Here’s a sentence that you may have to read twice: “for most of my life I have been aware that when certain people have shared something good that has happened to them, I have felt disappointed – and when they have shared something bad that has happened to them, I have felt mildly elated.” My suggestion that you read this sentence twice is not because it’s a difficult sentence to understand, but more so because it’s difficult for most of us to admit.
I have had these feelings since the age of about 9 and can pinpoint the exact moment that my body first registered the physical stab in the gut that accompanies the jealousy that underpins these feelings. I was on holiday with the school and my classmates and I were walking down a country lane. My best friend and I had found out that we were both being considered for some kind of special acknowledgement – class captain or something similar – and when I looked up and saw my friend walking alongside our teacher I experienced a stabbing feeling in my gut accompanied by mild agitation. That stabbing sensation and accompanying agitation became so familiar to me that I simply incorporated them into my life; completely missing the point that it was my body’s way of drawing my attention to a choice that I was making that was neither loving nor harmonious… and I continued to miss the point for about the next 40 years!
Looking back, I have had a surprising level of awareness around these feelings of comparison and jealousy but my awareness was never enough to actually shift them. These feelings continued right up to my fiftieth birthday and if I’m totally honest, I still occasionally feel their murky hold.
Over the years my body has silently catalogued an inordinate amount of times that it has felt a very secretive part of itself skulking down behind its own eyes, holding its breath, whilst it waits to see if a friend is about to share something ‘good’ that was happening to them, or something ‘bad.’ If the friend shared something that wasn’t working in their life, then that hidden part of me would breathe a sigh of relief and launch itself into a charade of commiseration. However, if the news was jubilant then a crusty hardness would come over my body and my ‘congratulations’ would be pushed out from behind tight teeth.
What I knew about this behaviour was that these feelings usually arose with certain female friends and hardly ever with men: in fact, these feelings were always strongest with my closest female friends and my sister. Due to the fact that many of my competitive feelings seemed to be centred around women’s looks or their weight, I had always put them down to some kind of primal competitive behaviour, designed to ensure that women attracted the fittest mate.
By brushing off these feelings as ‘normal,’ I allowed them to play both a major and a crippling role in my life: they have interfered in my relationships, not only with others but also in my relationship with myself and interestingly, what I have now come to know is that it is from within my relationship with myself that these feelings were actually born.
As a direct result of my involvement with Universal Medicine and Serge Benhayon’s revelatory presentations, I have come to realise that what I brushed off as ‘normal female jealousy’ was not – it was in fact self-fury. What I took to be competitiveness around ‘looks and weight’ was not, – it was self-fury centred purely around the potential evolutionary power that I could feel in another. And the reason why this evolutionary power that I could feel in another made me so furious was because I have subjugated myself since the age of about 8.
I took my naturally joyous expansiveness and crammed it into an old shoebox and stuffed it under the bed of life. This I did through my own free will – it was a choice that I made to be less. Then, when in the company of women, who even so much as hinted at being their naturally amazing selves, I went into an internal rage (commonly known as jealousy), knowing that I had chosen to energetically kneecap myself since childhood.
By allowing myself the space to understand why I would choose to live in such a diminished way, I have come to understand that I was intent on avoiding the vile jealousy (self-fury) of other girls who had already made the choice to dim their natural light.
There is one sentence that I have cowered from my whole life, lest it should be hissed at me from the shadows, and that sentence is; “who the %#@! does she think she is?”
Having made the choice to reduce myself down to the same washed out version of me that everybody else had also chosen for themselves, I then perpetuated the cycle of abuse by inflicting the same force (jealousy) on other girls and women who had not yet chosen to energetically opt out.
As women we can blame all manner of things for keeping us out of our power, but the biggest factor by far is jealousy from within our own ranks. It has taken me years to remove the layers of protection that I have built up since childhood and to return to the essence of the stunningly beautiful girl that I was at the age of 8. Looking back, I can see that I was an unadulterated slice of life, an absolutely pure reflection of divinity and now, as I return to that exact same divinity, I am consciously choosing to not cower in the face of jealousy but to stay steady and to shine my light.
By Alexis Stewart, Disability support worker, Yoga teacher, Mum to a stunning boy and Partner of a beautiful man, Sydney, Australia
Related Reading:
Comparison and Competition between Women
Jealousy: Foe or Friend?
The Beauty of Loving Women. Women Loving and Honouring Women is a Lost Art
The Truth about Serge Benhayon 
Beautiful to read this and that you are now claiming it Alexis, ‘It has taken me years to remove the layers of protection that I have built up since childhood and to return to the essence of the stunningly beautiful girl that I was at the age of 8.’
How amazing will life be when we all celebrate and are joyful because of how awesome another is.
Thank you for putting the spotlight on this evil. The poison of which is so destructive to ourselves and others. I have to realise this to build the focus and clarity about wanting to have absolutely nothing to do with it anymore and therefore to be willing to see when it spikes its way into my life at any moment.
“I took my naturally joyous expansiveness and crammed it into an old shoebox and stuffed it under the bed of life. This I did through my own free will – it was a choice that I made to be less.” That’s a powerful realisation that we ourselves both have the power to separate or reconnect back to our essence. A great reminder for me today Alexis to practise this power. Even though we can hold understanding as to why we made the choice to separate from ourselves, that choice is still completely ours, as it is to come back to who we are.
For the ‘shoebox under the bed’ read ‘buried and shut down within us’. It is always still there, ready for re-ignition, and nothing can ever take it away.
Comparison is a complete copout, that like jealousy and exhilaration keep us from our Essences, Inner-most-hearts / Souls and it can also be said that any eagerness, exuberance, excitement or enthusiasm plays the same game at the other end of the scale. And as you have shared Alexis, returning to our natural Joy by realigning to our Souls is the greatest evolutionary step we could make.
See life through the other end of the scale did little for my evolution until the presentation of Serge Benhayon highlighted and then took the proverbial scalpel, which revealed how my overzealousness for life was as encumbering to our evolution as every lie that has been feed to us by our conniving spirit.
Why do we find it normal to have emotions that seperate us from each other from young. Raising children comes with the responsibility to clear out any jealousy, comparison or competition siblings may have towards each other in order to bring out their own qualities and understanding that we all bring a unique part of the whole and that we cannot do it on our own.
Sure but if we’re unaware of our own unique qualities then we’re not going to be able to teach a child to focus on theirs, we’re going to do what most parents do wihich is to encourage and reward competition.
True Alexis, to heal whatever is there and appreciate what we bring is always the first step before we can parent anyone.
True Annelies but we all try and parent before we’ve addressed the things within us that are painful and so without realising it we parent in a way that is wounded and so our parenting puts constraints on our kids rather than providing a platform from which they can truly fly.
Our lived wisdom speaks loader than words and set natural boundaries that shares the Livingness of who we are, and therefore the rewards from heaven are those that are needed for everyone’s evolution.
I really appreciate what you are sharing here Annelies that children have such unique qualities of their own that should be encouraged so that it weakens the strangle hold of comparison and jealousy so that it is completely killed off altogether . This would be a huge kick start for children to be sure of themselves so that when they enter education they are more equipped to deal with the onslaught of society that is in such compassion and jealousy it’s like a heavy cloak we have wrapped ourselves in.
Jealousy and comparison blind us to the truth. In truth we are all equally delicate and beautiful when we choose to re-connect to who we innately are.
Alexis I always enjoy reading your blogs because you deal with those parts of our behaviour that we would rather no one knew about so I love your honesty to get real about how we relate to ourselves and others so that we can give ourselves a stop moment to consider how we cope with life or even do we cope with life or do we dull ourselves down so much that we live our lives on auto pilot which is not living but existing.
Crazy how we all like to hold each other back, I don’t think as society we are aware of how ingrained this unhealthy harmful behaviour is.
Jealousy does confirm our equality though, because when we feel jealousy we are furious at not taking the same steps someone else has, steps that we know we were / are capable of also taking.
Jealousy and comparison is not something we so readily want to admit so I love your honesty here Alexis asking all to do the same, for if we bring this to the forefront rather than pretending it is not there then there is far more of a chance of clearing this from the body and never allowing it again. As both destroy the body from within. From my experience if I am jealous or comparing myself with another then I am very much missing looking at the finer detail or appreciating what is going on in my life. For if I am jealous or comparing then this is definitely looking outside of myself and not within. Lately I feel my life should be that of one in a swimming pool, googles on head down and focus on what is going on with me, what are my movements instead of everyone else’s!
There is always something there for us to see – a reflection coming back at us to learn from.
I agree Ariana which means that evolution is always on offer, constantly.
I love and admire the incredible honesty in your first sentence, honesty which once shared has the power to open the doorway to healing what it is that is waiting to be healed. And for you it was the opportunity to drag that joy-filled shoe box out from under the bed so once again you have all that you need to shine your glorious light as a woman.
We tend to normalise far too much in our lives which means we don’t have to look more closely at our behaviours and see how insidiously harmful they are…nor do anything to change them..how ridiculously irresponsible can we be!
Oh we can be ridiculously irresponsible, in fact we’ve perfected it to a fine art and integrated it into every aspect of our lives. Which as you so rightly say Elaine has then normalised it to such an extent that we don’t even notice that that is what we’ve done.
This is really interesting; ‘ in the company of women, who even so much as hinted at being their naturally amazing selves, I went into an internal rage (commonly known as jealousy), knowing that I had chosen to energetically kneecap myself since childhood.’ I love your honesty, it is really supportive for me to be honest when I feel jealous of someone and to ponder on what I have and have not chosen in my life that create this feeling of jealousy.
Gutsy honest writing exposing jealousy. Nice one. What you talk about happens ALL the time but how often do people admit to it. Thank you.
“As women we can blame all manner of things for keeping us out of our power, but the biggest factor by far is jealousy from within our own ranks.” How honouring and beautiful it would be if we were to celebrate each other for simply being who we are rather than being jealous.
I can feel that I also took my “naturally joyous expansiveness and crammed it into an old shoebox and stuffed it under the bed of life”. And looking around me as a child I could see that most around me had done the same, so it appeared to be the normal thing to do. But there is nothing normal about hiding the amazing beings we are, it’s hard work, it’s exhausting and the world misses out. Time to crawl out from under the bed, dust ourselves off and live the amazing life that we are naturally born to live.
We are the expansiveness of life, it’s time that we let ourselves expand.
If we choose to not see and be aware of the reflection before us we are at the mercy of contracting and diminishing our light. The power within is there to be claimed and held regardless of what is there that tries to bring it down.
Thanks Caroline, I really appreciated your comment, I had forgotten about the simplicity and practicality of receiving whatever is in front of me, and responding or healing whatever comes up by making sure I allow myself to register it in full consciously and work with it.