Part of The Dragontree’s mission is “to seed our community with centered, peaceful, and healthy people.” For those who wish to actively pursue this, one of the most challenging—and life-changing—assignments is a drama fast. We suggest starting with a single day.
Our social programming—through family, community, and media—teaches us some useful things, like how to relate to others and be productive. It also teaches us some not-so-useful things… like how to generate and spread drama. The world sends the message, in both subtle and obvious ways, that there’s something to be gained from dramatizing our lives. You can feel the charge in it. So the idea of life without drama might sound boring or even unnatural. But in truth, dramatizing reality—especially by focusing on conflict—often degrades our experience of life.
When we turn life into drama, the rich, nuanced reality gets flattened into black-and-white thinking. We lose clarity and gain resistance, judgment, and division. Worse, we give away our power. Drama disempowers us by convincing us that we’re subject to forces outside our control, causing us to surrender our vision and our ability to choose how we respond.
Our greatest power—the most fundamental one we have—is the power to choose our point of view. Our lives, no matter how impressive or tragic by anyone else’s standards, are ultimately only ours to judge. If you’ve ever met someone who seems truly imperturbable—someone who stays hopeful, grounded, and positive no matter what—you’ve witnessed a person fully claiming that power.
Any situation offers a wide spectrum of possible viewpoints. The situation itself doesn’t dictate our response. Broadly speaking, these viewpoints tend to fall into three categories. The first is a neutral perspective: simply acknowledging the facts without attaching meaning or story. The second is a viewpoint that diminishes the experience—by adding blame, resentment, victimhood, guilt, or shame, and by subtracting one’s own personal power. The third is a viewpoint that enhances the experience, either for oneself or others—through gratitude, openness, curiosity, or by seeing the opportunity hidden within the challenge.
The purpose of a drama fast is to consciously lean into those first and third options—to either stay neutral or choose an empowered, uplifting perspective.
Every human being has the ability to face whatever life delivers from a place of inner light—meaning clarity, spaciousness, and a certain emotional buoyancy. This doesn’t mean bypassing or avoiding difficult emotions like sadness or anger. It means that we can experience these emotions fully without letting them shut us down or rob us of our ability to choose our response. When held in the light of awareness, even painful thoughts and feelings don’t harm us in the same way. The natural contraction they cause is temporary, and it’s often followed by an expansion.
A drama fast is ultimately about taking responsibility—not blame—for how we shape our experience and how we affect others. Most of us don’t consciously intend to degrade our lives with drama, but the pull is subtle and sneaky. It often shows up when things don’t go the way we want—whether it’s something small like the flow of our day or something vast like the environmental or political state of the world. Disappointment feels heavy. Turning that disappointment into a drama—where we cast ourselves as the victim or the martyr—adds energy to it. It makes it feel more compelling.
It becomes a better story.
During a drama fast, the goal is to catch yourself in these patterns. Practice being a master of cleanness: stick to the facts, don’t share gossip, focus on what’s good, and seek solutions. Often, the simplest solution is just to let it go. But letting go isn’t always a one-and-done declaration. It’s a practice. You may let it go and notice you’ve picked it up again a few minutes later. That’s okay. Just let it go again. No need to analyze it—just drop it. Not only is this a gift to yourself, it’s a valuable service to everyone around you.
Drama is often a way we try to distract from our own discomfort. Sometimes it’s about feeling superior to others; sometimes it’s a way to deflect attention from our own shortcomings. But have you noticed that the people who refuse to engage in drama tend to exude a natural calm and confidence? It’s easy to assume they’re just wired that way—but in reality, this is a choice anyone can make at any time: I choose not to degrade my own—or anyone else’s—experience.
Fasting from drama means changing your inner conversation. It means noticing when you’re indulging in drama and consciously choosing to return to clarity and calm. It applies to your outer conversations, too.
Before speaking, you can pause and ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? And what is my purpose in sharing this?
So what do you do when you’re talking to someone who’s revving up the drama engine? If you find it impossible to be around them without getting pulled into it, you may simply need to excuse yourself. While that might feel unsupportive, sticking around to validate or feed their drama doesn’t truly serve them.
If you feel up for it, though, you can choose to stay present and become a calming, grounding influence. You might notice what happens when you simply hold space as a neutral container for their experience—listening without adding fuel to the fire. You could experiment with being the embodiment of calm clarity, just sitting in the energy of steadiness.
You might gently remind them that they have the power to choose how they view the situation. You can ask them to just give you the facts, without the story layered on top. Or you might simply hold them in your mind as the highest version of themselves—whole, resourceful, and capable—while they sort through their current struggle. Sometimes, it’s enough to remind them of the path they were on before the drama knocked them sideways.
Imagine how the world could shift if more of us practiced this. Try it for a single day. And if you like how it feels, try another.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten