What is Your Envy Telling You?
Pause to Ponder
Today is my last “Pause to Ponder” newsletter of the summer, but since people have been appreciating these short posts and I enjoy creating them, I plan on making them a regular offering, sprinkled between full-length blogs. I hope you had a great summer!
“I notice we are envious of people who are already doing what we are made to do. If we use our envy as a sort of an arrow pointing us toward our destiny, that is a beautiful thing.”
―Glennon Doyle
“A good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy. People don’t like to feel envy. They feel like it’s kind of like a taboo. They don’t want to feel that. They think that they’re a bad person for feeling that. But actually, envy is very instructive, because envy tells us something about desire. I always say to people: Follow your envy. It tells you what you want.
“So when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that’s a clue to what might be enjoyable for you. We are so hesitant to look at our desire. We don’t want to give space for desire. We’re so much about the shoulds, as opposed to the ‘What do I want? What does desire look like for me?’ We feel like it’s almost a selfish act…
“I think that there’s so much noise out there where sometimes people can’t hear themselves. So they conflate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want, what the culture tells them they should want, versus what they inherently want. And if what they inherently want goes against some of those culturally accepted things of what we should want—it’s very hard for them to even acknowledge that that’s something that they want.”
—From best-selling author and psychotherapist, Lori Gottlieb, interviewed by Arthur C. Brooks on his “How to Build a Life” podcast.
Take a Moment Micro-Meditation
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