Comparison is the Thief of Joy

Welcome to the Intuitive Health podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anthony Rafferty, medical doctor, PhD, Reiki, and shamanic intuitive healer. I'm here to bring you on a journey of holistic healing that explores the science of the physical body, mental and emotional well-being, energetic, and spiritual health. And I am so delighted that you have joined me today because I'm going to be exploring comparison. So, It's been so interesting over the last couple of weeks because I'm seeing it a lot in my practice, even within my own world. And I really wanted to focus in on this comparison wound because it can actually be a really deep um psychological wound that can have a huge impact on ourselves and our whole life. So, you know, all through kind of my earlier stages with opening my business, I constantly compared myself to other people that had started out in this entrepreneurial path and what do other healers do? How do other people run their businesses? And I see in my practice an awful lot, there's a lot of energy disturbance in people's bodies as a result of this wound of comparison. So, in this episode today, I'm hoping to expose a little bit of the psychological and the energetic roots associated with comparison and show how it distorts our identity. how it fractures our own sense of self-rust and also really just touch into the fact that it's it's a leak in our life force energy in our in our creative flow. And I'm going to offer some tools at the end of this episode just to help people reclaim their sovereignity and their sense of self so that they can be anchored in their own body and their own journey and not projecting their energy into other people's stories. So that's where we are going to go with this. So you know I was reading something lovely um during the week uh in which it was discussing what comparison is and it's a thief. Comparison is a thief of your joy and you know it's it's the ghost of joy. It almost like haunts you as you move through life because in reality it's a reflection of someone else's world. It's not our world. We're looking into what they're projecting out into the world.

And a lot of the time these days actually what we see on social media and in the world around us, it isn't actually a true representation of exactly where people are at or who they are and what their life really looks like. So, you know, I always tend to find that if if we compare ourselves to other others, it's often because we've forgotten who we are. Um, so I'm hoping that this episode will help us to remember the light and the magic that exists within us rather than looking to others in this kind of comparative way. So generally speaking we are wired to measure ourselves in relation to the tribe. So this is an ancestral um kind of trait in which you know back in the day you would um you'd be out and you would be in your tribal energy and you'd compare yourself um in order to feel safe and maintain a sense of belonging. Am I keeping up with the tribe? Will I be excluded if XY Z happens? You know, and this was part of our ancestral um makeup in which we we basically fit into the community. However, in the world today, there are millions and millions of beautifully cured images and projections of illusions of of how people lived their lives. These aren't real lived human experiences and they're often covered with two or three beautiful filters, you know. So, when you actually really kind of sit and you look at this, you kind of think to yourself, well, what's actually going on here? You know, it it maybe it isn't necessarily about what they have. It's more about um what you've disowned within your own self. So what I tend to see with this is that we tend to have envy um for other people or the positions that they are projecting out into the world when we haven't actually allowed ourselves to fully claim those things within ourself. You know I I don't necessarily feel that comparison is admiration in any way. I tend to actually feel it energetically as misdirected grief. You know it's the soul saying that was meant to be me. Like why are they there and I'm here? And a lot of times it's because we haven't allowed oursel to step fully into our power and allow our destiny unfold in a way that our soul is desperately yearning for. So where do the origins of these wounds come from?

Generally speaking, it is it tends to be from childhood. Let's be honest, a lot of these wounds can be from these type of of places. So, it generally is a symptom of um of a child that was just craving love and craving kind of to be seen by their caregivers. I often tend to find that some of the childhood imprints could be linked to potential sibling rivalry. Um so, why can't you be more like your brother? Why can't you be as good as your sister? Your brother always does this. Your sister always does this. So, have a little sit and to think of what the relational dam dynamics was like in your home in relation to your siblings. And at the moment, what I'm seeing in practice is a lot of on an energetic level, how a sibling might step in um to a role with a parent that blocks the the parent from actually seeing you. So that is absolutely fascinating on an energetic level. It's almost like the view from the parent into your eyes has been blocked. So have a little think about it. Did you feel potentially growing up that one or both of your parents um were looking into the eyes of of a sibling rather than seeing you for what you were uh achieving and going on a journey with. Speaking of achievement, I tend to find that some people grew up in homes where actually love was achievementbased. You know, it's we're very proud of you when you you win or when you succeed or or when you reach certain milestones, that's when the love comes in. And that could be for school grades, it could be for um competitions, you know, popularity. All of these things can form a a thought or structure within our minds that, you know, I'm loved if I obtain or do X. And and that's really really tricky because, you know, then we kind of go into this hyper yang state where we're constantly trying to achieve because it's mixed up in our sense of self. It's entangled in this energy of self-worth and you know uh feeling seen is associated with being loved on a deeper level when we achieve things. So our love essentially had to be earned by being better and better at different things. So you know We didn't learn in those circumstances that being loved was actually uh given to us for just being us.

And that can be deeply wounding for people, you know. So what that wound actually uh leaves is a scar. We constantly scan ourselves. We scan other people um and we have you know maybe some lowgrade anxiety when other people win or succeed. Maybe you become hypervigilant around other people's successes. And this can be a symptom um of, like I say, of us not being seen when we were younger for just being ourselves. So, you know, it it's worthwhile having a little think about those things in relation to your own childhood and what they what that might have looked like um when you were little. So, generally speaking, I tend to find that um comparison can impact us in several different ways. So, mentally it can cause our thoughts to race. Um, and you know, just as an example of this, when maybe we see our friends that are experiencing something that we wish we were experiencing or you see something online, you know, this kind of projected image of someone thriving and you are back here thinking to yourself, I am only surviving. How the hell are they out there thriving? An inter an internal story kicks in. You know that I should be there. I should be where they are right now. And this mental loop kicks off a cascade of events in the body. Sometimes in really kind of um significant situations, you can end up in a sense of collapse. We can go into a state of procrastination uh where we actually just tap out uh and go into a self-destruct mode. Or in some circumstances, we begin to mimic other people's behaviors because we're like, well, if they're thriving, maybe if I just copy what they do, I'll get to that space. However, when we actually begin doing that, we actually disconnect from our own soul's purpose. We're actually projecting oursel into someone else's timeline essentially.

So that on a mental level can cause racing thoughts and you know this constant benchmarking of where you are uh in relation to somebody else and it kind of disconnects us from our own original vision and our intuition about where we're going to go with things you know should I be doing what they're doing it gives us kind of anxiety about our journey in this world and you know sometimes this can become obsession and when people come into me they're like I'm obsessed with this person's Instagram profile and It's just so beautifully c uh curated and and created, but it is a facade of what they want to project out into the world. And you know, when we're obsessed with someone's else's life, we're essentially disconnected from our own. So, keeping that in mind on an emotional level, you know, we tend to take on this kind of stormy weather of someone else's journey, you know. We're not actually tuned into our own frequency. We're tuned into someone else's frequency when we project ourselves into their space. And that can bring up a lot for us. We can enter into a space of uh kind of feeling shameful about where we're at, the decisions that we've made, about regret that we haven't made different decisions. You can end up resenting yourself and other people around you. You can end up with a terrible inferiority um complex or maybe you have imposter syndrome and then in some circumstances we go into this space where we actually overcompensate. We give too much. We're we're just projecting all of our energy outwards and that can be really really tough going on our emotional body you know so in certain circumstances I find that it brings a lot of emotional liability into our energy systems and you can kind of oscillate between the sense of envy and a sense of kind of emotional collapse uh where we go into a self-destructive mode and this kind of cycling between these uh types of emotions can occur quite frequently. Now on an energetic level this is an absolute sign of a leaky energy in your energy system. So it's a sign that your aura has some leaky spots and that potentially your boundaries aren't really where they need to be.

Now, boundaries, I I have to tell you, I could talk about boundaries in every single podcast episode that I do because they are so so important. And sometimes, you know, it's not necessarily about having boundaries from other people coming in on top of us, even though that's really important. But what do boundaries with yourself look like? What you allow yourself to think and do? And what's your journey with your own personal boundaries like? And you know, on an energetic level, sometimes People start trying to mimic other people's behaviors. Sometimes they wear same clothes, they dress the same, and they go into a sense, especially for entrepreneurial life. They begin marketing the same way that they do. And you see this all the time on Instagram. It's become just a marketplace really, a place where people sell their courses and all of these different things. And I know I definitely fall into that space, too. Um, so it it can be really a tricky journey, but it's important. to kind of think about these things and recognize where you may be falling into a space in which you're not respecting your own boundaries. Are you mimicking how other people are showing up on their journey? And do you feel like you've leaky energy in your energy field? And essentially, I'm just going to say it even though it can be really hard to hear in a lot of uh in a lot of ways, but comparison is spiritual trespassing. You're stepping into someone else's energy. um and projecting yourself into their energy space. Uh and you know that isn't fair on them, but also it rips you away from your own energy field and the places that you are meant to be. You're essentially living in someone else's shadow and that's not what we came here to do. Sure, it's not. Um and then also on a physical level. So like I spoke uh speak into in some other podcast episodes, I tend to find that mental, emotional and energetic impacts tend to ultimately end in physical body disturbance. And I tend to find with the clients that I talk to with my own journey with comparison, sometimes our test our chest gets a little bit tight. Our breathing might change.

We get tension in the body and our belly and our jaw and we go into a state of nervous system dysregulation, you know. So this can be really really important because If you have done a deep scrolling session on social media, potentially you've ended up in a state of dopamine withdrawal. You have used up all of your heavyhitting um dopamine energy in your brain from seeing all of these things on social media and you just feel wrecked. This constant like uh hit of dopamine every time you see one of these circumstances or situations that kind of uh put you in a state of comparison. Do you feel exhausted after your time on the gram? Um, so you know, if you find that you're going into spaces with certain people or perhaps on social media and you're suddenly feeling empty, um, and you know, if that is the case and you're really kind of, uh, getting into a space where you're really viewing yourself in not a very good light after these kind of interactions, Even though nothing is actually wrong, it's time to actually get real with yourself and just think, you know, what am I doing here? This is self-sabotaging. And that is not the place to be. That's not where we want to be. We want to be sovereign in our energy. We want to be standing in our power and our energetic light and not projecting it into someone else's story. So, how do we go about rewriting this um journey for for ourselves. So, I've spoken a little bit previously into cord cutting and that's basically cutting cords with any energies, any um energetic imprints that aren't for our greatest good. And we can do this with people, with places, with entities, with so much stuff. I love a good cord cutting ritual. So, sometimes what I do is I sit down, I journal about everything. I really get my head clear on where I'm at with a lot of stuff and I really identify what I want to release and let go of now through my shamanic training and you know uh shamans love a good fire ceremony. I tend to love love love um using all of these beautiful uh kind of tools to really do a good job at cutting energy. So I write things down. I identify what I want to let go of and I'll do a a little ritual or a ceremony around um releasing the energy.

So essentially once I've identified what I want to cut cords with, I'll go into sacred ceremony and essentially I'll speak out the words that speak best into my soul. So something like I cut the energetic cords with the illusion of who I think I should be. And you know, I call all of my energy, I call all of my strength, and I call my sovereignity back to my body. I return into my path. I reclaim my energy for my journey with my destiny. And then what I'll do is once I've said that, I'll burn the pages and let go of everything that I no longer want to identify by or I'm really looking to let go of. And you know, I do uh cord cutting twice a day. I do it before work. I cut the cords with all energies, entities or lower vibrational um things that are out there in the world that aren't for my greatest good. I cut cords with any energetic darkness that comes into my body because believe me there is working as a sham and I have seen some dark stuff. Um and I just call the light I'm only aligned with the light. I'm aligned with my soul's destiny, my soul's purpose. I do that every day before work. I will cleanse my energy after each client and then at the end of the day again I will cut cords with anything that is not for my greatest good. So, I do it several times a day to keep my energy as fresh and so clean as it can be. But it's really good to start taking a deeper dive into all of this stuff. But essentially, like I say, when you project your energy into someone else's energy field, into their story, you're trespassing in their world. Um, and you know what? You're here to go on your own journey. So, reclaim all of that energy that you've given projected away and use it to to forge your own path forward. You know, use that energy and uh that kind of creative flow to actually move in a direction that your soul wants to move in. A lot of the time we don't give ourselves enough time to actually sit and ask our soul, ask our heart what it wants to do. So, I tend to recommend if you're someone that um does a deep comparison with social media. Give yourself a social media fast. Give yourself a detox from the timeline.

Um, and even, you know, if you're finding that you're comparing yourself to a lot of other people, um, I tend to see this for a lot of my really beautiful fertility clients as well when they see the news of of a pregnancy. It can be so heartbreaking in so many ways, but we never really truly know what each other's journey has been. Some people have been on journeys for many years. Um, and you know, we all find our way to certain paths at different times. So, you know, we don't know when or how someone else started their path. Uh, so it's just important to stay in our lane on our path of destiny. But generally with timeline fasts, I tend to recommend no social media, no consumption or comparison in any way. Just allow yourself to sit in your own space. And you know what? I really love with these kind of fasts is kind of setting aside some dedicated time to actually create something from scratch yourself. So maybe it's your sitting with your words and that's through journaling. Maybe you're into music. Maybe it's just about speaking your truth out into the world. Um and you know finding a way to create something even in in five or 10 minutes that was done in a way that let your soul shine. So yes, I absolutely love that as a tool to maybe navigate through some of this stuff. No, no scrolling, no comparison, and actually allowing yourself to create from scratch. Um to just show that you can do it and you know do it in a way that feels authentic and right to your soul. It's also really important on this journey with comparison to anchor yourself into your own identity. Who are you? Have you ever thought about that? You know, maybe some really good journaling prompts are to sit with kind of uh thoughts or themes associated with values. What values do I refuse to compromise on? You know, I love that because when we have a value system, it acts as an anchor and it acts as a beautiful sail by which we can navigate our way forward. So, what are your values? What do you refuse? to compromise on what feels right in your heart and your soul. I also would love for you to sit and contemplate what you are building that nobody else could. What original thing are you building in this world that nobody else could?

And you know I really struggled with this for many many years. Um especially uh in an entrepreneurial setting you know you're wearing I wear so many hats as an energy healer as a doctor as an acupuncturist. But, you know, it's it's really important to sit and think, well, how do I weave all of these things together in a really authentic way? And I used to use really kind of strict medical protocols because I was like, well, that's what I've been told that I need to do or I'd look to people for permission um in order to do it the way that I felt intuitively was the right way for each one of my individual clients. And, you know, it took a long time to give myself permission to show up in a way that was actually authentic to what I was building in the world and to allow my intuition to shine through and to allow kind of all of the energetics of what I'd spent so long cultivating to to to show up in the most authentic and beautiful way. And I know now that what I'm building on a business side of things, it is something that nobody else can do because I've allowed myself to go on a journey with my what my gifts look like. But keeping in mind at the start of this journey, I did compare myself to others. And funnily enough, the thing that actually uh became the most comparative element was uh the stuff that I'd learned that everybody else had learned. All the doctors had learned a way to do this, you know. And actually, I kept a lot of what my gift was with my energetic healing and my vision through my shamanic work that was in in the shadow, you know, I was like, well, you know, I'll sit with things because I know all about the gut. I know about the vagina microbiome. I have a desire to to support people from fertility perspective and all of these beautiful um kind of things that I'd learned, but like I was still doing it on a on a tick list and looking for permission based on what other people had built. But when I allowed myself to fully sit into actually what my gifts were and show up in a way that nobody else that I know was showing up, that is when when my business began to thrive. That is when my heart felt like it was alive and singing. So now what I do is I journey with that every day.

At the end of every day, I just think what an amazing day I had with these beautiful clients today because actually I'm living and building a soul-led business based on what my gifts are, what my spiritual gifts and my energetic gifts are. So maybe have a little sit and a think about what you want to build in the world and what are your gifts? that maybe you're not allowing to radiate as strongly as you could because you're following the same footsteps that other people have. Really important things to sit and identify. Um and also another thing with regard to kind of anchoring your identity is to identify, you know, who are you when nobody's watching? What do you love to do? What do you do when it's just you and your soul is allowed to be radiant and shine in a way where you don't fear judgment. So, they're all really good things to kind of allow yourself to sit with who you are and kind of who you are in the world in the most quirky and weird and fabulous way. Now, I also want to kind of touch on kind of shifting our mindset a little bit when it comes to celebrating others. So, I think like I say sometimes you know when we compare ourselves to other we use it as a measuring stick of what we aren't doing right. But let's use their success as a mirror for ourselves and actually maybe it's about giving thanks. Thank you so much for showing me what's possible. You know, showing me what what could potentially be uh on the cards for me down the line. You know, this belongs to me. Call in the energy of how you're going to embody that energy when the divine timing comes that you can step into that energy and own that in your own authentic way. So what I encourage you to do is celebrate success, celebrate other people, you know, really really allow yourself to sit into that energy of if they can do it, you know, this is a wonderful uh barometer for for success that I'm capable of doing too. So don't allow yourself to collapse in on yourself or allow envy to hit. Allow yourself to actually sit and be like, okay, this is good. This is good. It is a benchmark and a barometer for where I can potentially go in these circumstances where you feel your nervous system being activated.

I also encourage doing some centering breathing. You know, I I love kind of box breathing where you inhale for a certain count, you hold for a certain count, you exhale for a certain count, and you hold for a certain count. I tend to recommend doing it in in kind of counts of four. So, inhaling for four, holding for four, exhaling for four, and holding for four. and just calling your energy back to your body. So as you inhale, you're just saying I belong. And as you're holding that, you're just saying, I am here. And as you're exhaling, you're just saying to yourself, I am here now. You know, and even as you hold further, you're just saying, I am in my body. I am solid. I am still. I am present with myself. So returning to yourself with some lovely nerve nervous system practices and I love breathing as a way to do that. Also, grounding can be lovely. Getting your feet out on the earth, which is so so nice. That's a really lovely way to do that. And potentially you have some other tools in which you use to come back to your body. So, I really love this kind of um relationship with returning home to yourself. And you know, if we really sit with this, what does that look like? It looks It's like saying to yourself, there's no one ahead of me. There's nobody behind me because there's only me on this journey. You know, walking your path in your shoes, in your time based on the design of what your soul came to do, stepping onto that path and walking in your own shoes, the path of your own destiny. And you know, I talk about this all the time with my clients, you know, from an ancestral perspective. Sometimes what happens is these shoes about what's expected and the path that people are expected to walk are handed down from one generation to the next. You are then handed these shoes that have walked the same footsteps all through the timelines. And you're handed these shoes and you put them on without even realizing they're not yours. And after many, many years of walking these footsteps, steps, walking this path that was handed down to you, was fated to you by your family lineage. You start to go, "My toes are bloody sore. Don't like these shoes. Actually, they don't fit me.

They don't go with what I'm wearing." And that is a really beautiful time on your journey where you take off those shoes. You don't have to walk in the path or the footsteps of your ancestors. You can go and buy yourself a new pair of shoes and rewrite how you want to show up in the world. And you know, one of the beautiful teachers and mentors that I I I have learned a lot from on my shamanic path, he always says, "Fate is fatal. It is fatal." And you know, you are fated through your ancestral and family history to show up and walk in a certain way in this world. However, when we can take off those shoes of our ancestors and we can step into our own new shoes, we then walk on the path of destiny. We've stepped off the path of fate which is fatal which has been handed down to us and we step onto our own path of destiny which is our unique soul's journey in this world. So that is really what I hope for all of you listening to this is that you can begin to sit down have a little conversation with yourself and identify where am I showing up in relation to how my family have shown up. What looping patterns and behaviors have been handed down through my family lineage? And actually, am I still walking in the shoes of the people who came before me? You know, and I have to tell you, like comparison is so huge within the Irish culture. And you know, what would the neighbors think situation where we show up in a way it's almost like a facade because we don't want to to be outdone by the neighbors, you know, and we don't want their shame. or the judgment projected onto us. So this can be deeply rooted within our cultural history too, our societal norms. So you know it's time to break free from all of this stuff and to walk your sovereign path. And you know that means really stepping away from this energy of comparison. You know comparison is the language of scarcity. But what your soul wants to speak is originality. You know your soul is timeless. It's unshakable. And I really just am so excited for you guys to step fully into the magic of the the energy of what your soul is here to do.

And if we continue to compare oursel to how other souls are living um and moving through this world, we will never fully come home to oursel so that the true light of our originality and our soul can shine as brightly and as amazingly as possible. So, Like I say, it's not your job uh here as this beautiful unique soul to compete with other people. Your job is to remember. It is to remember the true authentic light that you hold in your heart, in your body and allow that to shine as a sovereign individual that doesn't follow the call of everybody else. You are anchored in your own being and you are here to transmit that beautiful original light that nobody else can do. other than you. So with love from my heart to yours, have the most beautiful time navigating comparison and I will chat to you in two weeks.