“Comparison to other bottoms - how can I avoid it (the flood of great pictures on SoMe or Facebook makes it so hard) - maybe it goes hand in hand with selfworth?”
How not to compare myself with other bottoms is the question I often get. I also observe a lot of competitiveness going on around (hello EURIX), so here are some thoughts on that.
Competitiveness is in us. It is not ingrained in the discipline itself (well, unless you are an athlete officially competing in a championship, but even then, I believe, competitiveness can hinder your progress).
Competitiveness comes from looking at ourselves from a third-person perspective. That is, when we tap out of a direct experience, happening in our flesh and bones, tap out of our bodies, (which can happen for many different reasons) and instead go into habitual external third-person perspective. This is the mode where we judge ourselves, this is where we compare and feel inadequate.
Judgment is the opposite of paying attention.
There is nothing sexy about being competitive. Essentially we deprive ourselves from our direct experience in the moment. It’s as if we live next to our bodies.
We heal it by turning attention into our bodies, plugging into lived - immediate - bodily experience, plugging into curiosity about what is there for us to feel... There is nothing to win, really, there is no other reward as nurturing for body and soul, as the capacity to live our own lives fully, through our bodies.
However culturally rewarded, there is nothing nice about being competitive. Possibly it grows from a place where we don’t feel ourselves, where we don’t inhabit ourselves fully, we don’t quite trust our own divinity. So we contract. So we try to resolve it by proving it externally, by comparing and collecting evidence that we might be ok after all. We may notice that it never works.
The pathway to dissolving this contraction is not to “fix” ourselves but to soften into the painful feeling beneath it. Attending it with love and kindness, which might be the most difficult thing to do.
It is definitely more serious work than competing, and it is real work.
Remember, judgment is the opposite of paying attention.