Joan is an attractive, educated teacher of third graders. Happy and content, she loves her husband, enjoys her work, and has great plans for herself. However, Joan suffered terribly from a delusion so common that we all can learn from her pain.
Joan suffered from the belief that she was her thoughts and that her thoughts were her. Joan’s mind created a false self, and then convinced her that it was the real deal.
Every year, when Joan visits her closest, dearest girlfriend, she is consumed with a jealously so overwhelming that her week is ruined. Joan’s friend is married to a NASCAR driver and lives in an exclusive part of Santa Barbara. Although Joan’s friend’s husband is not particularly attractive or kind to his wife, he is a great father and, according to Joan, “They have so much!” When asked what she means, Joan can only say helplessly, “They have so many…things!”
When she told me this, I was taken aback. Joan is not a superficial woman. She is in her late thirties, old enough and experienced enough to know the limitations of this approach to life. In fact, she knows it so well that she spends the two weeks prior to her visits getting ready by “telling myself how much I have to be grateful for” and how “things are just things.” She knows her suffering is silly, but she cannot seem to free herself from it.
We have all seen this so many times – maybe in ourselves, maybe in others. Envy is considered one of the seven deadly sins, but why does it exist at all?
They have been best friends since elementary school, when they were classmates together in the same middle-class neighborhood. They grew up together, and stayed together emotionally; but although they remain close, Joan describes their lives as having grown apart. She lifts her hands in a large V to show me the trajectory of their lives, ever more distant from each other.
“She moved on and I stayed there, in our hometown. I know it’s silly, and she’s still a great person, but I cannot stand to be in her beautiful home, with the swimming pool and all of those wonderful things that she owns. For two weeks before each visit I try to prepare myself, and for two weeks after each visit I try to repair myself, but the feeling just won’t go away. And I hate myself for it. I know I only have myself to blame for my feelings. There is so much I have to be grateful for…but the feelings eat me up inside!”
“Let them,” I suggested. “Stop fighting them. Don’t run. Don’t fight. Don’t struggle. Just look at them, the next time you get a chance. Where do those feelings exist?”
“Inside me. I can feel them in my body,” she said, grimacing as she passed her hand over her stomach and chest.
“These feelings are your friends,” I contradicted, “however much they appear to be the opposite. Treat them like your friends. Invite them in. In fact, welcome them. They’re trying to tell you something that you need to know.”
For the next few months, she did as I told her. She didn’t fight, run, or repress. Instead, she looked at those painful feelings and realized that they were only ideas in her mind, nothing more. If she left them alone, they went away on their own. By just being with them, she made friends with her mind and, through passive non-resistance, took away the power of these thoughts of jealousy.
No big news there…but then something extraordinary happened. Joan realized that it wasn’t actually her friend’s “things” that she coveted. Instead, those feelings masked something much more vital.
You see, Joan’s friend had a child – a baby boy. Joan and her husband had always planned to start a family together but they had put it off, over and over again, waiting for the “right time,” when life would be settled and stable and secure. But life is never totally settled and stable and secure, and Joan realized that it was her friend’s status as a mother that she truly envied. When Joan stepped away from the war that her mind had created within herself, she discovered a simple but primal truth: she wanted a child.
She became calmer, at peace with herself. From a genuine, deep, aligned place within herself, she brought up the issue with her husband, who himself had begun feeling that he was ready to move on to the next phase of their life together.
Joan’s false self was not her enemy. Had she declared war on herself, that’s all she would have had – a war in which one false self battled another over how things “should be.” One set of thoughts battling another set of thoughts. When she quieted down and then paid attention, Joan realized that she was not her thoughts but something deeper, richer and more profound than thoughts can ever be.
By simply being with her envy, by acting without resistance or contention, Joan had naturally grown into the place she needed to be in order to continue to evolve. Envy had helped her move from a false and petty self to the wonderful loving mother she was to become.