Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about how to trade jealousy for genuine joy for others happiness. So you've probably experienced how painful jealousy can be and how much it affects your mental wellbeing. And your feelings of envy don't necessarily diminish the happiness of those you're jealous of, but they certainly do diminish our own peace of mind. And I think, you know, what makes jealousy even harder is it's one of those experiences, it's one of those emotions that we don't really like to admit that we're having, we don't like to talk about it.

So it's often a really private experience. And sometimes quite frankly, we don't even want to admit it to ourselves, right? So jealousy takes many different forms. Competitiveness, resentment, envy, insecurity, feelings of unworthiness, or just ill-will towards another person. So I think what we often don't realize about jealousy is that a lot of it does flow from believing that we and our lives are not good enough just as we are. So it's a kind of feeling of less than.

So, for example, I've noticed that a bit of jealousy and insecurity rears up in me when I see social media and sometimes these achievements of people in my field who are doing really big talks or, you know, they've already written their books and I'm still working on mine. And in those moments, when I feel jealous, I use a tool that I learned from Buddhism called sympathetic joy. First, I actually just lean into the feeling of the emotion in my body. This allows me to stay present with my direct experience of the emotion instead of getting caught up in my head and in all the thoughts that keep fueling the jealousy. So this leaning into what I'm feeling also pulls me out of pretending I'm not feeling jealous.

And makes a space for the calm and compassion of mindfulness to kind of surround the jealousy. Then I switch my focus from the jealousy to deliberately cultivating happiness and appreciation for this person's good fortune. Mentally, I wish them really well. And I connect to the fact that deep down, I really do want others to be happy. So I take a moment to delight in the fact that they are, I don't want them to be sad.

I want them to do well. And then finally, I just take a moment to notice all the good fortune I already have in my own life. And I feel gratitude for it. So after doing this practice, I find myself filled with a sense of abundance and happiness for both of us. So instead of feeling lack, I feel abundance.

Instead of feeling less than or separation, I feel connection and joy. So in today's meditation, I'm going to guide you through a practice of sympathetic joy so you can really have a longer practice of this for yourself. But also just the next time you find yourself caught up in jealousy, see if you can lean into it, let yourself feel it, and then switch your focus to being happy for the abundance and beauty, not only in their life, but in your life too. So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us. And now let's settle in for today's meditation.