Who Would You Invite to Your Dinner Party?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. I don't know if it's because I'm going to win a contest soon or what, but it's kind of a fun question.

Almost as much fun as picking the guests is choosing the ground rules.

First, all of my personal friends and family are excluded. The reason for this rule is obvious. I can't invite all of them to this once-in-a-lifetime event, so I need to have recourse to a rule that excludes them all equally. That way I can shrug and say, "If it were up to me . . . "

But for this rule, I would invite my octogenarian uncle who would thoroughly enjoy the night, though he may not appreciate most of my selections. This would be especially true of my aunt who would undoubtedly be his date. I would invite them anyway if I could. But rules are rules.

What's Your Drama?

Ok, I'll go first.

My drama has been to allow my pain-body to take over my thinking in the context of a love relationship.

No, that's too abstract. Let's try again. My drama has been to take things personally in the context of a love relationship. There, now that's something people can relate to, I think. 

Things said and done by my significant other would be felt as intense "emotional pain."

[Ok, now I've said the same thing in three different ways. Take a moment and look at those three descriptions of my drama and try to understand how they're all saying exactly the same thing.]

This "emotional pain" would cause me to react against the supposed source of this pain, my significant other. But of course, she wasn't impacting my physical body in any way, so how could she have been the source of my pain? She couldn't. In fact, it was my own thoughts that were causing this "emotional pain," so called. I was doing it to myself.

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.