the importance of recognizing and overcoming jealousy

The next time you feel jealousy - rejoice! Jealousy is a lifeline. It is your mind's way of showing you what you are missing, where you'd really like to be. If you are feeling like you don't know what you want to be doing, think about what makes you envious. When you are not reaching your potential or are not on track, your mind focuses attention on others who are where you'd like to be.

This same gift, however, can be horribly destructive. Envy can make you hateful. It can burn within you making the object of your envy a horrible villain in your mind. It can make you believe that while someone else does/owns something you want, they are keeping you from having it. Envy will lie to you.

Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, talks about these concept eloquently. In a section of the book discussing how others will try to prevent you from fulfilling your creative destiny, she says (my paraphrase) that people who are not living their own dreams feel very threatened and angry at those who are doing this. These people will try to sabotage the success of the others because their success makes the person who is not living their dream feel horrible about themselves.

You can have many reactions to the success of others. You can be grateful for their success as pioneers and good examples of how hard work can pay off. You can become angry at the injustice of their success when you are still struggling. You can celebrate their success because those niggling jealous thoughts spur you on to work harder. You can let your jealousy distract you from your own work and instead concentrate on talking about how those people don't deserve their success. ("She is using other people", "She is just in it for the money", "He doesn't care about the 'little people' anymore, he only wants to spend time with successful people.", "She is trying to keep other people from succeeding." etc., etc.)

How you react to any situation will determine your experience of it. Tony Robbins gives an example of a party and someone with a video camera. He says that we often live our lives like we are viewing life through a video camera, concentrating intently on some areas but rarely seeing the big picture. For example, if you watch a video of a party and the person taking the picture zooms in on two people kissing in the corner, you might think it was a rather 'intimate' event. If they turn the corner and see two people fighting, you might think the event was rather tense. In reality those were two "moments" in a party that lasted several hours and had many moments. Life is rarely cut and dried.

Everyone experiences jealousy at one time or another. What you do with that depends on you. You can focus on the other person and allow it to distract you from your work and into negative behavior or you can use it to look at your own life and focus on where you may be dissatisfied or unhappy.

I can say this with absolutely certainty. Nothing good ever comes from speaking badly or acting to harm someone else. If you find yourself immersed in gossip or engaged in a campaign to ruin someone else -- you need to refocus your life. You can't control other people, what they do or say. You *can* control your own actions. If you don't like what someone else is doing, then you need to concentrate on doing something positive to change the situation.

If you feel rage or anger at the acts of someone else, ask yourself why. There is little in life that is worthy of the energy needed to sustain rage. That is not to say that nothing does, there are certain acts that are worthy of nothing less. Pay attention to the things that make you angry, uncomfortable or jealous. Rather than concerning yourself with what someone else does, reconcentrate your effort on your own goals and vision. You should feel peace with yourself and others. If you don't pay attention to what the source of that discomfort is, you could learn a great deal about yourself.

*** If you enjoyed this article, you can subscribe to Tera's online newsletter!
Click HERE to subscribe. It's free!***