Comparison and jealousy can stifle creativity, turning passion into a relentless hustle. Instead, embracing the joy of others’ successes can transform envy into connection. By celebrating wins and loosening the grip of competition, we move with life’s natural flow. Let go, and watch your creativity take flight.
Editor's Note: We're kicking off a new series with Lama Tasha Schumann, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher trained in the lineages of Dzogchen and Mahamudra and a longtime collaborator of Jeff Warren's. Over five weeks, Tasha guides us through five patterns that tend to run our lives, what she calls knots: Aversion, Grasping, Striving, Self-fixation, and Confusion. This week, we are focusing on striving.
Early in my music career, I lived with a particular ache. It was an anxious urgency, a knot in my gut that tightened every time I saw someone else succeed: a record deal, a big tour, a glossy press feature.
I’d be chugging along, building my little empire, fueled by encouragements like “you’re the hardest working girl in the industry!” and for a moment it would all feel possible. But one sideways glance at someone else winning what I thought should have been mine already, and the fragile sense of momentum would collapse.
Why not me? I’d think, sick with certainty: I’m already behind. It’s already too late. (Which is a totally twisted thing for any twenty-something to think).
I wanted to be the kind of person who could stay focused on her own lane. Instead, comparison and jealousy started to sour my creative fire.
I shrank away from collaborations. I tuned out of conversations about other rising artists. I measured every success against someone else’s and couldn’t celebrate a single one. My creativity became a heavy, endless hustle for survival.
The more I competed, the more I cut myself off from the very ecosystem that could have carried me.
One day, in a haze of envy and self-loathing, I did what any budding meditator might do: I Googled how do Buddhists deal with jealousy?
The answer was annoyingly simple: “The antidote to jealousy is to rejoice.” To actively celebrate the success of others (especially my perceived competitors). To open the knot exactly where it hurt.
It sounded dumb and I DID NOT want to do it. But I hated the stuck feeling even more. So I went in, full throttle.
Anytime someone got a win and that ol’ familiar gut-punch came up, I practiced. I’d conjure up genuine gladness for them. I’d picture the unseen work they’d put in, their fragile hopes that were just like mine, the people cheering for them behind the scenes. I imagined their joy like something that could spill over and find me too. As if abundance was something contagious.
Very (extremely!) slowly, the knot started to loosen. I found myself sending congratulations texts I would have once swallowed out of spite. I started feeling excited for people whose wins used to make me turn green.
And when the jealousy loosened, so did the tightness around my own activity. A sense of possibility opened up and I was moving again. I got excited about skill-sharing and collaborating, about building community.
I finally got what was meant by the saying a rising tide lifts all ships: That other people’s success didn’t diminish me, it expanded the field of what was possible for all of us.
We weren’t locked in mortal competition after all! We were part of an ecosystem!
As someone who had always felt like a lone wolf fighting for survival, this was a massive revelation for me.
In the Buddhist tradition, every affliction hides a wisdom. Inside the knot of striving and competition is the wisdom of effortlessness (often called “All-Accomplishing Wisdom”), the free-flowing momentum that comes when we move with life as it’s already unfolding—without fighting it, or wishing it were different.
It’s symbolized by the element of air and wind: activity that flows with responsiveness.
When that quality is clear in us, momentum feels as natural as breathing. We act without overthinking, create without calculating, and celebrate others without souring our own joy. We move because life itself is moving and we’re part of it.
But when fear creeps in and that tight little voice says “you’re behind, you’re not doing it right, they’re outpacing you”, the flow turns into a storm. We grip the wheel harder. We perform. We ruminate and hustle ourselves half to death.
The effortless flow that is available to us gets snagged and we start believing that success is a zero-sum game. That your win is my loss. That I have to hack my productivity and game the system to engineer my wins against yours.
We fight the breeze that’s trying to carry us both and our actions collapse into tight, competitive little storms.
And the hustle culture we’re caught in stokes this brilliantly! We’re pitted against each other with TikTok views, Instagram follower counts, Substack bestseller charts, blue checkmarks—a global Olympics of who can claim a lane and win it first (all while quietly falling apart).
But it’s a false urgency. Your path isn’t in competition with anyone else’s.
The wind doesn’t race itself and it doesn’t blow in a straight line. It moves in all directions, in perfect responsiveness to the environment.
To see ourselves in this way is a practice of loosening. It’s a quiet rebellion against the linear project of capitalism and colonialism that keeps us in survival systems that say “if you stop hustling, you’ll die.” It’s a practice of courage.
Lucky for us, there are lots of ways to loosen into flow:
Any method that unbinds you from isolation and scarcity, helps your voice emerge—powerful, unforced, responsive, true.
The wind doesn’t calculate its progress or try to prove its worth. It just moves. And in moving freely, it accomplishes everything.
If you want to explore more of Tasha's work, visit her website or tune into the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, her podcast with Jeff Warren.
