Latest / Soul Salon with Ayandastood / 49: comparison is (not) the thief of joy

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49: comparison is (not) the thief of joy · Soul Salon with Ayandastood

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If you have heard the words, comparison is the thief of joy, and something as always
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felt a little bit off about this advice, to simply not compare yourself to other people
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when we are part of a shared world and a shared collective experience, or if these words
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have actually really resonated with you, but you're always open to a different perspective,
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then this sole session, this episode in other words, is for you.
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Hello, soul sibling, hello sunshine, hello divine and magical being.
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Welcome, or welcome back to the soul salon, a soulful place for the dreamers, for the
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vealers, for the healers of all kinds.
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I want to welcome you and say I am so grateful.
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This conversation is one that comes up for me very often.
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We've all felt the pain of comparing ourselves to other people, whether that be people
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whose lifestyles, or beauty, or relationship, or career, that we have felt a deep envy
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for, a deep unworthiness towards ourselves for.
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We've also compared ourselves because we're taught to put romantic love on a pedestal,
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or the ageist milestones that we're supposed to reach.
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We're taught to want to progress with our peer group, and so when we start to deviate
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from each other, it's like, wait, what is going on?
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Especially with the people who are really intimately woven in our social world, there's
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the sense that, okay, we were on the same path, we went to the same schools or whatever
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it was, and then what happened suddenly you're there, I'm here.
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Often the idea is you should be happy for your friends, and I totally think this is true
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in many ways, and at the same time it kind of erases some of the deeper pain that happens
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in this feeling of jealousy and envy and social comparison, that I don't think is in any
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way malicious, like if someone's friend gets engaged and they feel jealous, that doesn't
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make them a bad friend in my mind unless they act on that jealousy in a malicious way.
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But if they can sit with that jealousy and say, well, you know, I'm feeling jealous of
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my friend for this milestone, and that this jealousy is not purely my own.
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This jealousy is the culture that I've grown up in, it is my conditioning, it is the fact
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that we are taught to think of each other as competitors rather than collaborators.
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This comparison and this jealousy is really a product of the environment that I've grown
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up in, so long as I choose to respond to it with love, not only for myself, but also
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for this person and not be harmful towards them in any way and still express love and
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support towards them, I think that that is not in any way to me, something that we should
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be made to feel shame around.
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We are taught to envy the same things that reproduce the social order.
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Think about it, wealth, beauty, consumption, nuclear family, social dominance, and a capitalist,
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supremacist, eco genocidal definition of success.
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And I think the problem with comparison is that it's often very much experienced as deeply
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shameful.
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So it's not just the fact that we're looking around and saying, am I doing well enough,
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am I beautiful enough, am I whatever enough, it's that we also then feel shame for the
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fact that we don't feel good enough.
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And there's not a lot of collective space to hold this shame and hold this emotion together.
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So we're left experiencing it in isolation.
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It's very difficult to have conversations around the feeling of comparison.
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It's difficult to admit and to say even the words to use your body and your mouth to
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say the words, I'm jealous of them, I'm jealous of her, you know, I'm really feeling
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not good enough because of the success I see this person having.
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And again, that success is shaped by this capitalist and hierarchical and elitist understanding
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of what success even means and looks like and indeed that it could look like something
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at all.
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So I think there are very few collective opportunities that we can sit with this feeling.
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We turn to people online to help us sit with this emotion and help us make sense of it.
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And my issue is that in response, I fear that the response to this idea that we're all
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comparing ourselves to each other and it feels really painful is actually its own kind
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of individualistic logic.
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So comparison I think as a phenomenon is rooted in individualism, not on a personal
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level.
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Like I'm not saying when you compare yourself to someone else you're being individualistic,
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I think on a cultural level it's shaped by an individualistic paradigm.
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When we are living more egalitarian lives that are rooted in shared resources, we share
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the hunt, we share the water, there's enough to go around.
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When we have a culture that's deeply rooted in some relationship with some sense of the
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divine, something bigger than us and with nature and with each other.
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And that is a deep value system of the community that we are raised in.
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I think when we have all these factors, when we are taught to see beauty as something that
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we access through nature and through the divine and through collective dancing and rituals
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and healing practices, when that is our understanding of what beauty is and when that is our understanding
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of what we are all here to co-create, I think there's just so much less room for comparison.
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So I fear that the response of telling people, don't compare yourself to others, you're
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on your own journey.
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And I've said these words and I think it's coming from a really loving place.
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I'm not criticizing the people who say this, I don't think that they're somehow trying
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to promote individualism.
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I understand so much that this is coming from this idea of it's easy to look around
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and feel I'm unworthy, but what we really should be doing is looking inward, looking towards
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ourselves and thinking, what am I trying to accomplish, what do I value, what am I doing
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so that I'm on my own journey, I'm on my own timeline.
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And at the same time that I can hold this view with love, I also think we need to ask ourselves,
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why the fuck am I on my own journey?
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Why am I on my own journey?
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We just take that for granted, like that's meant to be soothing and I think it's really
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interesting because we've been taught to find refuge in our very isolation.
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Oh, don't worry about what other people are doing, just focus on yourself, you're on
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your own path.
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But then I ask you, and if you think of the metaphor of being on a path, why are we on
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our own path?
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It's such an individualistic understanding of what we are here to do as alive and conscious
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and loving and intentional beings.
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That the idea purpose of all of this is for you to go off on your own, there's a lot
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of videos about how you should disappear for six months and reemerge as you were always
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meant to be.
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You know what I mean?
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And it's like, why are we romanticizing how deeply isolated from each other and from
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a higher sense of meaning we all have been made to be?
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There's a beautiful quote by a philosopher who I am obsessed with named Bioacomolafe.
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He literally blows my mind, he's Nigerian, he's a contemporary philosopher that I feel
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so excited and thrilled by and just grateful exists.
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I don't believe abandonment is possible in an entangled universe.
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I believe we're all connected even beyond the things that we say we believe, lives do
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not turn on the cognitive perception or the cognitive convenience of believing that we
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are enraptured and indebted and trained with and entangled with forces that are larger
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than these ideas of what you believe and what I believe.
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Something that he says is sometimes the way we respond to the crisis is the crisis.
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Sometimes the ways that we respond to the critical events around us only becomes a resuscitation
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of those problems.
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Then we're in a very unique place.
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You know, we might tell ourselves for instance that the thing to do now is to persist, that
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climate chaos is a thing.
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And if it's a thing, then we should do our very best to save the planet.
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And how do we do this?
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We reduce carbon emissions.
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How do we reduce carbon emissions?
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We kind of motivate ourselves to do so and we put in a lot of money and ads and political
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currency in trying to educate people about the facts and also to motivate them to be good
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conscientious folks.
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But then a broader look would invite us to notice that turning off the lights doesn't quite
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do as much as we think it does or sending your neatly discarded trash to a green emerald
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city where it is hopefully recycled and sent back to you as a green product.
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Sometimes it quite worked the way you think it does.
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So sustainability and those ideas while idealized and maybe possibly laudable actually work
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as waste colonialism and racialized capitalism and extractivism.
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So they're doing the very opposite of what they claim to be doing beneath the surface
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of our righteousness.
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He's talking about this at a very large scale so you can go and look at his work.
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What I want to talk about with respect to this conversation is by saying I know this
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comparison is painful but you're on your own journey.
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I think that is also a crisis.
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I think that is a crisis of alienation and I want to read you a quote from Gabor Mace's
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work, the myth of normal where he's really showing us the importance of thinking collectively,
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thinking communally and the crises that emerge when we think in individualistic ways.
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If you have a bunch of plants going in the garden and his plants were not developing
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the way they should if they were start behaving or manifesting in ways that are path
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logical that doesn't further their growth that doesn't ensure that they have the longest
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possible lifespan that stunts their development somehow.
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If you were a gardener what would you do?
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Well you have to ask yourself what is the nature of these plants and what conditions does
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the nature of the plant demand for healthy development?
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And I'm suggesting that rather than looking to diagnose diseases or conditions or behaviors
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why don't we look at what is the nature of human beings and what conditions are necessary
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for the healthy development of human beings and what happens when those healthy conditions
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are not met.
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In other words, instead of seeing human behavior as sort of inherently pathological or healthy,
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why don't we look at it as the outcome of circumstances just as we would, the development
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or maldevelopment of a plant or say an animal.
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So I'm not going to go through all of evolution with you and scientific prehistory not that
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I know it anyway but I'm certainly interested in what is human nature and what conditions
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promote its healthy development and what conditions undermine it and it's from a point of
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view of how does a culture meet the needs of human beings and how does it promote healthy
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or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society.
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So when we think about the idea that in response to you feeling pain when you compare yourself
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to others, you should just not compare yourself to them and how that burdens the individual
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with a societal issue.
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It's like a societal and cultural problem that we are now putting on the shoulders of the
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individual and saying, now you go cope with this.
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So listen to this quote from the book The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabriel Mata.
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In an atomized materialistic culture, people are induced to take everything personally
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and listen to the double meaning of that because we tend to think of that as negative right
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don't take that personally it's not about you but also when you get sick, oh fuck I got
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sick versus it's not your fault you got sick, it's the culture, it's the society okay.
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So in an atomized materialistic culture, people are induced to take everything personally
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to see their own mental and physical distress as misfortunes or even failures belonging
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to them alone but later on he says, a society that fails to value community or need to belong
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to care for one another and to feel caring energy flowing toward us is a society facing
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away from the essence of what it means to be human pathology cannot but ensue.
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To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment.
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When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that is where disease
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comes from and remember disease, disease, disease.
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That's where breakdown in our health, mental, physical, social health occurs.
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This is a quote from psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry, the sub quote and then government
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continues, if a gene or virus were found that caused the same impact on the population's
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well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front page headlines.
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Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted,
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it is the water we swim in.
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We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are each of us mere individuals striving
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to attain private goals.
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The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects
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of who we are and what we need to be healthy.
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If it's one thing about me, I love a quote.
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I love a quote, okay?
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I think the part that gave me the most chills.
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We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are each of us mere individuals striving
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to attain private goals.
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You're on your own journey, you're on your own path, focus on you.
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Now, another person's work that I want to bring in here who I am absolutely obsessed
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with, I'm obsessed with each of these people that I've brought up so far.
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But his name is Youngchul Han and he is a Korean-born German philosopher and I'm obsessed with
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his book The Disappearance of Rituals.
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I can't wait to read more of his work, but it's one of those books that you really want
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to sit with.
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I've just finished it a few weeks ago and it's something that I just want to keep
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rereading.
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It's so excellent and he speaks about the way that our society has become so atomized
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and that the disappearance of rituals means that we are basically a people who do not
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feel at home in space and time.
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And he basically says that rituals are to time, what home is to space.
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Rituals make time habitable.
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We cannot live in time without shared collective rituals.
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He talks about the degradation of community, he talks about this hyper focus on authenticity
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and how we have become a more narcissistic culture, that the obsession is on producing
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the self, being a self, actualizing a self and how anxieties and depression can only ensue
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from such a society.
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And it links perfectly with what Gabor Mata is saying.
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If we are set up to think of ourselves as atomized individuals, we will never be well.
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We will never have health.
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We will never have peace.
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We will never have ease.
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We will always be in dis-ease.
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But then the culture, the society, will continue to burden and blame the individual for experiencing
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the symptoms of the culture that they live in.
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And that's exactly what I believe is happening with this idea of comparison.
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The following excerpt is from the podcast philosophies this episode 189.
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What happens when you give people this message that there are a project to be optimized, that
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there are a commodity that needs to improve their market value by constantly learning and
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growing.
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That they are the sole person that should be determining who they are, and that if anybody
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ever tries to tell them who or what they should be to not listen to that person.
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When you divvy out that message to people in mass, Bianchel Han would say, it should not
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be surprising to you.
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If what emerges from that is a society where people generally just consider the existence
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and opinions of other people less because they're focused on themselves, and are more skeptical
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towards community bonds that try to tell them what to do because they should decide what
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to do.
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And if these inwardly focused people are more skeptical of things that bond communities
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together, then one of the common things in the world, this type of person, is naturally
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going to be antagonistic towards, are the very rituals and traditions that communities
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often participate in.
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Put another way to Bianchel Han, a trap that's common for a narcissistic person to fall into,
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is that they will reject social norms, mores, customs, and politeness, and they will
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reject these things simply on the basis of who are any of these people to tell me how
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I should be acting anyway.
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Let me read you a couple of quotes from Bianchel Han's book, The Disappearance of Rich Wills.
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So he says, the narcissism of authenticity undermines community.
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Okay, so that sentence in and of itself is doing so much.
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So when we say be your true self and actualize your true self, and I've used this language,
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I think it's not coming from a malicious place again.
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I think it is the culture we're breathing in, but there is critique here that I think
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is important.
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He's saying that that project of being authentic, proving your authentic, and being valued
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for your authenticity, your ability to be an author of yourself and of your own life.
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He's saying that is inherently narcissistic.
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And I think this speaks to who the self belongs to, and where the self is meant to be located.
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Are we really meant to be our true self, listen to our self, listen to our intuition,
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understand our purpose, or are we actually here for a collectivist purpose?
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In which case it doesn't really matter what our true self is, it doesn't really matter
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what our inner voice is saying, what matters is the collective's well-being and the collective
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cohesion.
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I fell into a binary way of thinking here.
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It's not either this or that, it's both.
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We are both individuals and members of a collective, however colonialism plus capitalism
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have atomized society into an individualistic understanding and experience of reality,
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particularly in the West.
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And because Western cultural imperialism involves the mass export of consumerist and capitalist
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culture plus values, individualism is becoming an increasingly global ideology.
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We can observe this by the fact of rising inequality globally, even in those same nations
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with collectivist cultures.
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The narcissism of authenticity undermines community.
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But what he's saying is in a society where you privilege authenticity, you will undermine
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community.
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I love the chapter that this is from, which I think is called the Cult of Authenticity
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or something like that.
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The Cult of Authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual
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person.
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Within the Cult of Authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity.
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You must permanently do the work and pursue the project of producing yourself.
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Authenticity thus atomizes society.
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It puts you on your own path and romanticizes that for you.
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So by people saying to you, go find your true self and live your true purpose.
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That is a form of atomizing society.
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I think that's such an interesting idea.
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Another quote from this book that I love.
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It's called The Compulsion of Authenticity is the chapter's name.
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The society of authenticity is a performance society.
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So whenever you have a society that privileges authenticity, you will have people performing
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themselves, all members perform themselves, all produce themselves.
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How will this make me seem if I post this?
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I don't want to seem like this.
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What caption should I add to make it look like this?
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How do I not seem this but seem that producing the self, producing the self, producing
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the self?
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What do you do?
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I produce myself.
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I want you to hear not necessarily the full story.
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Everyone and everyone, I'm of course including myself in this and I'm not producing myself
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by what gets edited out of this video.
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The fact that this video is being made at all.
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But anyways, everybody pays homage to the cult of the self.
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What are you doing to actualize yourself?
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What are you doing to improve yourself?
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Who are you?
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The worship of self in which everyone is his or her own priest.
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And I think we see this in main character syndrome as a little vignette of culture and
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this idea that you should live your life as though you are the main character.
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This is why he said the cult of authenticity, atomize the society.
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If you have a hundred people and you have the desire to have a very socially cohesive communal
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collectivist society, when you rather have a hundred people who all believe that they
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are the main character and that their highest purpose on this earth is to be their most
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authentic self.
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Or would you rather have people who don't think authenticity is the most important value
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who have a relational understanding of self that yes, I'm not the same person I am with
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my parents and family as I am with these people who I'm building this woodwork with as
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I am with the rivers as I am with the trees because each social role that I'm in actually
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asks different things of me.
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When I'm in the role of teacher, that's a different thing that's being asked of me socially
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than when I'm in the role of worshipper.
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I'm not authentic.
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In fact, my authenticity is not the point of my life.
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What does it mean to privilege the idea of being authentic and the work that it takes
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to upkeep the image of authenticity?
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So what I think is really important on this topic of social comparison and how this
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all weaves together is the truth is we aren't, well, a truth.
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I can't say the truth.
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I don't have any sort of monopoly on the truth.
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My truth at this moment that I want to express is that we didn't come here to be on our
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own path.
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I really think we came here to be with each other and that this kind of advice in response
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to comparison, it is silencing the wisdom that maybe comparison feels so terrible because
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we weren't set up to have such huge inequality between us and the people around us.
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We were set up for sharing.
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We weren't set up for toxic beauty standards.
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We weren't like, that's not in our bodies, desires or needs to have this painful beauty
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hierarchy.
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So we were not set up to live this kind of life.
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I want to read another quote from Gabriel Matez's book, The Myth of Normal.
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All stresses represent the absence or threatened loss of something an organism perceives as necessary
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for survival.
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And so I wonder when we're feeling the stressor of like, I'm not good enough.
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I'm not where I'm meant to be in my career.
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I'm not where I'm meant to be in my relationship life.
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I'm this age and I haven't done this thing.
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I'm not beautiful enough and that makes me deeply unworthy when we have this messaging
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and we feel like, oh my goodness, this pain, this stressor of not feeling enough, not
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feeling worthy to the point of feeling we don't deserve to be here, to the point that we
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feel the self annihilation that stressor represents the absence or the threatened loss of
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something we perceive as necessary for our survival.
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And I think that thing we perceive as necessary for our survival is a society of cohesion, of
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unity, of like we are together and also recognizing the inherent divinity of all beings.
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Because when you don't have that spiritual foundation of a society, you will always have
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suffering.
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When someone has to prove their worth, rather than that just be a given, whether that's
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the being, the human or the river or the sky is the air.
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In that inherent divinity, that inherent worthiness, whatever word you want to use, it indicates
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a culture where that inherent value is not cherished from that suffering ensues.
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Suffering will be inflicted.
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When we're made to live in a competitive society, even if we don't want to compete, you're
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made to compete in the market society.
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And when we live in a society that's telling us, oh, you have to buy your way into worthiness
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or you can't afford to do that or shame, then of course, we are going to feel like that
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need to live in a culture that doesn't ask us to be anything than what we are.
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That's a deep pain.
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So gabamate continues.
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An impending loss of food supply, for example, is a major stressor for any creature.
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So is for our species, the absence or threatened loss of love, work, dignity, self-esteem or
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meaning.
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So I just want to highlight that there are so many social structures, capitalism and the
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mass inequality that has continued to grow, consumerism, pervasive inequality, white supremacy,
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the forms of supremacy that exist among marginalized groups and the beauty standards that exist
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across the board, the colorism, the abilism, the anti-fatness, how social media platforms
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work and their business models and how that does not further our collective well-being.
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All these social structures make comparison almost inevitable in my mind.
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So for me, it's not comparison is the thief of joy, i.e. comparison leads to suffering.
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It's all these social structures lead to suffering in and of themselves, but also lead to as
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an intermediary that comparison which then leads to suffering.
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So it's social structures leading to comparison, leading to suffering and also it's the social
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structures directly leading to suffering, not only through comparison because that's a
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very specific and limited form of suffering under this broader system.
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So when we have unforgivable beauty standards, when we have culture constantly shoving images
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down our throats making us not feel worthy, I think what is removed when we say comparison
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is the thief of joy and just don't compare yourself to them.
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You're not them, no two flowers are the same, like I think there is a deep pain that can
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sometimes be erased even as we try to be responsive to this pain.
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At this stage, I'm sure you're wondering, okay, so what do we do about this?
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And of course, an episode, a sole session is not going to solve social comparison, nor
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is it even intending to it.
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It's just aiming to give language that can be more rooted in a collective understanding
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so that when we do feel comparison, we feel less, first of all, shame around it because
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shame indicates we shouldn't.
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We shouldn't feel this way.
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I should feel happy for who I shouldn't feel unworthy and it's like when we talk about
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it from a social lens, it coheres, it makes sense with the society we live in, which can
27:14
hopefully help to reduce some of that shame.
27:16
Like yes, I should feel this way in the sense, this is a natural extension.
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This feeling is a natural extension of the culture that I live in.
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Even if it makes me feel like I'm a bad person, that's also an extension of the culture
27:27
that I live in and the imagination that shapes that culture.
27:32
So what I have sort of come to is because it's our culture, our society that leads to
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this feeling of comparison, a framework we could think of where an individual recognizes
27:44
their suffering, but doesn't blame themself for it could be this idea of a cultural cult
27:49
or a cultural flu.
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When you get the flu, you're not like, what's wrong with me, I have the flu and I'm so
27:54
unworthy and what have I done and it's so shameful that I have the flu.
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You recognize that that is a symptom of being part of a society, of sharing the earth
28:04
with other beings and also of maybe the weather.
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I think that's maybe been debunked, but we'll just go with it for metaphorical and poetic
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reasons.
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The conditions of the earth and the weather, the people and the bacteria and the viruses
28:16
that are growing and living among us and how easily they spread and the fact that we
28:20
share resources and we share infrastructure.
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That means I therefore now have a flu and I'm not to blame and there's a certain way
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I should treat myself with care and with acknowledgement when I do have the flu.
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I shouldn't say, oh no, you don't have the flu.
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You kind of the flu.
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You're not the kind of person who gets the flu.
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You're like, no, I'm a person.
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Of course I get sick and of course my body is doing what it can to try and fight the
28:42
sickness.
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And also I'm worthy of this rest, even though many of us don't actually feel that way.
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So I think comparison is similar because even though we sort of have this current of
28:52
it flowing through all experiences, there are those moments where it's like a flare-up.
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I just had breakfast with a friend or I saw my high school peer group or I went on social
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media and was in this rabbit hole of just looking at people who are traveling in ways that
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I can't afford to travel or these things.
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You could say to yourself, okay, I have a cultural cold.
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I have a cultural flu of comparison and that doesn't make me unworthy.
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That doesn't make me shameful.
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That makes me part of a society.
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That makes me part of a culture that is toxic.
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Like this is a toxic culture and I have about of the effects of that toxicity.
29:27
The second reason I like this idea of like a cultural cold or cultural flu is it also
29:32
cause on us to be really truthful and loving in how what we are doing to spread this flu
29:38
and spread this cultural cold.
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So thinking to ourselves, if I'm taking a picture of this moment and trying to post it
29:44
on my Instagram, why am I doing that?
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Like what is my intention?
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Do I actually want people to envy me?
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Because that's what's also happening.
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A lot of people, we fuel each other, we like, we feel the envy, we feel the jealousy
29:56
and so we say, okay, cool.
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I'm going to try and do something that fills this void by in turn perpetuating it.
30:03
You know what I mean?
30:04
And so I think a lot of the content that makes us feel really shitty on Instagram.
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I know that I used to post like this in my early 20s where it was like, oh, I need
30:12
to show off myself because I don't feel worthy and I feel insecure in my own way.
30:18
So I'm just going to make other people feel that way.
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I didn't think of it in that way, but now looking back, it's like, I wanted people to envy
30:24
me.
30:25
You know, I wanted people to look at me and be like, oh, look at her.
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She's fashionable or whatever.
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And I think it's like, if you are in a beautiful moment, where's the impulse to share it
30:34
on your profile?
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Where does it even come from?
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Just thinking of that can be interesting.
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The ways it's normalized that we post in ways that make us also feel not good enough.
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So we perpetuate this cultural cult online.
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And then offline, I think in our relationships, what this looks like is not sharing the
30:51
highlight reel of our lives on and offline actually.
30:55
How can we be more truthful so that if you're in a new relationship and it seems perfect
30:59
and your friend is envious of it?
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If it is really perfect and you have nothing to share, I'm not saying make things up.
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But if you are kind of putting that perfect face forward and saying, oh, it's perfect.
31:09
It's wonderful.
31:10
Of course, it's going to engender sense of envy.
31:12
But if you say, you know, I started this new job, I got promoted in these ways.
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I'm loving it.
31:17
It's more of the work that I wanted to do.
31:19
I'm working with a really great team.
31:21
And also sometimes I miss having a little bit more time to myself.
31:24
Then it's easier for your friend to walk away from that and be like, ah, okay, I'm really
31:28
happy for her.
31:29
And also I understand that they have been, there are things to not envy about this experience.
31:34
I think that's just so much easier to sit with, but I'm not saying I have to make sure
31:38
you don't feel jealous of me.
31:39
So I'm going to downplay myself.
31:41
I'm saying I have to be truthful.
31:43
And if I say to you, I love this and I love that and I love that and this is amazing.
31:47
And this is amazing.
31:48
And this is amazing.
31:49
You're going to walk away like, oh my goodness.
31:51
Like, but that's also not true.
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It'd be different if that was true.
31:54
I'm like, yes, these things about this path are amazing.
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These parts about the path I don't like.
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I think that's just so much more loving, give someone the full picture and in moments
32:05
where you recognize you're actually obfuscating the fullness of your truth, that is going
32:09
to grow the cultural cold of comparison.
32:12
Okay.
32:13
We've all felt that sigh of relief where we thought something was perfect and then we sat
32:17
down with someone and we're like, ah, so this thing that I was fearing regret of also
32:22
has its flaws because every path you choose in this life has its flaws.
32:27
The person who seems like they're in the perfect relationship is sacrificing something
32:31
to be in that relationship.
32:33
The person who seems like they have the perfect job, there are moments of their life where
32:36
they think, what the fuck am I doing?
32:37
Like that's part of the human experience.
32:40
But when some people pretend like, oh, this path has insulated me from suffering.
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I don't suffer on this path.
32:46
This path is amazing.
32:47
I think it does naturally grow our envy because we know on a spiritual level, nothing is
32:53
so simple as to be perfect, as to be only good.
32:57
You know, everything has its both and and maybe that person was willing to put up with
33:01
certain things that you wouldn't put up with.
33:04
You know?
33:05
And I think that's really important.
33:06
For me, that's really helped with relationships.
33:08
Relationship envy.
33:09
I don't really have it as much anymore.
33:10
I see the fullness of the relationship and I'm like, ah, okay.
33:13
There are aspects of this that are enviable, but there's also aspects of my single life
33:17
that are enviable.
33:18
That's the third way that we can sit with this is if I envy people, then there may be
33:23
people who envy me.
33:25
Maybe I have an amazing friend group.
33:26
Maybe I'm an artist.
33:27
Maybe I'm an amazing chef.
33:28
There's people who are like, damn, I wish I could cook like her.
33:31
So we could also ask ourselves, okay, in what ways do people maybe envy me?
33:35
I do know though that these are all individual responses to collective issues, which is where
33:40
we started out.
33:41
So I think that the way to solve this cultural cult is to change the conditions that
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brewed the virus or bacteria in the first place to change the social structures and to
33:50
reimagine a society more in alignment with love and collective thriving, mutual aid,
33:56
like, there is enough to go around and it shouldn't be structured in a way that is so
34:01
deeply unequal.
34:02
So I think that's a deeply important thing that we can't be well unless the social system
34:07
that shapes us and that we also shape as well.
34:10
If that system is unwell, we will be unwell.
34:13
And if the way that we're taught to think of ourselves within the context of that system
34:16
is individualistic, then we will also be unwell.
34:20
I hope that this sole session has served you.
34:22
I hope that it's helped you.
34:24
I hope that it's offered you something that maybe you were craving or needed or just maybe
34:28
in the future will reach for.
34:30
And if you're feeling like you're not good enough, it is my hope that this offered you
34:33
something nourishing.
34:34
I was feeling a lot of blocks with respect to this topic.
34:38
I have an essay on this that you can read on my newsletter.
34:41
This is also like my fifth time trying to record this video.
34:44
So I just felt like blocked by it.
34:46
And I'm proud of myself for hitting send.
34:49
If you're seeing this, it means I not only finished recording it, but edited and shared
34:53
it with you.
34:54
So thank you for being here.
34:55
Thank you for reaching for my voice.
34:57
I will continue to reach for your heart, for your highest good, for your love.
35:03
I'm so grateful to be on this shared journey, the shared path.
35:07
Everything I create is an attempt to reach for you.
35:10
It's an attempt to find flowers that I find meaningful and gather them into a bouquet
35:16
and say like, hey, do you like these flowers?
35:18
Do they help you?
35:19
Do you want more of them?
35:21
So I just appreciate you so much for being here and for experiencing me and for receiving
35:26
me and seeing me and holding me with so much love.
35:28
I love all the comments.
35:30
I read them.
35:31
I love them whether they be on YouTube or Spotify or wherever you listen.
35:34
I'm grateful.
35:35
Thank you for watching.
35:36
Thank you for listening.
35:37
And I will see you next time.
35:38
You step into the soul.
35:40
Salon.
35:41
Carry the frequency.
35:42
Carry the vibration.
35:43
And I love you so, so much.
35:45
I will see you on the next soul session.
35:48
I love you.
35:49
Bye.
35:50
I hope some paradigms have been shifted for you in today's conversation.
35:54
As always, if you can, please leave a five star rating on Apple and Spotify.
35:59
Like, comment, subscribe.
36:00
I love you so, so much.
36:02
Okay.
36:03
I love you.
36:04
Join me on my substack.
36:05
Links in the comment section.
36:07
Go there.
36:08
Okay.
36:09
Love you so much.
36:10
Love you.
36:11
Bye.