Comparison Mind
Just for the record, I love my IBM Selectric and my Macbook Pro!
Comparing yourself to others can be like experiencing food poisoning.
You are living a unique life. There is no other life exactly like yours. Emotions, thoughts, feelings, loves, hates, experiences, dreams… these are all yours and yours alone. In your natural state, you are aligned with your sense of purpose and well-being. When you compare yourself to others, you are falling out of that alignment and trying to align with a unique path that is not yours which results in pain. It often feels horrible to compare yourself to others. This is because when you fall out of alignment with who you are and your own unique path, you then start believing yourself to be less than that other person, when in actuality, there is no less (or more) because that other person is on their own unique path which is very different than yours.
When we fall out of alignment with ourselves, we feel depressed, angry, low energy, insecure… a barrage of negative states of being that again, is not in alignment with who we really are.
It is akin to food poisoning. When our physical body ingests something toxic, within hours, our body reacts by feeling horrible. And then our body will try to extract that substance from any passageway it can. It’s not fun, it’s painful, and yet it is over relatively quick.
The same can be true when it comes to feeling awful after ingesting whatever it is that causes you to compare yourself to others! When you feel awful because you just saw something that triggered your comparison mind, it is a sign that something isn’t right and action is needed immediately. At that point you can treat it as your body would with food poisoning, extracting it out of every mental passage you can think of so that your mind can be healthy and feel good again.
When you remember and reflect on your own, special, unique path in life, it becomes clear that there is no comparison.
All of your experiences have helped you understand who you are and what you truly want in life. Lessons can be light and they can be brutal, but in the end, there is always opportunity for alignment, and there is strength in aligning. Extreme examples exist of those who have aligned with themselves even in the midst of brutality (for instance, here and here).
Another way to expel the toxicity of comparison mind is to take note what does create a sense of alignment for you. What do you love? What do you want to create more of in your life?
And finally, do you really want the same mind of that other person you are comparing yourself to? Do you want to think like they do, behave like they do, have every single aspect of their mind instead of your own? Sometimes that question will purge comparison mind immediately, because ultimately, we inherently know that we are here to grow and learn from our own unique experiencing, which can only be conceived in our own unique mind.
It is from your experiences that you derive knowledge about yourself and the world around you. Every challenge is an opportunity to either learn or celebrate what you have learned. And your particular cocktail of experiencing the world is yours alone. You can relate and empathize with others who have gone through what you have, good and bad… but the exact experiencing of life — it is all yours! So there truly can be no comparison to others when we are in alignment with who we are. Isn’t it great to know that when you feel the pain of comparing yourself, it can be just like food poisoning, it is temporary, and with a little conscious effort, you can expel it from your mind and come back to a healthy state of being.
Kellyjoy Kanaley
Creative Professional Integration Mentor