Life's such a soap opera!

About 12 years ago when I first moved to Bournemouth, I shared a flat with another girl.

My flatmate always watched the TV soap 'Eastenders' so, rather than sit in my room all alone, I started watching it with her.  We used to look forward to our evening ritual and try to guess who would feature in the poignant last scene of each episode, when the title music would come on, or "who would get the duff-duffers" as we called it. 

(If you've never seen 'Eastenders', look up the ending theme tune on YouTube and when you hear the first few seconds, you'll instantly know what I mean by duff-duffers!)

I started to notice that when the characters were sad or arguing, my feelings started to get dragged along on an emotional roller-coaster.  Sadly, as 'Eastenders' storylines tend to be bad more often than good, I soon stopped watching it on the grounds that it was too depressing.

Over the years I have observed myself being emotionally affected by TV shows, books, films. Well of course we all are - that's why we enjoy them so much isn't it?

These media can make us laugh, cry, they can terrify us and uplift us with such speed and efficiency that we don't even realise what's happening until afterwards.

But I want to ask - is that a good thing? What about the energetic consequences?

According to the law of attraction, if we start emitting angry or sad thoughts or emotions, then the universe will respond like for like and send more sad or angry situations our way.

My question is why would we intentionally do that to ourselves?

Last year, I went to see the film Skyline at the cinema.  I love a good sci-fi movie, to my disappointment however, this wasn't what I had hoped.

The advertising had lead me to believe that it was an exciting sci-fi action film, and I was expecting something along the lines of Independence Day. A good yarn with amazing special effects, lots of action and excitement , and the good guys win in the end.

The special effects were good, but there was zero storyline that I could discern, and I spent the best part of two hours watching a full-on slaughter-fest, with helpless people being wiped out by alien machines.

It was basically a horror film, and as a gentle soul who doesn't enjoy the horror genre, I hated every minute of it.

I left the cinema feeling as though I'd been in a car crash; shaking, tearful and angry. I honestly felt as though I had been emotionally assaulted and spent the drive home trying not to burst into tears.

Granted, being a clairvoyant medium maybe I am a bit on the sensitive side compared to some, but seeing people suffer, whether imaginary or otherwise really upsets me. Surely that's just a natural human reaction?

So I have to ask - why do so many people seem to enjoy gritty depressing drama and horror so much?

How can you get pleasure from pain, enjoyment from suffering, happiness from so much sadness?

I started asking people I know who really seem to enjoy these negative genres.

The most common responses so far have been "because it makes me feels better about my own life"  and "it's not real".

No, it's not real, but the emotions you feel most definitely are.

Humans crave drama.  As if there wasn't enough suffering and drama in our lives, for some reason, we go looking for more.

TV & cinema provide the perfect 21st century way to experience the emotions and energy that goes with suffering and drama without any of the hassle of getting into those tricky situations yourself.

Is it simply that our soul needs to experience those things in this lifetime or is this our ego's way of keeping us in fear & distracting us from greater truths?

There is no direct scientific evidence linking acts of unkindness or crime with watching horror and cruelty on TV and film, so is the effect simply a more subtle energetic one that science and statistics might have overlooked?

I think so.

It also begs the question; why as sentient, supposedly intelligent, energetic creatures do we still seek out things to harm ourselves with, on the grounds that we "enjoy" it?

Could this be the Monkey Mind that the Buddha talked about? The part of us that loves to chatter away about nonsense, get wrapped up in drama and keep us from finding our true divine nature and our enlightenment?

I don't know, but answer me this:

Would the Dalai Lama watch Eastenders for fun? Who knows.

I'll leave that one for you to make your own mind up about, but suffice to say, I won't be watching it!