ON JEALOUSY
How do you turn your jealousy into a tool for becoming more conscious? Here’s three strategies to overcome feeling jealous that’s worked really well for me.
Jealousy is a normal human emotion. It’s easy to get into. But it’s really not necessary to stay in that space, and there are easy ways out if it.
Jealousy is something many of us are familiar with and have to find a way to deal with. Especially with social media it’s a topic that often comes up.
Jealousy can look like wishing for what someone else has, criticizing someone or racking them down, or comparing yourself / hold yourself up against another person’s accomplishments.
SoMe only shows our lives in glimpses. It’s the polished and selective version of our lives. I don’t think the problem are the platforms themselves, it’s all about our relationship to it. I personally quite enjoy social media, and I think there’s great information and entertainment here, and also it’s an interesting activity to understand the different broadcasts, and the collective consciousness. As with everything, as long as I don’t get sucked in, but are able to use the technology rather than being used by it, this place for me poses no real problem, and instead becomes an opportunity.
But when dealing with issues like comparison and jealousy, social media can be hard to navigate. And I get it—and I’ve been there many times myself. So how do you turn your jealousy into a tool for becoming more conscious? Here’s what I have found works really well for me.
Three strategies to overcome feeling jealous:
1. Just drop it (ah, my favorite answer to every problem). Knowing that I don’t have to solve any of my problems, solves pretty much all my problems. The notion of “spiritual bypass” aka absolutely HAVING to deal with your feelings or emotions at the level of the emotion, is total BS. You don’t have to “solve” any of your problems, you can transcend the frequency, and you can decide to just not go there. How can something exist inside of you, if you decide that it doesn’t? I might have had a thought yesterday, but today I have a different thought. Being able to change the channel is one of the greatest spiritual hacks. Thinking that you don’t have that sort of power over yourself, limits your power over yourself. Simple as that. Just preoccupy yourself with something else. This requires energy and a clear mind, and a strategy so that you can “catch” yourself when the feeling arise. Generate enough mental strength and stamina to have the power to decide.
2. If you’re into the self psychology of it, you can approach your jealousy as a roadmap. Ask yourself What can I learn? What does the jealousy tell me? What does this person have that I’m imagining for myself, or that I feel might be for me? Change the emotion from jealousy to desire. Understand what part of it is drawing you in. Find ways to use feeling jealous to map out your future. If jealousy turns up for you in the form of criticism you might have to come to terms with the fact that you criticize because you’re watching someone else having something that you feel is really your right. Just identify what that is, use it to your advantage and to map out your next move.
3. It’s so easy to compare yourself with one tiny aspect of someone else’s life. When getting into a comparison spiral, always look at the totality of the other person who you are comparing yourself to. Would you want that person’s entire life? With all the history and the full journey to get to where they’re at? Chances are that you don’t want the whole person’s life at all. It’s so easy to take one thing about someone out of context. But just like you have spend your entire life making your way to where you are right now, someone else also have the life they have because of a series of events that all brought them to where they are now. Be grateful for your own journey. Look at all the things you have learned. Trust that you’re going in the right direction. What is for you will come to you. Trust that the universe gives you what is for you at exactly the right time in your life. Get into a state of gratitude for what you already have and have accomplished. Start co-creating with the universe and become conscious about where you want to move yourself.
