Master the green monster

Virat Chirania            

The first thing to learn to deal with negative emotions like jealousy is to accept their existence. Let’s not feel guilty or make others feel guilty about feeling these negative emotions. Accept that these emotions exist and naturally come up from time to time and instead of worrying about why you get so many negative emotions, put your effort in trying to come up with a solution. 

Nothing lasts

Another way to make you realise how pointless jealousy is to realise the impermanence of people you are feeling jealous of. To feel happiness in the progress of other people is evolution. And it’s worth cultivating this sense of happiness for other people’s progress and contentment for your own. Would you like your friends feeling jealous of your progress? No. If you are ahead in the race, you would like others to feel happy for you and appreciate your hard work. Then let’s do the same to others. Know that the person you feel envious from has done some good karma in the past and is now reaping the benefits of it. Take that as an inspiration to do good karma in this moment. Sometimes you could be on the receiving side of jealousy from others. Just ignore them and move on. Remember situations can change any time so don’t be arrogant or over-confident. 

Work on self worth

Jealousy comes from a sense of lack; the idea that I have less and someone else has more.  The best thing to do whenever jealousy takes over you is to immediately count how much you have been given in your life. This makes you feel grateful and a sense of gratitude will overpower the feeling of jealousy very effectively. 

If  at all you have to feel jealous, let that jealousy serve as a positive motivation to do more meaningful endeavors with your talents and time. God has created this world with infinite uniqueness and although similarities appear on the surface, in essence no two people are alike. So comparing yourself to someone else is anyway not a very wise way of looking at your life. If at all we have to compare, let’s compare ourselves with our own selves and strive to be a better version of ourselves. 

— The writer is a TEDx speaker