Jealousy and “Ugly” Negative Emotions

Last week I saw a post: my yoga teacher praised my friend on her flexibility.

I thought, “She’s so much better than I’ll ever be.”

And I felt it creep up my body…

…JEALOUSY.

The horrible, awful vibration of jealousy.

Immediately, I resisted.

“NO! I shouldn’t be feeling this way - what an ugly emotion. I don’t want to be the kind of person who feels jealous. What if people find out… what will they think of me?”

And then:

SHAME.

The overwhelming, unbearable discomfort of SHAME.

It’s funny how the mind works, even in negative emotions we sometimes create a hierarchy. 

Some negative emotions are glamorized or romanticised, like sadness and melancholy.

(I’m thinking of Wuthering Heights and tragic heroines, ah, how BEAUTIFUL.)

And then some of them are kind of reviled, like jealousy and bitterness.

(How UGLY.)

But here’s the thing about thinking this way:

We end up resisting how we feel and arguing with reality:

We tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way, when we DO feel this way.

And then we tell ourselves it means something awful about who were are.

We shame ourselves for an experience we are going through,

So we layer shame on top of the original negative emotion.

Which creates more suffering and makes it harder to look at the emotion.

But what if experiencing an emotion had nothing to do with who you were,

and there were no good or bad negative emotions?

What if emotions were just part of the human experience and it was all ok?

It’s like having a human body:

We wouldn’t say the heart is a good organ but the liver is a bad organ.

They are all just organs and we need them all.

They all fulfill a purpose.

When we accept our negative emotions we can also see what their purpose is.

What are they trying to tell us?

We can access the belief system that created it,

and decide if it’s something we want to keep or challenge.

I realized that I had been thinking the the available yoga skill was in a pie: if someone took a big slice there was less for me.

(I know, illogical, right?? Good thing that I was able to accept my jealous and take a look at this belief system that was causing it and see that it was not serving me at all.)

And I realized, I could use this friend as INSPIRATION - If she can get to that level of flexibility, that shows it’s POSSIBLE, for me too.

What would it look like if you fully accepted your negative emotions, what do you think they are trying to tell you?