I woke up this morning, got online, and discovered a peer of mine was running a workshop well-received enough that people are flying in to take it. I could have been joyful for her success. Instead, in about five seconds, I spiraled into an old pattern of comparison that turned a happy morning into an ‘I’m not enough’ state of being.
Five seconds is not enough time to think. Whatever happened, happened below thought: a drop in the chest, a tightening across the shoulders, the particular sinking that arrives before any sentence does. The sentence comes second. By the time I had words for it, my body had already been there a while, waiting for me to catch up.
We all have our mental cancers that sneak in and take us by surprise, even after years of self-growth and mindfulness practice.
And the part that runs them is not trying to ruin my morning. It is doing something older than that. Somewhere it learned that measuring myself against other people was how I would know whether I was safe: whether I would be kept, chosen, allowed to stay. Comparison was its early-warning system. It is still running, all these years later, over a workshop that has nothing to do with me.
The practice of mindfulness in daily life is not aimed at a state of perfection. It is the pause that allows us to become compassionately aware of what is. The practice of Maitri (loving-kindness) is the softening that pulls us out of the poisoning story we feed ourselves, the ‘I’m not enough’ that is a knife to our soft and tender hearts.
So I pause. I send love and caring to my vulnerable ‘I am not enough’ part, and in doing so I let go of the comparison and the story. In entering into compassionate relationship with the ‘I’m not enough’, I expand my compassion to everyone else who carries one. In that expansion, I come to understand that it is not my ‘I’m not enough’ story. It is ours. I lose the ego illusion of isolation and experience myself connected to the wider experience of us.
I want to be careful not to make this sound tidy. Some mornings it does not take five minutes. Some mornings the part is louder than the practice, and I carry it most of a day before I notice I am carrying it. The practice is not that comparison stops arriving. It is that I recognize it sooner each time, and that when I turn toward it, I am no longer turning toward an enemy.
Mindfulness and Maitri soften us, let us live in a more loving space, and connect us to the Bigger Something of all conscious human beings. I practice to deepen my spirituality, but ultimately, I practice because it makes me feel better. I could have let those five seconds dictate my emotional state for the entire day. Instead, a few minutes later, I am solid and happy, and thoroughly thrilled for my peer’s success.
Continued in Comparing Ourselves To Others – part II, on the other side of comparison: the judgement that says I’m better than you.