Jealousy, that uncomfortable feeling we experience when we believe that our lover, parent, sibling, or friend likes someone else better than us. It starts in childhood when we often get compared to other kids. My mother used to say, ”Eva is just so much more loving with her mother than you are,” which made me think that my mother wanted to have Eva (my cousin) as her daughter. Because I depended on my mother for my survival and not on Eva, I started to hate Eva even though she had been my best friend for several years.
Miranda (not her real name) is very angry with her boyfriend, because she feels he is attracted to another woman – let’s call her Suzy. To make herself feel even worse, Miranda compares herself to Suzy and of course comes out the loser. Suzy is much more attractive, more outgoing, more fit, she believes. And so the suffering continues.
When we compare ourselves to others, we put them up on a pedestal. This perception creates a separation in which we think we are different from the other, that we have nothing in common, that he or she is our enemy. This habit of comparing creates the belief that there are differences between people and that some are better than others.
So now let’s contemplate how we play this game of seesaw. Who do you put on a pedestal, and who do you put beneath you? How does it feel when you do that? Can you feel the underlying fear behind this manoeuvre? You may not feel fear but hatred instead. Hatred is a derivative of fear, in that we hate people because we fear they are better than us, that they threaten us in some way. Anger is equally a derivative of fear, in that we are angry with people when they don’t behave, look, or think like us. We then perceive them to be either lower or higher than us. If we look more deeply into our thinking, we discover that we play this seesaw game way more often that we might have thought. It is the ego’s game, that part of us which believes that we are a unique, differentiated individual, and that we need to protect our identity against intruding “enemies.” It is this part of us that creates jealousy and spins us out of peace.
This perception is based on the fear that we are not as good as others. It’s a feeling that we all want to avoid at all costs. We all want to prove that we are good people. In a moment of jealousy, our hope of being good is shattered and we fall into the abyss. This is what hurts us. It has nothing to do with other people
The truth is that we are all emanations of great love and peace. When we realize this, we don’t need to prove that we are good; we just are, and we see this same natural peace in all beings. We also all fall into fear and comparison; we all spend time there. When we identify with the fear-based belief system, we all have the same sense of scarcity (of love) and the same emotions of fear and hatred. We are not different from one other!
Another underlying belief characteristic of jealousy is that this “enemy” is about to steal our partner’s love – the love that he had given to us. As if, first of all, there were only a limited amount of love in our partner, and secondly, if he didn’t give it to us, then we wouldn’t have any love. We tend to think of love as a commodity. We forget that love is our nature, our natural state. It is what we are, and therefore we can never lack it. But we can definitely forget about it, and that’s what we do most of the time. All suffering comes from forgetting who we truly are. If we were to remember that we are love and joy, and that we are all the same, then we could not feel jealous or insecure about our partner’s love. We would feel peaceful and whole in any situation.
So where does the healing process come in?
When you don’t succeed in changing your mindset, as I described above, when situations and relationships drag you down and you suffer ’because’ of them, that’s an indication that there are events in your unconscious mind from the past that need to be cleared, so that the emotional charges and the unconscious beliefs can be released. Then you will be able to change your mind at will, and you will feel free.
Marlise Witschi, M.Psych., Alternative Counsellor, is the founder of the Internal Freedom ProcessTM, a psycho-spiritual path to healing yourself, your relationships, your business and your life. To get more F.R.E.E. articles like this one, you may go to www.internalfreedom.com and safely sign up for articles and my newsletter.
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