John and Lisa's Blue Skies Blog – Soaring with God

I’ve wondered about the spirit of competition in the Western world.  It’s supposed to be healthy, but is it?  When I was a runner, I was never competitive.  I just ran for the health of it.  If anything, I competed against myself.  Competition is what has supposedly made our Western culture so successful.  But how do we define success?

Since I’ve been meditating and going inside myself, I question competition as a virtue.  My inhale certainly doesn’t compete with my exhale. 

Yet, I thought about how, when I was first beginning to meditate,  I tried to do my meditation for twenty minutes.  A goal of twenty minutes.  Can that not be called competition? 

Perhaps a better word is discipline.  In our spiritual practice, discipline is a virtue, but competition – even with ourselves – is a vice.