Green-eyed-monster as teacher...

So I noticed I was starting to feel envious and irritated with my friend because her facebook posts were always expressing how joyful, successful, and beautiful she felt. After sitting with these feelings and not liking them very much, I decided to refocus on myself, to see what these feelings of envy and irritation were trying to communicate to me. It seemed everything I read that my friend wrote began illuminating my own gnawing self-doubts and challenges to feeling joyful, successful, and beautiful. This was about my own self-imposed limits, and not about her. Thankfully she was the catalyst that begged me to look deeper within myself. I could have dwelled on my irritation and envy, and come up with a whole host of justifications for feeling that way, continuing to blame her for being her, and neglecting an issue within myself that clearly needed my loving attention. And instead of using this as an excuse to feel bad about myself, by judging myself for having those feelings of envy and irritation, as we all tend to do sometimes, I used it as intel that I needed to give myself more love and more faith. I needed to embrace my own own joy, success, and beauty. We can go deeper into our darker feelings that often lurk in the shadows of our awareness to illuminate areas within ourselves that are in need of our caring attention, and let go of trying to be anyone other than ourselves.