Does Meditation Help With Jealousy?

Meditation helps us better manage our emotions, and when it comes to jealousy, it’s no exception. At times, jealousy can be useful for us, and I’ll go into why later.

If you are experiencing any emotion during meditation, allow yourself to experience the emotion to ultimately let go of it. Anything can come up during your session and you should be ready to respond with full acceptance if you want to move on from said emotion.

Sometimes, said emotion amplifies, but over time, the more you shine a light on it, the more indifferent you condition yourself to be against that emotion.

If you consider yourself a jealous person, don’t be ashamed. At its core, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to protect what you cling on to.

If we’re talking about relationships, understand that you have no control over the other person, and that person can choose to go their own way at any moment, regardless of the promises they made.

It hurts, it’s part of life, and over time, you learn to become stronger from it. Regardless of whether you meditate or not. Meditation can speed up the process though. 

Now, jealousy is a broad term, and can also be applied if you are jealous that someone has something that you don’t. That’s the kind of jealousy that you don’t want to keep around since it only sets you back.

I’ll address both jealousness respectively and how you can manage them with meditation. At the end of the day, you should always trust your intuition but these tips might resonate with your situation.

Having an Abundance Mindset

Meditation can make someone go from having a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. The latter is what allows you to be free, detach any expectation from any outcome, and allows you to be present. 

Scarcity often stems from the past or even the future, in the form of anxiously not knowing what’s about to come or dwelling on something you can’t change, which is the past. 

The moment you shift your attention to the present, and keep it there, the easier it becomes to stay in an abundant mindset and be better prepared for whatever life throws at you. 

Things outside your control will happen regardless, but the less reactive you are to said things, and the more you focus on what you can control, the more you start losing fear. 

At some point, you have to put yourself through some fear, and this will often happen during meditation when you are experiencing some sort of discomfort that resembles something you want to escape from. 

If you learn to endure these inevitable roadblocks,  the aftermath will often be an abundant mindset. At that point, you’ve already been through so much, you’ll have a ticker skin, and by extension, you might notice improvements when it comes to jealousy. 

The more you think in terms of abundance, the less jealousy affects you. If you’ve never experienced it, it might seem like a far cry, but meditation does open up a new reality for you where you can thrive and become your best self, and that might imply a significant reduction in jealous feelings.

Embracing Jealousy

You won’t be doing yourself a favor if you try to fight jealousy, rather than embracing it. As the old saying goes, that which you resist will often persist, and if you allow your jealousy to be, and accept it, it will just be another emotion you can take a step back and analyze. 

Is jealousy serving you a purpose or subtracting from your quality of life? The more you ask yourself questions along these lines and seek understanding, as opposed to judgment, the more likely you are to find the source of that jealousy. 

It might be subconscious, which meditation can help you deal with, or might be related to something that’s happening right now. But in either case, don’t run away from the emotion, at some point, many feel jealous but it’s for different reasons. 

There’s no need to suppress that part of you without understanding why it’s happening, then, once you learn more about what’s causing it, and embrace that jealousy, the less of an effect it will have over you. 

Comparing Yourself To Others

This is what I touched on, and what often is something we want to get rid of when we talk about jealousy. 

But in one way or another, we will always compare ourselves to others. You can do that comparison in a good way or a bad way. ^(Source) 

For instance, a good type of jealousy would be if someone has something you don’t have, and rather than thinking it’s too far-fetched for you to achieve, you understand that you can do, or achieve the same. 

Use the comparison to others in a good way, meditation, after all, helps you let go of a large portion of that ego part of you that’s making that comparison, and making you feel like you lack something. That’s why it also helps to complement this with an abundance mindset. 

The type of jealousy to get rid of is the one that puts you down and makes you feel like you can’t achieve the same thing you are jealous of others for. That’s something meditation will help you overcome. 

But going back to the ego aspect, meditation can make you less ambitious, or at the very least, less outcome-dependent. You’ll want to balance that out so that you can remain outcome-detached but still committed to achieving your goals. 

Now, while meditation might not make you directly achieve material goals you might’ve set for yourself, it can help you in indirect ways by becoming a better performer at those habits that are meant to put you closer to your goal. Meditation, after all, can serve as a form of a magnifier. 

You are on your path and after all, you are more in competition with yourself than anyone else, just because it took you longer to achieve something, doesn’t mean you failed. 

Intuitive Jealousness

Jealousness can stem from a gut feeling, telling you something is off. After all, consistent meditation can make you more intuitive, which can help you in differentiating which jealousness serves a purpose and which jealousness is warranted. 

Sometimes, you just have to accept that jealousy is a part of you and it might not go away just like that, from meditation. 

While the practice of meditation is very useful in several aspects of our lives, it’s not the end-all-be-all, answer to everything, it’s one means by which we can submerge ourselves in a deeper spiritual journey to know ourselves. 

I’m gonna be playing devil’s advocate in this case, and say that jealousy might be something you have to accept in yourself. Assuming it doesn’t worsen your quality of life and it’s mild. 

If others don’t accept you for who you are, be it a partner, or certain friends, and you have a type of jealousy you know is warranted, then it could be a sign that it’d be time to reevaluate those relationships, especially if they are guilt tripping you for a completely normal response, which many choose to paint in a negative light.  

The answer is of course not as white and black as you might expect, but never let that jealousness stem from a place of scarcity. 

The jealousy I’m talking about assumes you’ve already evaluated it through a logical process, taken a step back, and based on that, found a valid reason for said jealousness to be present. 

If someone is consistently making you jealous, you aren’t always the problem, and it might just be a form of boundary that you set.