Overcoming The Need For Drama, with Eckhart Tolle

And at first there are even people who feel they need that drama to feel that the relationship is still real. And that is there comes a point when it gets too much. So then the pain that arises so often and so frequently it gets too much. I can't live with this person anymore. And then you separate. But if you haven't, if the awareness hasn't come in so that you can be aware of your own pain body, what you contribute to it, then you will repeat the same thing in the next relationship. So the pain body needs to re experience emotional pain through drama. And whoever it comes up first in it is usually an over. It's always recognizable by being an overreaction to something, an event, something you said, something you did, or something you failed to say or you failed to do. But the person who is displaying the pain body does not know it's an overreaction. So only an outside observer or the other might see that it's an overreaction. But to the pain body it seems a totally natural reaction. So you need to know what situations. There may be certain situations in your life that tend to trigger the pain body in your relationship or at work. There may be certain people that you. That your pain body is susceptible to resonates with. If you live alone, then the pain body has a little problem. What am I going to feed on? I can't have drama with myself, or can I? Yes, you can. You can have the drama in your mind. You can have a stream of destructive and negative thoughts in your mind, either about yourself or others. They may not be here, but you have the thoughts about them. They may be in your past, they may be dead. But the pain body, if there's nobody around that the pain body can feed on through negative emotion, it will feed on negative thought streams, your thought streams. And this is where the addiction to negative thinking comes from. There are people who are actually addicted to negative thinking because the negative thinking is used by the pain body to feed on. Because those are. That is the. Because thought is energy. The pain body is. It's an energy form. Everything is energy. Every thought is an energy field. And a negative thought has. The energies have different frequencies, so to speak. And the pain body seeks further negative thinking because it strengthened itself through that it's food. And so people get into terrible suffering, terrible misery in their lives, not realizing how it arises. If they knew how it arises, if there were some awareness in the background. And for some people this realization has come through reading the power of now. And they suddenly, oh my God, this is what it is, this is what I've been doing. This is what we have been doing for all those years. Okay? And that's a good thing to see that that's not all. Because now the next challenge is to be there when it happens. In the moment you can more easily see, okay, that's been going on in my life. But in the moment, the moment has the emotion that comes up, has enormous energy and can easily obscure your awareness again. So it requires a lot of vigilance. But being here, for example, is quite helpful because it increases your level of presence, your general level of presence, which then you will have grown, that is how I put it, you will have grown in presence power, for example, by being here, even by reading a powerful spiritual book that has been written through presence that can help you, or listening to a spiritual talk. Then practicing presence in your daily life when you are not being challenged. Why don't wait until you're challenged to practice presence? But a challenge, of course is a little alarm bell that says this is your opportunity to wake up and to be present. But don't wait for the alarm bell because the alarm bell is not going to wake you up if you haven't practiced presence when we are not being challenged. For example, here, walking in nature, being present as you take in all the perceptions, the sense perceptions, being present while you walk, inviting presence into your life. In daily situations that are very ordinary, ordinary situations that are usually regarded as too ordinary really to be acknowledged. Whenever you wait somewhere, I often say that don't get upset about waiting. Or if you do get upset, observe it, be there and accept any waiting period as an opportunity to be present. So where is your attention when you are in those situations? Neutral situations, non challenging situations. Where is your attention when you are present? Now the ultimate way of being present is to just be the presence. Sense the presence that you are sense the awareness, be there as the awareness before you can be there as the awareness and you can transition. Then this is a more advanced thing that may not yet be possible for all of you to transition from thinking awareness to step, the ability to step out of thinking into awareness. So you've been thinking and suddenly you realize that your thinking is causing you certain emotions. You're waiting in line, that's a simple situation. You're waiting in line at the airport or the supermarket and it's not moving. And the people who are at the other end dealing with things are obviously totally incompetent, says the mind. How can they allow people like that to be there? Also your mind will be telling you that you're never going to fly with this airline again or do your shopping again at this place. And it's all. And then comes the next negative thought that there's so much. I'm so overwhelmed with stuff, there's still left to do. And here I am and I'm not. I'll miss that plane. Why is this always happening to me? Why things always go wrong? Let me think about all the other things that have gone wrong recently and you can see if then you are alert, you will feel you become unhappy, very unhappy. Now that should be an alarm bell. It can be. Potentially, it's not a bad thing to be unhappy because you can use it as an alarm bell that says, oh, there's some lack of awareness here. There must be a lack of presence. I must have been missing the present moment. Is there any way I can get out of that right now? Can I bring my attention back to the present moment and you realize what you've been feeling? The unhappiness did not come from standing in line at the airport. Check. Encounter. Because after all, and this is just one example, simple one, after all, you're just standing somewhere and breathing. There may be a little bit of discomfort. You can't be. You're not sitting, okay? And of course, if you're physically handicapped, then you might need to do something to sit. But there might even be a little bit of pain in your legs. Okay, but is that a big deal? It's pain in your legs, okay? So all that there is is you're standing there and breathing. That in itself is not a source of unhappiness, but your mental commentary on the situation is the cause of unhappiness. Once you see that freedom comes in and in that moment, you can ask yourself always, what happens if I drop, Relinquish, let go the mental commentary. Let's just try something out. I'm going to drop the mental commentary about this situation and just breeze and look around at the people and where I am and see if I'm still unhappy. And that's a beautiful experiment. You can experiment with that. Let's see what this situation is like in. If I don't judge it.