Nothing to Envy

Recognize the abundance of life itself, and petty jealousies—even those you may not be aware of—will begin to melt away.

By Sally Kempton

The moment was a perfectly ordinary one in Pat's life. She and a friend were discussing their mutual acquaintance, Emily—a mother of two who manages a nonprofit while getting a master's degree in psychology. "You know she's totally ADD," Pat was saying. "She's living on Ritalin."

Then, Pat tells me, she actually heard herself, heard the tone of her own voice. "It was like I stepped outside myself and went, omigod, I'm badmouthing Emily because I'm literally ridden with envy. She makes me feel inadequate. I mean, I can barely handle one job and keep my marriage together, and she's juggling two jobs and two kids, plus she has a great husband who takes her to warm places every winter. Some part of me doesn't think that 's fair."

But there was more. "I have certain friends I criticize a lot," Pat admitted. "Almost all the time, what's behind the criticism is envy."

In the shadowy regions of the human psyche, where buried emotions fester and attack us from behind, envy often lives disguised, never quite showing its face, surfacing instead as a critical remark, the guilty pleasure at a friend's hard times, or a secret act of sabotage. When envy is particularly well hidden, we may not even be able to name it. We just find that certain people irritate us or "make" us feel we're lacking.

A young graphic designer says that she nearly ended a friendship with another woman because of an inexplicable feeling of annoyance. "Finally I realized that I just envied her. She has enough money so she doesn't have to work. She gets to do all these creative projects and go to yoga retreats, and when I was around her, I'd feel bad because I don't have that freedom. How screwed up is that? My friend is lucky and happy, so I want to end our friendship?"

Envy is hard to look at, hard to admit. So we often let it smolder unexplored until it erupts in a broken partnership or a family quarrel. No wonder it runs like a dark thread through so many sibling relationships, sits like a secret canker in friendships and professional associations, and has fueled literary plots from the Mahabharata to Othello to A Separate Peace. Perhaps it was discomfort with their own envious feelings that prompted the Greeks to project envy onto their gods, producing a mythology filled with stories of divine retribution directed at too-beautiful or too-talented mortals. No question about it: Envy hurts.

And, for me at least, envy is also pretty embarrassing. Anger can have a certain Kali-esque cachet. Desire could be re-framed as sheer appetite for life. But envy feels like a loser's emotion. It's especially shameful if you're a yogi—a person who is supposed to know better.

Because we want to keep it hidden, envy can be particularly difficult to deal with. If you're going to work with your own shadow issues, you first have to admit that you have them. How many of us are willing to cop to the heart-twisting feeling that pops up when a friend calls to tell you she's just received a fellowship, or the sense of injustice—the barely articulated Why him and not me? that clouds your first glimpse of your wealthy friend's fabulous new apartment? ("It's not about the money, " someone told me recently. "It's the beauty he has around him.")

Envy so often looks like something else—resentment, perhaps, or a sense of dissatisfaction with your own life, your own income, your own family. For many people, envy simply merges with an overall feeling of not being quite good enough.

Peer Review

So, if you want to uncover the envy in your psyche, you may have to sift through several layers of costumes. There are clues, of course: a compulsion to find fault with someone, the feeling of depression you experience in certain people's presence, or the whiny inner voice that says "Good things never happen for me!" when you hear of a friend's good luck. Perhaps surprisingly, that type of discouraged resignation often surfaces in spiritual groups, which is why some spiritual teachers ask their students not to discuss their meditation experiences: "Other people can feel bad when they hear you had some kind of inner breakthrough," a teacher of mine once explained. "And sometimes they get jealous and want to hurt you."

For all these reasons, I was intrigued by the strategy Pat found to work with her envy. "I did the normal stuff," she told me. "Substituting loving thoughts. Listing all the things I'm grateful for. But the main thing that shifted it for me was realizing that the people I envied were either people who had qualities I thought I was supposed to have and didn't, or else they were expressing potentials that I knew I had but didn't know how to bring out. And that last realization was huge for me." She began examining the people whose radiance or skill felt particularly galling to her. In every case, they were peers.

Maybe there's no one you envy. But if you did envy someone, you might notice this same interesting truth. I did. I'm not the least bit jealous of the president of Yale, because I'm not playing in his ballpark. Nor do I envy people whose greatness is so undeniable that I can only offer salutations. Those I envy are people just like me, whose quirks and failings I can see as clearly as my own, yet who somehow manage to express their talents in a way that I feel I should be able to do myself.

A writer friend of mine and teacher of Kabbalah who believes that all our shadow qualities are actually distortions of our soul's unique gifts, says, "The thing that really makes me jealous is when someone else writes a book I wanted to write. I'll see that person and say, 'That was a really good book. I'm so jealous I can't stand it!'"

My friend Wendy knows how to share her experiences so openly and honestly that people love to listen to her. Sometimes when I'd hear her regaling a group, making a mundane tale seem fascinating, I'd have to suppress a sour twinge of envy. One day I asked myself, "OK, which of my unexpressed gifts does she embody?" and realized that I envied and longed for her ability to speak simply and from the heart. When I began cultivating the energy in my own heart, my spiritual center of gravity shifted as well, and my words also came from a deeper connection with myself. Once I'd learned to follow Wendy's example, I stopped envying her.

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