@jealousyorme

"Wouldn’t it be beautiful? To move past painful selfness so as to feel the joy of those around you? Then the sunshine on a flower‘s face would tickle your nose and the green leaf crunched by the beetle would make your belly warm and full. Practice mudita and you will see that self is other. No lines should be drawn between me and you, for we can only inter-be. Ask yourself: If there was no one here to witness, would “I” even exist?

Only jealousy is keeping me asleep. It pushes me to the edge of illusion, asking me to see your joy as an obstacle to my own. What if I want to be the source of your joy but you choose another over me? I can her my SELF breaking and I don’t like it.

Perhaps, if we understand what makes us feel jealous, we can learn to move past it and reach a state in which joy is infinitely interconnected and the self finally disappears."

"It's like a lemon and spoon race, where you hold a spoon in your mouth and balance a lemon while you walk to the finish line. Jealousy feels like the fear of dropping the lemon. Or that's another way to say it's some fear of losing something that I should hold on to. It's insecurity or isolation, it's a metallic taste in my mouth, maybe that's just the spoon.

I remember once feeling it all, like hot magma over my heart and telling myself "this is not me, this is not me"."

On blurred boundaries/ interconnectedness:

"There are instances, or flashes of something like blurring the lines. I remember walking down a trail, very much lost in my head, and just thinking how I am in ‘an always hug’, a constant embrace of earth and air and everything around me. Or sometimes, it’s outside of UHC, looking at the trees while waiting I cannot help but feel an awareness of everything as if I could feel the gravity of all things, no matter how small."

"I feel sympathetic joy a lot. As I became happier and happier with the years, I realized that joy for someone else’s joy is much more easily felt when we are happy ourselves. How could I feel bad for someone else’s happiness when it seems like goodness is infinite and your gain has nothing to do with my loss. Then joy becomes all-encompassing and you understand that someone not being happy doesn’t make you happier.” 

On feeling jealousy:

“When my belly is gray I know that jealousy managed to get a hold of me. I try to show her my teeth and gently ask her to leave me alone but, on some days, when I forget my own beauty, she still manages to curl up inside of me.”

“A friend of mine recently told me that she doesn’t feel jealous, she feels like she misjudged. That resonated deeply with me. I imagine that, if my partner cheated, I would not be hurt by the fact that they did but by the fact that I thought they were the kind of person who wouldn’t.”

On blurred boundaries/ interconnectedness:

“I feel the most interconnected when I am witnessing a musician be inside of their music. I stare at them and suddenly I feel (or imagine to feel) the depth of joy that they feel. When they play their guitar it’s as if the vibration of the strings becomes one with me, I feel as if I am being twanged. This feeling becomes intensified when I’m surrounded by people who move in unison. Then, I realize that we draw lines that aren’t there and we keep separate what truly is one. As I get goosebumps, the air and I merge and there is nothing left but beautiful sensation.”

On the sensation of jealousy:

"I feel jealousy right between my heart and stomach as a sharp weight pressing in towards my spine; there are subsidiary feelings that come along with it that I feel elsewhere in my body (anger flushing out through arms and up cheeks, sadness heavy around the eyes, skull, and lower stomach) which then make it into a full body experience depending on the specific way that the jealousy is playing out (openly expressed jealousy has a lot more anger around the extremities of the body, whereas hidden jealousy has to keep that shaking/burning feeling closer to the center, tending to make the actual jealous feeling even worse)."

On feeling joy for someone else’s joy:

"There is a difference between my feelings of joy for platonic and romantic relationships. In platonic relationships, I often feel pride of the cheering on and smiling sort. In romantic relationships, I feel a much calmer, softer sort of joy that seems to be carried along with my partner’s."

On feeling connected:

"The most recent times that I have felt connected to other people were when I would go with my friends on long walks where we would speak freely about their life, problems, needs, wants. Rarely during these times did I share about my own self, even feeling more disconnected when I did talk about a story from my own life."

On blurred boundaries/ interconnectedness:

"My freshman year of college, I had a very intense crush on a girl despite having hardly ever talked to her. The first time we hung out for a prolonged period alone, I went to kiss her on the cheek and she rejected me. […] I don’t know if it was immediately after this rejection, but a feeling certainly came out of it: I started to feel an intense love for every person around me. I felt as if there were an orange-gold warmth which filled every human being that I could almost see; I felt as if I could tangibly feel every person around me; I felt as if in love (in some higher sense than I can even now understand) with everyone that I saw […]. I miss it despite hardly ever having felt it. It was, briefly, my religion."

“The little bug is jealousy. Some days, jealousy hides in the space between my ribs and my liver. It creeps in like a sour taste that can’t be ignored as I wish I hadn’t seen what I saw. To me, jealousy is grey. Unlike red anger or blue sadness, jealousy feels lazy. There is nothing I can do to change the source and therefore all that is left is to let it go.

On other days, I ask those questions whose answers will make me jealous just so that I can feel.”

On the sensation of jealousy:

“To me, jealousy is a very general sense of uneasiness and discomfort, probably around the chest area.”

On the source of jealousy:

“The jealousy I usually feel is achievement oriented. I look at other people, and I have a certain impression of how they are living their lives, who they are and their successes and accomplishments. I know deep down that I don't know these people and don't know the kinds of problems they are going through. Still, at least I'm jealous of the image that I have of other people's lives, which I perceive to be better than mine."

On coping with jealousy:

“I don't really do anything actively to cope with it. I just let that feeling settle. I treat it the way that I usually treat any other sort of similar feelings. I tend to have a sort of internal monologue in which I get my emotional side to see there is no logic in these feelings of jealousy.”

On the sensation of jealousy:

"I feel it in my upper body, maybe in my chest-somewhere between my belly and my neck. It’s a difficult feeling to conjure. It’s strange, you can easily revisit anger but jealousy, I can’t imagine it."

On the source of jealousy:

"I understood what caused jealousy for me when I first started to explore non-monogamy. At first, when my relationship felt secure, I was very happy for my girlfriend whenever she told me that she was attracted to others. But, when the relationship became rocky and I didn't feel secure that's when I started to feel jealousy when she told me about other people. That was a new discovery for me, that jealousy appears when your needs aren't met. Now I think l that jealousy is not a bad emotion but a signal."

On feeling joy for someone else’s joy:

"I feel this a lot when my friends are happy—when a friend has a crush for example, I feel their excitement everywhere in my own body. I think polyamory is helping me with feeling this. It teaches me not to prescribe anything to love so that, when I love, I don't love people as friends or lovers with all the "shoulds" attached. It feels very limitless now when I love someone."

On the sensation of jealousy:

"I feel it in my stomach, it makes me feel weak. It’s like falling in a bad way. I‘m also realizing that I judge myself for feeling jealousy and that makes it hard to remember when I last felt it."

On feeling joy for other people‘s joy:

"I can't remember a time when I felt someone else's joy and it makes me sad. I think that’s because I currently am feeling disconnected from my own joy."

On blurred boundaries/ interconnectedness:

"I feel connected to others when I feel like I am heard and that I am hearing. Blurred lines makes me think of a question I was asked in class—Was there ever a time when your body wasn’t your own? To me, that question felt so dark. It made me think of being disempowered by sadness and feeling as though my body was too heavy. Another person responded saying that sometimes your body not being your own brings joy, when you are part of a collective. I always thought that we shouldn’t seek boundary dissolution with others so it was interesting to hear that you could also perceive it to be something beautiful."

"There was this time where I came close to blurred boundaries—it was when someone was very aware of my pleasure, it felt beautiful. It was with a person who took my hand and put it on a speaker so that I could feel the vibration of the music. It was so beautiful because that person had recognized the state of intensity I was in and was inviting me to take it to another 'dimension'."

On the sensation of jealousy:

"Jealousy feels like getting something stuck in my throat and like I need to cry a little bit. l also turn tense and try to hide the feeling as much as I can which makes me feel it in my jaw and perhaps my stomach too."

On the source of jealousy:

"Jealousy for me comes from insecurity and from a feeling that I'm not being prioritized, there is also the fear that the other person doesn’t love me enough, so underneath it there is the need for validation."

On overcoming jealousy:

"Practicing polyamory has affected how I think about jealousy because it confronts you with the feeling more so you lean how to self-soothe and to not put the responsibility on the other person."

On blurred boundaries/ interconnectedness:

"I feel most connected when I’m vulnerable and when I can share my feelings. For example, when I tell someone about my deafness and then they take it into consideration in their actions—that makes me feel connected. I also feel like boundaries between people become blurred when they have tough conversations about feelings."