For example, often "good girl gone bad" goes from shame ruling her life and she would do anything to avoid it, to shamelessly engaging in activities that everyone around knows are, at the very least, inappropriate for a “good girl” to do. Generally, we do this because we don't want to (and we don't know how to) take responsibility over our own internal cues. So we'd rather avoid feeling our feelings or we'd rather make it about someone else being wrong or we'd rather try desperately to keep the illusion of peace, and so on.
We all do it. And we do it because it serves us in some way. Even if it’s as simple as not wanting to take action differently. So, we turn our drama into a resource and keep playing the same familiar role we’ve always played. And, nothing changes until we mindfully decide to take responsibility for ourselves.
To reclaim our lives is to take the sacredness of responsibility back.
In a recent conversation with Louise LeBrun, she said to me:
open, honest and direct diffuses drama when people use drama as a strategy to be able to continue to not take responsibility for their own internal cues.
Whoa.
Drama, as a strategy, is us trying to get rid of the chaos we feel inside and we don't know how else to do it. So we do what we know and perpetually keep ourselves prisoners to our own habits.
The power, however, lives in making different choices than the habituated.
Consider, for a moment, what life looks like when we live fully congruent lives, not tied to our age-old familiar habits simply because that's what we know. But instead, we create new habits where the normal is acceptance of what is and letting go of the old while honouring the truth that lives in the body.
I read in an old diary entry from a year ago, when I was so righteously enraged at everything going on around me yet (seemingly) no one's paying attention:
"How can I be more present to myself in the face of collapse -- fear, rage, outrage, familiarity, -- outside of me? The next time I create such an experience for myself, I will choose to stand in the moment, allow the rush to move sufficiently through, that I open my body to a new Truth. One that supports my Soul in evolution in the moment, without being seduced by the show of the outrage, the familiar. Knowing, I AM the Force of Manifestation for all that unfolds in my life. Knowing that every single experience I create for myself is an INVITATION to propel me forward...a mere moment of choice. Going back to the familiar is easy -- outrage, I now all too well. Choosing expansion, life, godForce ...magic! Now that is the new way of living! Everything is an invitation to choose THAT which I AM. How do I get myself to the point that everything becomes but a metaphor for the choices I am making?"
When Quantum TLC™ replaces the intellect as a way of life, the I AM that we each are emerges. Because Quantum TLC is the essence of WHAT we are. It is not yet another strategy …
So.
What does it take for us to notice the drama we create inside ourselves because we're used to the familiarity of the habituated responses?
What does it take for us to breathe life into the truth of our experience, without shutting it down or trying to make it be anything other than what it is?
What does it take for us to let go of the habituated, trusting that it isn't giving up our life and everything we've known, but instead a simple choice that moves us toward the future we desire?
Drama above the choice point looks very different.
To me, drama above the choice point converts to intensity, definiteness, clarity of intention, honesty, directness. I know what I know, and I am unapologetic about that. It is a deep connection with our own inner cues, and it is savouring the moment and everything it brings, trusting: this is where freedom lives. In the perceived mess of the whole thing. Where there is no right or wrong, how could there be? There is only the truth of my experience, owned.
This is an incredibly attractive space for us to live in, once we give ourselves permission to taste its sweetness. The space where we each show up as our authentic Selves, expressing. Letting go of the habitauted and worn-0ut, and embracing the power of the body. This is where the energetic Force of the Crone lives...and therefore creates.
How then, shall I live? asks Louise. There is a powerful alternative .... Will you choose it?
RESOURCES TO CONSIDER
Quantum TLC is not a strategy; it is WHAT we are as quantum-biological beings. I say, read what this is, from the horse's mouth, so that you know, in the quantum spaces of your being, Quantum TLC is Life in flow ... itself. The whole point of living from the right side of the doted line is to invite and allow the wave to move. That's it, that's all. To try and stop the flow of Life, is to stop living. That is what causes us pain.
Our bodies are constantly revealing secrets. Are we listening?
Pain is usually perceived as something we want to move away from. Perhaps, it is time to reconsider how we interpret pain. Here's a podcast reframing the nominalization of pain. The point of the CODE Model™ is to invite the wave to move. That's where the power lives!
There was a time when I wanted to die. And then, I discovered there is another way to live ...