When addressing the scarcity mindset, we are talking about what most people are experiencing in the world today. As we speak about that from the Vedic philosophy perspective, let’s keep in mind that it names ignorance as the root cause of suffering. Making the mistake of believing you are limited to the ever changing aspect of yourself that we call prakruti or matter.

Now, I know that telling someone to not feel fear, jealousy, envy, anger because there is no such thing as separation will not be helpful. Especially in the midst of the emotion. I would even go as far as saying it’s often this that becomes spiritual bypassing and that is really toxic. 

Just like telling someone that their “bad vibes” or “negative energy” is not good for you is also highly toxic.

When we feel envy, we are indeed imprisoned in a small version of who we truly are and we are focused on ourselves. But telling yourself that you are therefore being self absorbed is just going to make the feeling push deeper down inside of you. 

If you listened to the previous episode, you know that the underlying emotion here is shame. Starting to tell yourself that you are being petty and self absorbed is only going to make you feel worse. Not only are you feeling envious but you’re also in your own bubble. How bad can you get?

So please see that this is not the solution. 

Like the saying goes, whatever we resist, persists. So the first thing to do is to recognise that you are feeling it. Once that is done, it becomes far easier to see that it is not true (i’ll get to how in a minute) and that is the biggest step because it is actually using our own intellect in choosing to abandon the belief that we are not whole in ourselves.

But let me emphasise again : do not try to move faster than your experience. Our mind is very clever and will find all kinds of reasons and excuses. Don’t get on your high horses and feel righteous and start bypassing the envy by repeating spiritual quotes or truths to yourself. You will know that you do this when you start noticing just how much you judge yourself and others. That is a hint that you do not allow yourself to feel your envy. 

You have to see that your emotions are always a perfect reflection of what thoughts are going around in your head. So if you are feeling this, it means that you are telling yourself a story. One of scarcity, falling short, inadequacy and hopelessness. Let’s start with that.

When you can recognise that how you feel is linked to what thoughts you are thinking, you can also realise that those thoughts are not necessarily the truth but more so, a manifestation of the state of your mind. Understand the power of this realisation because it means that you have started to see the actual truth. And that truth is simple, you have heard it many times but it doesn’t mean that you have properly taken it in. And that truth is : you do not have to believe your thoughts. 

Once again, I am turning to the scriptures and the very well described work for this in the vedic philosophy. Because this understanding is basing itself on the logic that there is something in you that is permanent and something that is impermanent. And the suffering happens when you identify with the impermanent and believe it to be real. 

If you can learn to see the impermanence of your thoughts, you can also work on them. When you are feeling envy and jealousy, you are believing that there is a lack inside of you. That someone else has more than you or that something can easily be taken from you. The only way that either of these two fears would be true is if you are not levelling up in worthiness to your imagined competition. You are placing yourself lower on the measuring scale because you believe that you need to be different in order to be enough. There is a belief that you are comparable. If you are comparable, it means that you are not unique. But that is not the truth. Simply by the fact that your history can only be yours, is a proof of your uniqueness. 

So if you see this truth, then we can begin the work on also feeling it. Experiencing your uniqueness, experiencing your true nature. 

Have you ever listened to the narrative of someone else about their lack and thought to yourself “how come they can’t see what I see?”. You can see them more clearly than they can themselves. And that is because they are oblivious to their own true nature. There is the matter part which is physical body, thoughts, emotions, past experiences and the patterns they have created but all of that would still need to be lit up (literally) by the energy source that makes us all be alive. Two things are helpful to you here : the uniqueness that is the matter part of you but also the true nature, the part that never changes that makes it so that there can be no lack. It’s as if you, the eternal part of you, came here to experience expansion. To do so, you need to see the world as dual, as things having relationships to one another. This is why we experience duality and it is also why we are unique as a snowflake, each and one of us. If you are absolutely unique, it becomes impossible to compare you since there are too many variables. But beyond that, the eternal. You see, that part means that there is no lack and what that means on your personal level is that there is not end in what could potentially become. The reason you might not see your uniqueness as something valuable is because you are missing to put the endless possibility part in the equation. What is your life today, is a sum of all the past experiences and often we forget to see that many of them would have seem impossible before they came into our lives. From the moment we accept the uniqueness that is us at this time, we stop resisting what is and can begin to use that to our advantage in order to transform the eternal part, the energy that is always us into whatever we decide to focus on.