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 Fix for Envy

Envy, like any other complex feeling you indulge in for a while, may have laid down enough tracks in your nervous system to have become a habitual tendency. Then it acts as a default setting—manifesting as a surge of agitation whenever you see someone who triggers that reaction.

Because envy is rooted in the feeling of lack or deficiency, the assumption that there's not enough to go around, its best antidotes will be practices that activate your own feelings of natural abundance. The process of getting free works faster if you engage it on several levels: the level of thought and imagination, the level of action, and the level of awareness.

When I decided to confront my own envy, I did it on a case-by-case basis, and each time I started with the same inquiry. I'd ask myself exactly what I envied in the other person. Then I'd work with one of the classical mind-training practices from Patanjali's Yoga Sutra: "Cultivating feelings of friendliness toward the happy," but with a twist.

Suppose I had been wishing I had someone else's intelligence or wit. I'd picture the person before me and send forth the wish that her brilliance would shine brighter. If someone's social gifts piqued me, I'd ask that her friends value her even more. Then I'd think of some of my own desires for myself: love, fulfilling work, recognition, enlightenment, mastery of a skill, a beautiful place to live, the boots I'd admired in a store window. And I would mentally offer each of these to the person I envied.

This practice works on several levels. First, it feels good in the moment and will often wipe out the unpleasant residue that envy creates in your own being. Second, it should improve your relationship to the person you've envied. I've noticed that when I offer inner gifts to others, it inspires a certain motherly fondness, as if I were personally responsible for making their lives better!

The third effect is more difficult to prove. But many people who practice this sort of active, specific well-wishing eventually notice that some of the gifts they've wished for other people begin to appear in their own lives. Another way to look at this is as an illustration of the karmic law that we get back what we give. I feel, however, that it comes from the fact that we are all, in essence, part of a single energy. The wishes we send out to others are ultimately being offered to ourselves—since in reality there is no other. So it makes sense that when we offer to others what we desire for ourselves, we attract those qualities into our lives.

Offer Your Help

Another envy antidote is one I learned from hearing about how my friend's guru helped him work through his envy. H. is a gifted and rather competitive teacher who played contact sports in high school and brings some of that intensity to his spiritual life. For many years, he and another man were the teaching stars of their spiritual community. During much of that time, H. kept a mental score card on which he totted up his own accomplishments and compared them to the other man's: "Two keynote addresses for him, one weekend workshop for me. A weeklong intensive for me, a weeklong intensive for him."

During one retreat, the guru appointed H.'s rival to give all the dharma talks. H. was doing his best not to feel bad about it, and succeeding only partially. Then, the guru called him in and told him that the other man's talks were not sufficiently inspiring or helpful.

She asked my friend to help his rival. She added, "I'm making you responsible for him."

H. could not have been more ambivalent. One part of him had been secretly hoping that the other man would fail. On the other hand, he is an ethical person with a strong sense of fairness and service.

He devoted the rest of that summer to helping the other man shine. By the end of it, he told me, he felt that the tendrils of many years of secret ill-wishing and hidden acts of sabotage had been pulled out of his subtle body.

Finally, the real secret to working with the envy gremlin is to acknowledge its right to exist. It sounds paradoxical to say that our shadow tendencies will begin to dissolve when we begin to accept them. But anyone who's ever worked with their inner Ugly Stepsisters knows that fighting them only seems to make those envious, angry, greedy parts of us push back. It works better to invite these inner demons to sit across the table and talk to us. "How could we forget those ancient myths...the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses?" wrote the poet Rilke. "...Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

For me, every deep transformation has begun with a moment when I embraced myself even in the presence of feelings that felt stunted and shameful. One way I've been able to do this is to hold on to the Tantric understanding about shadow energies, reminding myself that envy, anger, fear, greediness, are at bottom simply energies that have become contracted and fixed. Behind every inner block, every painful feeling, every surge of resentment, is a bit of life force waiting to be freed. You can start to see this once you stand back for a moment from the content of your shadow feelings.

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