8/5 Meeting Notes

on observing jealousy and envy

To practice inner stop in the mind is like making oneself motionless in space. You are not noticed … In your mind you are surrounded by different I’s. Each wants you to believe you are it. Each wants to speak in your name. Suddenly they cannot find where you are.

—Maurice Nicoll

This last session with life conspired toward one major opportunity: observing my envy. If you are a Work student, then non-critical self-observation is a foundational pillar of your spiritual practice. You agree to watch yourself like a neutral passerby, and thus develop your inner witness as a primary means for self-knowledge. The practice requires you, eventually, to be honest with yourself. If you’re really looking, it’s inevitable you’ll start to uncover unsavory facts about yourself. Sometimes we can deny these facts for a long time with rationalization and self-justification. But if our Work is true, finally we’ll have to admit we’re riddled with all sorts of meanness and pettiness and negativity. Accepting our own ick is much harder to do within oneself than it is for other people - everyone in relationship with you has already accepted the way you are before you became conscious of it.

So anyway, I’m jealous. (In case you need a quick review, as I did while writing this, envy is defined as “the painful feeling of wanting what someone else has, like attributes or possessions,” and jealousy is the feeling of being “threatened, protective, or fearful of losing one’s position or situation to someone else.” I’m using the terms interchangeably because I observed both.)

Seeing my jealousy (and other repressed traits) is like riding in a glass-bottom boat where my unconscious is the ocean and my Witness is a character on the boat, trolling over the depths, peering in. All is well and quiet and pristine for about six seconds and then, ho!, we approach a gnarly reef-like monstrosity teeming with a host of strange sea creatures. This week, we dropped an anchor and took a lil dive.

I saw how much I compare myself to other women, even though I thought I’d grown out of that. I saw how exaggerated my impressions of others and myself can become when I’m perceiving from envy: they are the most beautiful/intelligent/graceful being on earth and I am Gollum. I saw the barrier my jealousy is to intimacy and friendship. I saw how painfully fragmented my energy and attention become when I am taken by envy. One Saturday afternoon we rode an actual boat out to the barrier islands off the Mississippi coast where I live. We had friends in town and the sun was shining and my children were armed with crab nets, body surfing and treasure hunting. Watermelon and PBJs abounded and rainbow-colored umbrellas dotted the beach; the scene idyllic in every way. Except that I squandered the wonder by constantly assessing other people’s bodies and measuring them against my own.

In the end, I wrote a message to my Work Partner that said: I am so tired of this bullshit. I want to feel profoundly free to be what I am and profoundly free to let others be what they are, sans any inner commentary, judgment, jealousy, or beauty contests.

I’m glad to grow tired of my own bullshit. The gift of self-observation is that it does not let me remain. When I observe the manifestations of my envy and look closely at how it steals my force and Presence and threatens my most precious relationships, I recognize my imprisonment and I wish for liberation, for myself and for all beings.

After texting my Work Partner, I picked up Madame de Salzmann and read her words, “I have an irresistible wish to be myself, free of all that weighs me down, all that makes me dependent. I wish the happiness of being entirely myself, without any reservation. I feel it is not to be sought outside myself, in someone or in something else. The only source of happiness is the fact of being, without expecting any profit or reward, just the revelation of what is.”

When I do the difficult work of paying attention through self-observation and I do not turn away, even from what I find loathsome in myself, my meanness and pettiness and negativity lose power and my wish to be increases. I realize that however humiliating it feels to admit the dominion of jealousy over me (when previously I had little concept of myself as a jealous person), seeing the jealousy inspires the longing to become free of it. Whatever it is we call the underlying Force of the Universe, God or Self, It is merciful to us in this way, refusing to leave us as we are so long as we too are working toward our transformation.

Envy and jealousy will continue to arise, but in my growing consciousness of it, I see that I have a choice. I can identify with the negative emotion, dissolving my attention and devolving my quality of Presence and risking the relationships I love most, or I can decide not to combine with it. I can practice Inner Stop: “You notice an encroaching negative ‘I’ or negative state and instead of trying to banish it you become silent and still inside yourself and therefore are invisible to it. You don’t talk to it or contend with it in any way, you simply stay still within yourself which will give you the time to proceed to the next movement… However, sometimes you will find the simple act of making inner stop will be all that’s necessary to free you” (Rebecca Nottingham).

My aim is still to stay present to myself, anchored in my center of gravity, above board.

☼

MAY WE SEE OURSELVES HONESTLY, WITHHOLD SELF-JUDGEMENT, AND REMAIN UNTAKEN BY THE UNSAVORY MANIFESTATIONS OF OUR UNCONSCIOUS. MAY WE BE FREE OF ALL THAT WEIGHS US DOWN, HAPPY WITH THE FACT OF BEING.

*Credit and gratitude to The Church of Conscious Harmony for supplying a host of Work-term definitions in this essay.