Your Outer World is a Reflection of Your Inner State

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a marital relationship. It's one thing to believe that the person sitting across from you at the dinner table is mean, a jerk, exhibits all sorts of negative unconscious behavior. That very well may be true, and you can work very hard to try to "fix" that person. That effort is unlikely to succeed, but you can try.

 The more important question is why? Not, "Why is this person like this?" Most people in bad relationships spend the bulk of their time pondering this question, both in their heads and out loud. It's a futile inquiry. The better "why" questions is, "Why is this person part of my world?" For the answer to this one you have to look inside yourself. That's where the title to this post comes in.

Introducing The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder Book Club

For those of you in the Lexington (Kentucky) area, I've decided to form an exploratory committee to gauge interest in what would be the first of its kind in the world: a loose-knit social organization I've pithily dubbed The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder Book Club, or the SIBCMBC for short.

The SIBCMBC would meet once a month to discuss one of the books featured in my novel, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, A New Earth, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Secret and others. We would start with The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder as a roadmap to the other books. And when we get through all the books, who knows where we'll go from there.

We would have food to eat (a potluck arrangement) lots of good conversation and games for the kids (I made this last one up, there will be no games and probably no kids).

If you think you might be interested and/or have ideas, please let me know. Feel free to leave a comment of send me an email at toddwrightnow@gmail.com.

Avoid Dramatic People

What a liberating feeling! I've learned to avoid dramatic people! I used to fall pray to their painful whimsy because I used to be dramatic myself. And this is really the key to getting past these people: recognizing and acknowledging your own drama.

Without a nice soft spot to sink their drama hook into, dramatic people have no hope of reeling you into their made-for-TV movies. Don't judge them and don't judge yourself, just recognize and acknowledge on both counts. And don't try to help them. The more you engage, the more you get sucked in.

The only way to help them is to avoid them altogether, leaving them to occupy a world of their own making, full of drama and other dramatic people. If this is not a formula for sufficient suffering that stands a chance of breaking them free of the self-inflicted burden they carry, I don't know what is. Perhaps by being forced to go ever deeper into their drama in this way they will emerge free on the other side of it.

One thing I've learned: Life plays chicken with you until you learn not to flinch. Drama is the bad habit of flinching at everything that life brings your way. And Life won't stop bringing these "opportunities" your way until you learn not to react to them, that is to say dramatize them.

And this is one of the many ways that we can understand that the Universe is truly a beneficent place. It will never give up on all of us drama queens.

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