Jealous Me

The other day, I hopped on my podcast to discuss the jealous emotion, times when jealously has crept into my life, and how I used this emotion to learn more about myself. Not every negative emotion is a bad thing or experience. In fact, when looked at from a different lens, your emotions are your guides helping you uncover areas of yourself you need to tend to.

Being Jealous Can Actually Be A Positive?

As mentioned previously, your emotions are your guides/teachers. When its power is yielded correctly, it can actually tell you a lot about yourself.

It’s often easier (and more enjoyable) to associate positive emotions with external cues (e.g., being happy when you’re with your bf/gf, getting excited to eat, laughing at a funny show etc.). This isn’t to say it’s not possible when you experience negative emotions, but you have more of a relaxed mind to associate the feeling with the experience. On the other hand, experiencing negative emotions you may not always be up to diving deeper into the root cause of said emotion.

That’s why I always mention the practice of introspection where you can take inventory of yourself in order to learn from the self. If emotions can be used to show us more of what we do want, they can also show up for us and help us learn what we want to change (by showing us unfavorable emotions we’d rather not experience).

How Well Are You In Tune with Your Emotions?

Before you dive into wanting to identify where your unfavorable emotions stem from, you’ll need to be tuned in to your body and emotions. Again these feelings arise to help you uncover what is missing or lacking which then helps you trace back to the root cause.

In my podcast, I mentioned that whenever I felt feelings of jealousy that all I was really doing was comparing myself. In the book, The Mountain Is You, Brianna Weist mentions, “Jealousy is a cover-up emotion. it presents as anger or judgment when in reality it is sadness and self-dissatisfaction.” Going below the surface to help locate why I actually felt that resulting emotion, really helped me start to tend to where I wasn’t showing up for myself.

Practices to Help You Evaluate Your Emotions

What’s helped me with unpacking the jealous emotion was to use it to my advantage (and mostly just ask myself why am I feeling this way continuously until I get to the core of it). It involves taking a look at things from a different perspective which I’ve narrowed down into these few steps:

• Accept the emotion for what it is and peel back the layers
• Turn that energy inwards and focus on yourself instead
• Think with logic and reason

Easier said than done but one thing to highlight out of all of these practices is to feel the emotion. Give yourself the time and space to be immersed in it. This is actually something I learned from therapy, but we need to make space for our emotions. If we don’t give space or experience them fully, the energy just gets redistributed elsewhere – or it can pile up and cause more issues down the line (see: how stress can lead to illness).

E-motion is energy in motion, and it’s there for a reason. Listen to my podcast in full where I’m dropping more gems on this subject and share how it’s shown up in my life!

Thanks for reading and until next time ~~