Two ways to unjealousy

Edit Nov, 25, 2015: I just realized that the jealousy I am talking about in this article is actually envy. We envy what someone has, that we don't have. Jealousy is more of what we have, that we fear someone might take away from us. Like a fear that my partner is attracted to someone else. So this is more of a guide to unenvy, but the methods below are applicable to jealousy as well. Just note that to overcome jealousy compassion and openness are key! Guess I should have thought it through after all (Haha).*

Jealousy is beautiful, it brings out our desires. What’s irrational and ugly is wanting instant gratification of these desires.

A friend has a nice car, someone is with a beautiful partner, that girl is pretty, this guy is fit, money, fame, respect, whatever it may be, if we are jealous, it just means we want it. But unfortunately we feel guilty and become miserable.

I used to feel guilty for being jealous, then I get angry or I escape (mostly into YouTube). But the most painful part is right before sleep, when noises die down, I endure frustrated restlessness. Multiple iterations of Jealous-Guilt-Escape-Restlessness didn’t set me free. But with some experiments, I did stumble upon ways to unjealousy.

The First Way - The easier route is to act

Run, shout, sing, dance until all you can do next is sleep, work ferociously, be shameless and ask for what you want, forget that fake discipline you learned at school and from your society and just love yourself more. Let’s call these burning action.

Basically do what needs to be done to move towards fulfilling your desire. If you think love can change your life, go ask someone beautiful, out, shamelessly. Need money? work more, more means more harder, more efficiently, more intelligently, spend less on unwanted things. There is always a way, which we don’t see unless we start walking.

Why would burning action work?

If we observe oneself, when we become jealous there is energy arising in us, and when we don’t put it to use, we become restless. To spend this energy, we choose escapades, when all we had to do is to move using that energy towards our desire.

Here is an horrible experiment (Let’s just keep it a thought experiment)

Take a child to an ice-cream parlour and show her the most delicious ones there, this is the time when you should see her eyes glowing and she should normally be cheerful, this is the energy am talking about. Desire releases energy.

Now tell her she doesn’t deserve it, because she did something wrong (like homework maybe, you know!), you should have successfully inflicted guilt in an innocent being. Congrats! Until she thinks she ‘deserves’ the ice cream she is going to be Jealous whenever she sees someone enjoying it.

Burning action burns jealousy with it

The Second Way - The road less taken

The most important thing here to understand is that Jealousy came into your existence on its own. You did not create it. Some external stimulus acting on your belief system probably created it.

Assumption: If there is a way for jealousy to come into your system, there are ways for it to go out too

The work I put in to let jealousy out is to simply watch it. As jealousy pops into us, what we generally do is fight it! We try and control our facial expressions, give out fake comments, “Oh-am-so-happy-for-you :P”. If we do this, we are still in the Jealous-Guilt-Escape-Restlessness cycle.

The watch-your-thought experiment: Deliberately get yourself into situations where you would feel jealous, just to increase the probability of getting jealous. If you are easily jealous don’t bother getting into any special situation.

As jealousy pops into existence, just watch it. Do not run away or control it, by control I mean suppressing it by saying something like ‘maybe that grape is sour’. Understand that, you, are, jealousy now, so just be it! Jealousy is not seperate from you to run away from it. Be it for sometime simply watching and you would see it happen in you.

My results: It might be hard to believe unless you try, but most often as I observe myself when I am jealousy, is that there is change in me. Jealousy smoothly drops out of my system and sanity fills in instead. Its almost magical.

Simply watch it to end it

I have a few theories as to why this phenomenon takes place, let me keep them to tell you sometime later.

For now remember to practise this and let me know how it works for you.