Competing on the Mat and Beyond

“A flower does not think of competing [with] the flower next to it. It just blooms.”  -Zen Shin

It’s Saturday morning, and you’ve had a long week.  You want to sleep in, but you decide to go to a yoga class instead.  You roll out your mat in the middle of the room, feeling pretty proud of yourself for making the decision to break a sweat (a well-deserved pat on the back, if I may say so…it is hard to leave the comfort of your bed when you don’t absolutely have to).

Then class starts.  Five minutes pass by and your body is just not having it today.  You’re starting to wonder if you made a terrible decision coming to class.  Meanwhile, the girl in front of you has voluntarily done 12 extra vinyasas without breaking a sweat.  She sinks deeply into yogi squats with little effort, as if her body is made of silly putty.  Behind her, you huff and puff your way down into those same yogi squats, except that coming even halfway down sends a wave of panic through your hips.  Something pops, and not in the way that feels good.  You can’t help but wonder – why is this so easy for her and not for me?

At this point, we have to learn to drop it.  Drop the story, drop the comparison.  Because the truth is, while girl in front of you may be super flexible, she probably struggles in other areas.  Correction –  she definitely struggles in other areas.  And while the goal is not to feel a smug sense of gladness out of the fact that she also struggles, the point is that she (or anyone, for that matter) does not deserve to be a model of perfection against which we hold ourselves up.

Comparisons like these, which make us feel bad about ourselves even when we are trying our very best, are toxic.  They do nothing for us except make us feel shameful for our efforts.  Our bodies are all different and every yogi comes from wildly different backgrounds.  Even if we have been practicing yoga for a decade, we may not have progressed as quickly as someone else who has been practicing for half as long.  It can feel discouraging and make you question your efforts.

But the beauty of yoga (and any activity that we value) is that we are truly only “competing” with the person we were yesterday.  We wake up, we put forth our best efforts, we go to bed, and we try again the next day.  Over time, this process adds up to tremendous progress in our own capabilities.  So as long as we are making progress ourselves, do we really need to shoulder the additional burden of “gaining” against others too?

That’s not to say that there is no place for comparison/competition in life.  We all know that having more experienced peers can challenge us to become stronger ourselves.  But this process is completely self-defeating if we treat these challenges as ways to prove our self-worth.  Because the truth is, we have absolutely nothing to prove.  We are already worthy, and there is nothing that can prove or disprove our worthiness – not a job, not a relationship, and especially not how much our hips scream at us in a yoga pose that we’ve been practicing for months.

 

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