The Doorway of Jealousy: A Pointer to Our Dormant Aliveness: Working with the Vasana of Jealousy
Note: This is part of the series on Vasanas and frequencies coming out of classical shaivist tantra and tamil siddhant. If you’re just joining in this series, see the last 3 posts for the basics. All Love, Christine
The other day, one of my students told me she’s “crazy jealous” of her girlfriend. Any time another woman comes near, she spirals. She finds herself stalking their social media profiles, scrolling through photos, reading captions, measuring herself against what she sees. She knows it’s exhausting. She knows it doesn’t help. What to do?
Jealousy arises from seeing the world thorugh a lens of scarcity. When my student sees another woman near her girlfriend, she’s not just seeing a person, she’s seeing a threat. Beneath the surface, an unhelpful script starts to run: She has something I don’t. There’s not enough love, not enough beauty, not enough worthiness to go around. In this worldview, someone else’s light becomes evidence of my lack. (Side note: I am discerning here between mistrust and jealousy- it’s a fine line to notice what is alive and in what combination. For this essay, we are assuming a trustworthy partner, along with an inward feeling of jealousy).
We can feel jealousy in the body. Most people in my courses report it as fire, as a sensation of high alert. The chest tightens. The breath shortens. The muscles clench. The field contracts. It’s a literal shrinking of your energetic presence. When jealousy takes hold, you stop inhabiting your full field. You collapse inward, into a fortress of comparison.
And there’s a deeper trap: if we mistake this contraction for who we are, if we say, “I am jealous,” instead of “Jealousy is moving through me” or “A scarcity pattern is active in my field.” then we fuse with the jealousy and its story becomes the only story. The comparing mind takes over. We gather evidence: her smile, her ease, her success. Each piece confirms the subliminal narrative: I am diminished by her existence.
And here’s where it gets subtler: lack has a frequency. Whether you think of it as the brain’s reticular activating system tuning itself to find confirming evidence, or as Tantra’s view that your field vibrates in resonance with the stories you inhabit, the result is the same. The more you look through jealous eyes, the more lack you see. Your internal algorithm learns what you’re searching for. Your girlfriend laughs with someone else? Proof. She doesn’t text back immediately? Proof. The other woman is beautiful? Proof.
The vibration of lack calls forth the experience of lack.
And so we get caught in a loop. The jealousy tells us we’re insufficient, so we contract. The contraction fuses us with the jealousy. The fusion tunes us to the frequency of lack. And that frequency shapes our perception so we see even more lack. Round and round it goes.
Until we notice. The shift begins the moment you stop being jealousy and start witnessing it. This is subtle. You’re scrolling, comparing, shrinking — and then, just for a breath, you catch yourself. “Oh. There’s jealousy. There’s the comparing mind. There’s the story of lack.” The contraction may still be there, but you’re no longer inside it. It’s a weather system passing through, not the truth of who you are.
Once you have that space, you can ask a more interesting question, such as what is this jealousy pointing to?
Of course, it’s not truly about the other person. When my student feels that spike seeing another woman near her girlfriend, when she scrolls, she’s actually seeing something beautiful. Something radiant. Something she longs for. The jealousy might say, “She has it and you don’t.” But underneath that story is a deeper recognition: I want to feel that alive. I want to be that free. I want to inhabit that much light. Jealousy is showing her what wants to wake up in herself.
But you can’t reach that aliveness by grasping. You can’t take it, compete for it, or make it yours. This kind of zero-sum logic is the problem. As long as you stay inside that game, you keep feeding the frequency of lack.
The alternative is to bless it.
When you bless what you see in another… their light, their joy, their radiance… you are doing something powerful: you’re opening your field to it instead of contracting against it. You’re saying yes to beauty, even when it’s not “yours.” Especially when it’s not yours.
Blessing is meeting the beauty without trying to own it, control it, or make it about you. You see the light in another and instead of shrinking (“I don’t have that”), you recognize it (“Yes. That. More of that in the world!”).
And something happens: your own field strengthens. Not because you’ve taken anything, but because you’ve stopped collapsing into comparison. You’ve stepped out of the zero-sum story. When you bless another woman’s beauty, you’re no longer in competition with it. When you bless your partner’s joy, you’re no longer threatened by it. You remember that light does not diminish light. There is no scarcity in aliveness itself.
The practice is simple, though not easy. When jealousy arises, name it: “There’s contraction. There’s the story of lack.” Then, as an experiment, bless what you see. Open your field. Say yes to the beauty that triggered you. “May she be radiant. May she be free. May there be more of this in the world.” At first it might feel awkward or false. The jealousy may still be there, insisting on its story. But you’re not trying to erase jealousy; you accept it and then you practice a new frequency. You’re teaching yourself to open instead of close. And over time, something will shift, I guarantee you.
Jealousy isn’t really protecting your partner’s love, it’s protecting your sense of worth. It believes that if someone else shines, you dim. That if your girlfriend delights in another woman’s presence, it means you’re lacking or under threat. The stalking, the vigilance, the comparing… it’s all circling one question: Am I enough?
Inside the zero-sum game, that question has no satisfying answer. There will always be someone more beautiful, more accomplished, more at ease. The comparing mind will always find evidence of lack. As long as you’re measuring yourself against others, you’re living in scarcity, and scarcity has no bottom.
The way out is to stop playing this game.
Someone else’s radiance doesn’t eclipse your own. There is no competition for light.
This simple radical idea invites us to meet beauty without grasping. To let joy be joy. To know that the love you can secure or the comparisons you can win, is nothing compared to the joy of opening to the deep magical field of reality where everything has its place.
If we hold it well, jealousy will show us what we long for, and reveal dormant beauty and unlived aliveness.
Bless what you see. Bless it as if it were already your own.
