Jealousy dissected
The other day, I felt a wave of nervousness disrupting the otherwise rippling calmness in my stomach area.
An emotional state we might call jealousy.
As an object of study, jealousy is an interesting emotion to dissect. It teaches a lot about one’s insecurities, dependencies, and internalized rejections.
At the experiential level, jealousy is a tough one. The threat of losing someone you are intensely attached to feels sharp, unmistakably frightening for the profoundly social beings that we are.
Now, since I actively facilitated and even applauded the context in which I experienced this emotion (inviting a loved one to deepen the experience of intimacy with others), this facilitation was based upon an important value (true intimacy as expressive of the quality of our life experiences), I felt inclined to study the emotional intensity of the jealousy, to take a deep dive into this experience instead of avoiding the associated pain body and related content of my psyche.
A question rose: what was this jealousy telling me? As I studied the thoughts and images related to the emotional state, I noticed that several convictions were related to this particular threat.
Some were related to certain personality traits I identify with, others were related to aspects of my appearance, many had to do with unacknowledged social pain. I dissected the emotional energy categorized as jealousy and clearly saw how various uncertainties, and my tendency to keep these alive as emotional protagonists in narratives about who I am, were feeding into the jealousy.
With understanding comes calm. Instead of creating more thoughts that would justify the jealousy, I decided to question the deeper layer beneath those insecurities.
And then I touched upon a deep-seated need for self-acceptance and compassion. The calmness that analyzing the jealousy brought, was now met by synthesis, accelerated by feeling more than by thinking. Breathing through the jealousy, bringing forth a soft state of my body, I remembered the many times I occupied my mind with self-rejecting thoughts and experienced the accompanying painful emotions.
But hey, this is me, I heard my ‘big mind’ warmheartedly tell my ‘small mind’.
This opened the door to a richer kind of love. A love that is not so much about attachment as it is about loving (those with whom you share your) life, nearby or from afar. A love for all sentient beings even. A love for the fact that everything indeed is interconnected, that life is an exploration of this almost unbelievable, unimaginable fact. A love for the fact that every-body has its, his, her or their own journey of exploring this interconnection through diverse kinds of intimacy.
In this sense, the painful experience of jealousy was a doorway into the healing, whole, experience of self-transcending love.
Surely, the door will seem to be locked again someday soon, moments in which I can’t breathe into self-acceptance. But it does ease my mind and body to know that what is understood as a threat is actually a bodily map of old, distorted mirroring, and an openness – a vulnerability - we all share. It’s comforting to know that a wave of sensed rejection can ‘ripple’ into a stream of compassionate consciousness. An exercise in self-intimacy, really.