Intention:
My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. The end goal is to be able to simply be with; to sit with it and allow it in the body without holding on to it, resisting it, or identifying with it.
Having been disassociated for a long time and only recently able to feel my emotions and my body, I simply don’t have the tools yet to be able to observe it from a distance without getting sucked into it. I also didn’t grow up with healthy models of how to self-regulate or socially express this energy in healthy ways – so with all these difficult feelings and areas I am undertaking a conscious exploration of them to ease my way into these scary places and find a way to stabilize in peace with them.
What do I live now?
How does jealousy live in my body now?
I’ve noticed jealousy when I feel some other person is able to experience something that this body can not. Some part of me is happy the beautiful experience is being registered in awareness, but there form-identified part of me wishes it would be registered in experience through my senses.
I don’t experience it for material things. I experience it when other can connect in love and friendship where I am unable to. There is a pang in my heart that goes “ooo, this beauty, which is beyond me, I wish I could have it”. Specifically when I was in the running to be the one to experience a nice experience, but when someone else gets it. The pattern that seems to keep repeating is a jealous rivalry for a woman’s affection. I experience a lot of shame for feeling jealousy, and will – out of self-denial – give up the race – probably also a limiting belief about not being worthy of the beautiful experience is there too.
Dogs can be jealous. I’ve watched them. This isn’t the rivalry of growling to defend food – or not sharing something that is theirs – it’s specific to affection. Because it is so basic to pre-cognitive life forms, you can bet it has nothing to do with the personal story about the felt sensation of jealousy – it is pre-personal and thus impersonal like hunger. Stripped of personal identification, the mystic reality of jealousy is that it is the life in us wanting to be celebrated and enlightened by presence: by being held in present awareness/love. Ultimately, presence and attention is presence and attention as dynamic principles within the field of awareness – it matters not “whose” present awareness it is. So we must nourish ourselves and honour the life in us by being present with it in ourselves. Then jealously transforms into the selfless giving of affection and devotion and present awareness to the sacredness for life everywhere in all forms.
Reflective Conclusion
Jealousy isn’t a monster. It is an over-protective friend. Declining the thinking mind’s invitation to think about the feeling of jealousy – choosing to simply stay feelingly present with it – I see it’s good intentions. However, like an overprotective barking dog, it must be called back to heel. It is under the wrong impression fulfillment can only be got through experience, and that missing an experience is missing the chance for fulfillment. Fulfillment is within. Jealousy my dear friend, inner child, don’t waste our energy chasing the smells of other people’s meals! Your feast is right here, right now, in me, be satisfied, be perfectly satisfied, be eternally satisfied, beloved jealousy.
Next time jealousy drops into my body-mind I will be sure to welcome it as a beloved guest!