What Goes Around

"Envy and jealousy stem from the fundamental inability to rejoice at someone else's happiness or success." Matthieu Ricard

For some reason, I wrote this quote down a few weeks ago. And sometime between then and now, I had a conversation with a friend about scarcity mentality. And then today, I found in my inbox a yoga article about envy. Coincidence? Probably not. It's been a blog post brewing in me.
I spent most of my childhood living with scarcity mentality - the fear that there wasn't enough love for me or that I wasn't good enough for the love that I needed. I operated from that place in many areas of my life, whether it be about friends, money, love, time...it all had this foundation of fear. Fear that there was not enough for me and everyone else. It made me jealous of people that had things I wanted, which makes it difficult to really be happy for the people you care about when they are living life. I was aware of these feelings, but I am not sure I could have articulated them or that I understood why I felt like that. Who knows, maybe I thought it was normal!
I remember the first time in my adult life when I recognized I felt truly happy with my life. It was the summer I got married. I remember sitting on the couch in our first home together, a little duplex on Yakima Avenue. I was looking out the window and the feeling washed over me....I don't wish my life is anyone else's. I had always looked at my friends' lives and wished mine was a little more like hers or his. It always seemed like the grass was greener in everyone else's yard. We had a BBQ that evening, I think it was my brother in law's birthday, which coincidentally was just a couple of days ago. There are pictures of me taken that evening and I look really happy, free.
I wish I could say that I stayed put in that space without envy for always. I didn't, of course. I have cycled through periods of envy, jealousy, a side of myself that I don't much like. I am very aware of those feelings when they arise and try to immediately shift my thinking to some other place. We attract what we think and so if I think not enough, I feel not enough. I get it. I do my best to fake it until I make it if I'm feeling one of those oh so unproductive emotions. Other times, I am keenly aware that I am not feeling envy or jealousy when something good happens to someone I know. Instead, those emotions are replaced by gratitude, celebration, genuine happiness for another. I'll tell you what, that feels much better than the alternative.
I guess in a way I feel like I've had to learn to choose the goodness, to sometimes reframe situations that might not feel very good. In the long run, though, I think what comes around goes around and not only am I much happier when I can celebrate the success of others, more goodness comes my way, too.