From Crippling Jealousy to Peace
As someone who used to suffer from crippling jealousy, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned that has virtually completely freed me of jealousy.
I used to think my mind worked like a camera. I was under the impression that I would observe a situation or circumstance, and that the circumstance would cause me pain or jealousy. Because of this, I often felt like a victim of what was happening as a circumstance. My emotions were very much dependent even on the smallest things like my girlfriend looking at another guy. And so I became quite controlling because I didn’t want to feel jealous.
What I realized at one point was that my mind was never really capturing the outside world. Rather, it works like a projector. What we experience as a situation or circumstance is really no more than a thought that’s passing through the mind, which feels very real at the moment.
It’s similar to how in movie theaters there’s a tiny film in the reel but it gets blown up and we experience it full-screen. That tiny film is the thought, and the screen is what we observe as the world outside us.
We see the full-screen version and think it’s more than our own thinking — but it isn’t — it’s an illusion!
Understanding how thoughts come and go is easy to understand through meditation. You close your eyes, thoughts pass through like clouds. I already understood that.
What I didn’t see however was that that was happening throughout the day. So whenever I got jealous or upset, it was never at a situation, it was just at the thought that happened to be passing through my mind. My thoughts just looked so real to me that it never really occurred to me that I was making myself feel a certain way. I took them seriously, instead of seeing that they were just thought.
I always believed my emotions were being caused by something happening outside my mind, something I was observing instead of something I was creating from the inside.
In the past, I would have gotten angry at whoever or whatever I believed was making me jealous, then angry at myself for getting angry, and a whole host of other unhelpful reactions.
Now, when I do experience any kind of jealousy, it occurs to me pretty much instantly that it’s just thought— that’s normal!
It’s normal for jealous thoughts to create a jealous feeling. Just because it feels so intense, that doesn’t mean it’s more than a thought passing through the mind, it just means our own thoughts sometimes feel intense.
It’s similar to dreaming. While we’re in a dream, we feel stuck. But when we see it’s just a dream, we can wake up out of it and see that it was only ever happening in our mind, that we were never stuck.
When I see that it’s my own thinking, it goes away on its own.
When there are no negative thoughts to cover up this present moment, it’s inherently positive. All negative emotion needs to be supported by some kind of negative thought, but a silent mind is always at peace.
I like to call this positive nature. It’s like an inner foundation that goes with you wherever you go. There’s a nice feeling that you can always fall back on. There’s always a nice feeling to a quiet mind.
A mind full of good feelings is a mind open to new ideas and new perspectives. A mind full of good feelings can’t go wrong. It’s a mind in full sync with life’s intelligence.
That doesn’t mean you have to make your mind quiet all the time. Our mind quiets down on its own when we stop feeding painful thinking.
Whenever you experience any kind of negative emotion, it just means you’re caught up in some negative thoughts. You’ve deviated from the full intelligence of yourself.
It’s natural, easy, and simple to stop playing with the thoughts that are hurting you. Just like if you’re playing with a lump of burning hot coal — you realize it’s the coal that hurts and then you stop playing with it.
Drop the coal, and you feel at peace. Drop the thought, and you feel at peace.
Then an empty space opens up — what I like to call the “thought train station”.
New loving, beautiful, joyful trains of thought, new ideas, and new insights begin to occur to you in that space out of the blue. It’s a very pleasant space to live life from. There’s nothing to seek, no lack to fill. You are already fulfilled and living life with a heart full of good feelings.
Outcomes don’t really matter because you’re not doing things to become happy but rather expressing happiness moment by moment.
This is how I overcame my jealousy… two-fold:
First by seeing that my jealousy was only ever coming from my jealous thoughts in-the-moment, and second seeing that all I really ever wanted was to live a life full of good feelings, and that is unconditional.
What’s there to be jealous of if all the fulfillment of life you could ever want is already within you?
