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