584 - Buddhist Perspective on Compersion with Dr. Marie Thouin
We're excited to share a discussion between Dedeker and Marie Thouin about compersion from a Buddhist perspective. This conversation first appeared on Instagram Live and now has been remastered for all of our podcast listeners.
Dr. Marie Thouin is a lifelong student of love & life, as well as a PhD candidate in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on the experience of compersion in consensually nonmonogamous relationships. She is also a Dating Coach and Founder of Love InSight, where she helps people of all ages, genders, sexual orientations and relationship styles navigate the path to loving and healthy relationships. Marie is passionate about celebrating love in all its shapes and forms!
Find more about Marie on her website, as well as the services and events she offers.
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Dedeker: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, I'm sharing a conversation that I had with Dr. Marie Thouin about compersion and the Buddhist concept of the second arrow. Many of you may know that Marie is a compersion researcher. We've had her on the show before. Marie reached out to me because in her coaching practice, she kept noticing these clients who would beat themselves up a lot for not feeling compersion. This makes sense, that in non-monogamous communities, compersion often gets held up as this ultimate goal. It's something that you're supposed to feel if you're doing everything right. But then when you don't feel it, it's really easy to pile judgment and shame on top of yourself, and that's on top of maybe other things that you're already feeling that feel bad, like insecurity or jealousy. And so you're just multiplying the hard feelings. Marie and I, in this conversation, we get into the Buddhist concept of the second arrow, which is the extra suffering that we create for ourselves when we judge our own pain. We talk about what it actually looks like to work with that self-judgment, how to work with self-judgment without just giving yourself a free pass to weaponize your bad feelings or your jealousy or things like that, and also how to handle the pressure that may be coming from your community, or maybe from your relationship or certain partners, to feel compersion or to perform compersion on a particular timeline. So I hope that this is helpful for you. If you're interested in hearing more from Marie and about her research on compersion, you can check out episode 484 titled "Compersion is a Spectrum" or episode 285 titled "Compersion Research."
Marie: I'm the author of "What is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-monogamous relationships, and today I will be talking with my dear colleague Dedeker Winston, who is the co-host of the Multiamory podcast and a long-term Buddhist practitioner. I'm super excited to talk about the concept of the second arrow in Buddhism, which is the pain that we inflict on top of existing pain when we judge ourselves for what we're feeling, in connection with compersion, which is positive empathy for our partner's other relationships. As someone who is a compersion coach and someone who did research about it, I often hear people talk about how they beat themselves up for not feeling compersion in their relationships. So I'm really excited to join the concept of that second arrow and how can we remove it so that we can feel what we're feeling and move towards more emotional freedom. Welcome. Thank you so much, Dedeker, for doing this with me. I just did a little intro to the topic of the second arrow in Buddhism, which is the suffering that is not the initial emotion that we're feeling in relation to a stimuli, but the actual suffering that we impose on ourselves when we fight our emotions. I decided to reach out to you because I used that concept so much in relation to compersion in my coaching when people beat themselves up ultimately for not experiencing compersion. And I thought that concept of the second arrow would be so applicable to all kinds of non-monogamous situations.
Dedeker: Yeah, I'll give a background. I'll give a couple caveats also. My first caveat being that depending on how you slice it, I'm relatively new to even identifying as a Buddhist at all. I've had a meditation practice, the way that I described it for many years is I've kind of circled around Buddhism, probably close to 15 years at this point. The entire time, the closest I would get was identifying myself as Buddhish.
Marie: Mmhmm.
Dedeker: And there are reasons for that, right? I was raised born-again Christian, super intensive evangelical Christian. Of course, that left me with a bad taste in my mouth around most forms of organized institutional religion. And so that's why I never really fully committed to Buddhism. I just called myself Buddhish. And last year, when I brought this to my Zen teacher, I explained to him that part of the reason why I've resisted identifying as Buddhist is because I feel like if I actually identify with it, then I have to accept all of the imperfections and issues that Buddhism has as an institution, right? That then I either have to defend or I'm signing off on the fact that Buddhism is still a religious institution with structural issues, power hierarchy issues, extreme sexism, racism, sex scandals, teachers abusing their students, that I thought, oh, well, then I have to sign on to all of this if I say that I'm a Buddhist. And my Zen teacher just said, ah, well, it sounds like you're trying to figure out how to meet the world as it is. And that's Buddhism. You got me, old man. And so I decided that this year I was like, okay, I'll try experimenting with what it's like to call myself a Buddhist. So honestly, so far we're almost halfway through the year. I've probably used the term in relation to myself less than 10 times. So that's a little bit of my background and history. I kind of soft identify as like a Zen secularist, but I've done a lot of retreats and a lot of training with Theravada monks and nuns. So that's my personal history to give the caveat that I'm not a Buddhist scholar. The longer that I'm in this tradition, the more I realize that I don't know. And then the two other caveats I wanna put in before diving into this conversation, one of them is the way that my favorite philosopher, Alan Watts, used to put it is he said that he identifies more as an entertainer. And in the same way that if he was gonna play a Mozart concerto for you, he's not trying to sell you on anything other than just how beautiful the music is. And he said that about his talks about East-West philosophy. And then the last caveat I'll put on everything is what the Dalai Lama says, which is that, you know, don't use any tenets from Buddhism to become a better Buddhist, but use it to become a better whatever you already are. So that was kind of the runway I wanted to create for this conversation about the second arrow.
Marie: Oh, I love all of that. And I love the distinctions that you made about not being like a scholar, but someone who really uses that philosophy and these concepts with so many other circumstances, not just the religion, the Buddhism itself. So that's super cool. And you have talked before about the intersection between Buddhism and non-monogamy and some very specifically non-monogamous experiences. You've contributed an amazing blog on my site, whatiscompersion.com, about when there's actually hatred that comes into our hearts, and we are trying to Invoke or cultivate a fertile terrain for compersion and how confusing and multifaceted that experience can be, and just from that Buddhist meditation lens, so I invite people to go and read it. But tell me a little bit more about your experience with the intersection of non-monogamy and your Buddhist practice.
Dedeker: Yeah, I've been reflecting on that a lot recently in particular, because both in one of my relationships and then also where I'm at professionally right now, I'm sort of sitting in a little bit of a transitional chapter where there's a lot of uncertainty. And as I've been working with clients or even consulting with my friends or listening to my friends going through their own relationship struggles, what I realized is that there's something that non-monogamy can force us to confront in a way that a traditional relationship may not, or at least may not right out the gate, which is coming up against uncertainty and lack of control. The reality being that everything is uncertain. We're not really in control of anything, regardless of what type of relationship that you're in. But I do think that non-monogamy can really sometimes shove our faces into that truth, sometimes in ways that are really beautiful, sometimes in ways that are really disturbing and alarming. Because essentially, we're putting ourselves in a situation where we're choosing to love someone or to partner with someone or partner with multiple people, where we're also acknowledging their existence as an individual separate from us, who can make decisions separate from us, who may go off and have their own dating life, their own sex life separate from us. This person that we love is able to engage in things and make decisions that we don't have direct control over. And in the non-monogamy literature and all the content out there, of course, there's already been a lot of discussion about what happens when we do try to control a partner, really try to control a partner's decisions, try to control a partner's dating life, either through our own direct or indirect manipulations. That usually, that doesn't go very well for us. And so I find for myself personally, it really forces one to grapple with what do I do when I feel like things are out of my control and where I don't know what the outcome is gonna be. And I think that for me, that's when it starts to turn into something that connects to my own sense of spirituality or my own sense of trying to figure out how is it that we live in this world that is all uncertain and not in our control.
Marie: Yeah, absolutely. I think the connection between compersion and mudita, the third brahmahavara, the enlightened person in Buddhism, is very potent and evocative. The idea that when you experience sympathetic joy, joy for someone else's happiness that does not involve you, that requires letting go of control, requires letting go of controlling the source of someone else's fulfillment. And that can feel intuitive in many aspects of life, but it typically does not feel intuitive in the realm of sex and love and romantic love. We typically think, I have to be the sole provider of my partner's romantic and sexual fulfillment. Otherwise, why am I here? How am I safe?
Dedeker: Yes, yes. So to put a little bit of context on that, the four Brahma Viharas, which is often translated as the four heavenly abodes, they're considered these four aspects or four practices that is meant to be supportive of one's journey towards enlightenment. So there's Metta, which is loving kindness. There's Karuna, which is compassion. There's Upekka, which is equanimity. And then there's the one that I think nobody likes that much, which is Mudita, or often translated as sympathetic joy. And for me, always has a very clear tie to this idea of compersion. And I looked into it and there's a lot of Buddhist commentary and text and original sources that for thousands of years has acknowledged that mudita is maybe the hardest one to cultivate of all of the four brahmaviharas. And it's the kind of thing where on my days when I'm feeling more enlightened, it feels easy, right? Because it's like, oh, my friend got this thing that she was wanting. Oh, that's so great. It's so easy to engage in this sympathetic joy for her, right? Or, oh, wow, my friend is falling in love, or my friend got the job that they wanted. Oh, that's so nice. There's this wonderful nun that I've had the great benefit of sitting on retreat with multiple times, Ayya Nanda Bodhi, who she describes it as this joy that you didn't have to do anything to work for. Like somebody else did all the hard work of trying to get that promotion or get into that relationship, and you get to have the joy without having to expend any of the work. And that feels so great. It feels so wonderful. But then it all falls apart when it comes to someone that I don't like as much, someone that I don't necessarily consider to be my friend, somebody where I feel like maybe we're in competition for resources, somebody that I feel like is maybe similar to me, and so why are they getting this good thing and I'm not getting this good thing when I feel like we've both been working hard, or maybe I've been working hard, or I think especially in the context of relationship, we can get into the trap of feeling maybe more entitled than the other person, or constantly doing that calculus of who deserves what within this particular context. So it's— and much like I think Marie, what you talk about with compersion, that when it's there, it can be really wonderful, it can be really energizing, it can be really life fulfilling. And then not only can it feel shitty, to just put it in plain terms, but I do think that's when the self judgment can start to creep in, right? That in Polyamory subculture, when we have this particular value that we hold up of compersion, and similarly in Buddhist culture, when we have this particular value of mudita, or sympathetic joy that we hold up, as something aspirational, then when we don't feel it, it's very easy to slip into this sense of, well, that means that there's something wrong with me, that the conditions are not creating this within me, this thing that if I was truly a moral, high-functioning, good polyamorous person, it'd be easy for me to feel. Which is getting into the second arrow.
Marie: Right, right. What a great segue. And I think also, to put it in more like kind of Western concepts terms, I think it's similar to toxic positivity. The idea that we should always feel happy, we should always feel good things, and if we're unhappy, then we have to feel bad about that unhappiness and feel like there's something wrong with us. Not experiencing compersion as an object of self-judgment is one of the things that I work the most with in my coaching practice. People typically who contact me for non-monogamy and find me through my work on compersion, a lot of them will contact me and say, the problem is that I'm not experiencing enough compersion. There must be something wrong with me or with my partner. But they are caught in shame about what they're actually feeling. And they don't want to be feeling what they're actually feeling, whether it's insecurity, grief, jealousy, envy. They're like, Marie, help me get rid of that, because I want to feel compersion instead. And my advice is, most of the time, unless they're in a really bad situation and the situation itself needs to change, is try to take out the second arrow. Try to take out the self-judgment and the negativity that you actually impose on the situation, on the emotions that you're already having. And let's start to loosen that knot, not from a place of having this extra war inside of yourself against yourself, but from a place of curiosity and acceptance.
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Dedeker: Easier said than done. I will say, after so many years. So I actually, I got curious because I've heard the story of the Second Arrow told to me so many times, but I kind of wanted to go to the original source. And so I found at least the English translation from what's known as the Pali Canon, which is ironic, is the P-A-L-I Canon, which is because Pali was the original language that the Buddha spoke. So appropriate. But to directly quote from at least the English translation. It says, when touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental, just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow, and right afterward were to shoot him with another one so that he would feel the pains of two arrows. And so, like you're saying, I think what's actually really interesting with this model is that that second arrow can take a lot of different forms, right? So you talked about how it seems for a number of clients, it comes in the form of shame and self-judgment, this sense that I should be feeling more positively about this than I am. I should be more supportive than I am. There's something that's wrong with me. Or maybe it comes in the form of judgment of their partner. My partner's not doing something correctly, and that's why I'm feeling this. It can come in the form of storytelling of what does this mean about me? What does this mean that I feel disappointed right now and I feel lonely and I feel neglected right now and not that I'm feeling super supportive and wanting to high-five my partner when they come home from their date. I know for myself, the second arrow tends to materialize as intense analysis and problem solving. So for me, when I get hit with a first arrow and maybe that's disappointment, maybe that's feeling lonely, maybe it's any kind of primary pain, right? For me, then it's like, okay, well, let's figure out exactly what type of wood this arrow is made out of. Let's figure out exactly what tree the wood came from. Let's figure out what bird the feather in the arrow came from. Let's try to calculate the exact angle of trajectory that the arrow came from. For me, that's the second arrow of now I'm just gonna sink my teeth into it and just try to understand it to death and try to look at it from every single angle. And then from doing that, then that produces a lot of all its own arrows, like 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 of judgment or storytelling of resistance to the pain. And so I do think that is something that's interesting to look at for people individually, is that sometimes the way that we shoot ourselves with the second arrow in reaction to primary pain can be very different. It can be very different depending on the person.
Marie: And I love how you explain that in terms of all of the explanations that you try to put upon that arrow, as you said in the translation of the Pali Canon, it's a mental pain that you put on top of emotional or the physical pain. We're so used to try to fix things with our minds. That is such a value, I think, that we hold as a culture, trying to understand ourselves and think ourselves out of our problems.
Dedeker: And with emotional issues that typically backfires because then we get caught in the storytelling, we get caught in trying to rationalize it, we get caught in the trap of thinking, "If I can just understand it, then I'm gonna resolve it." If I can just understand it, or for me often it's like, if I can understand it enough to really create the case about why I was wronged in this situation, if I can really understand to the point where I can find the specific complaint to throw at my partner, then that's gonna solve my primary pain. Which sometimes is the case. I think you acknowledged how sometimes I think the dark side of this, the way that people can interpret this, is that we can really pick this up and run far into the direction of bypassing and denial. Where, I don't know, let's say if you caught your partner in a lie, for instance, and there's the primary pain of, wow, my partner lied to me. There's that primary pain of I feel betrayed. Or even maybe the primary pain of shock, right, of I thought things were going one way, but then it turns out they were going another way, that it then wouldn't necessarily be helpful to you to be like, well, I can't do any analysis of that. I can't question that. I shouldn't be thinking about the solutions to that. I shouldn't be thinking about confronting my partner about that. I should just be sitting with the pain. That second arrow coming in, your brain coming in to create a story and create understanding, sometimes it can be very helpful for you. But I think it is important to distinguish like your brain is helping you in that regard versus situations that I think a lot of people end up in, in non-monogamy. And I'm sure you've been there personally and seen a lot of people go through this personally where you're like, I'm agreeing to all this. Nothing's happening that's not above board. I am motivated. I want to be supportive here. I chose this. I want to encourage my partner, so it's not like anything quote unquote wrong is happening or I am being hurt or wronged, but I'm just not feeling the compersion or not feeling the encouragement, right? And that's what I think that this model is really, really helpful for people to pay attention to the ways that they're creating a certain amount of unnecessary suffering around that.
Marie: Exactly. A lot of people come in and say like, I'm experiencing compersion mentally, like I'm going on board.
Dedeker: Oh, yes.
Marie: But there's something grumbling in my gut that doesn't leave me alone. And oh, that's uncomfortable. What do I do with that?
Dedeker: And that really ties the work that I've been doing for a number of years as a somatic practitioner, which is the fact that in relationships and in non-monogamy, that is so common. This idea that your brain can be on board and everything from the neck down is not. Your brain can be like, yes, I can logic my way to compersion, or I can logic my way to why I should be feeling compersion, or I should be feeling positively about my partner dating somebody else, but my stomach is all messed up. I'm feeling shaky. I'm sweating. I've got a knot in my chest. All of these things that could happen from the neck down, that's really, really, really normal. And I think that sometimes that can make it worse. It is just so freaking difficult just to sit with primary pain and just to sit with uncomfortable sensations in the body. It is so, so, so, so difficult to sit with it, to not create stories around it, to not rush to try to fix it or try to alleviate it. And I think the more that time has gone on, where we've grown to in our culture is this increasing, increasing, increasing intolerance for the slightest amount of discomfort in our bodies. That's why it's so easy for us to check out at any single moment with our phones, right? At the moment that you get bored, or it's so easy to just kind of try to obliterate our feelings by self-medicating or turning into substances or distracting ourselves with whatever. We've really kind of lost, well, I won't say that we've lost something, but I will say that we've really gained a good skill at avoiding everything from the neck down. I'll put it that way. For myself, especially right now in this particular chapter of life, as I'm kind of sitting in uncertainty and a lack of knowing how certain relationships are going to turn out, or right now I'm working on a big project that I've been working on for like a year and I don't know how it's going to go. It is just really confronted to me so many times just how hard it is to just sit with the feelings of discomfort and not knowing. It's just so hard because to sit with it and to actually feel it, I think it forces us to accept discomfort and disturbance and uncertainty as a part of life, as a part of our relationships, as a part of being human. And that can be really, really deep confronting stuff. And so I think it makes sense why it's so easy for our brains to override that for us.
Marie: But would you say that that is the process of removing the second arrow? It is to sit with those embodied emotions?
Dedeker: Most of the time, I think yes. I want to put a big asterisk on that because I will say that for some people, yes, it is the right time where if you've identified, if your brain can identify that you feel safe enough, right? So you're not in active danger, you have access to a certain amount of security. If you can identify your relationship or relationships, they're not actively on the rocks right now, somebody's not actively abusing you, right? Again, once we've controlled for all of those variables, and for you, it's just kind of your own internal stuff coming up. Yes, I do think that I would encourage people to experiment with just sitting for 5 minutes with what the feeling is that's coming up in your body. It's hour 3 of your partner being gone on a date, and maybe a first date or a second date where you're not sure, you're gonna stay out with the person, they're gonna come home, I don't know. You reach that edge of where the uncertainty of what's gonna happen is becoming really uncomfortable for you. That's a really good moment to just pause Netflix literally for 5 minutes and throw your phone in the garbage for 5 minutes and just set a 5-minute timer, right? And a 5-minute timer of just seeing what do I actually feel? Is it a tightening in my throat? Is it a tightening in my jaw? Is it a shakiness that's in my stomach? And purely just getting curious about the sensation without any judgment, without trying to manage it. So you're not trying to make it go away, you're not trying to create a particular story around it. And usually I find that when people do this, one of two, or I'll say one of three things tends to happen. One is that sometimes people are surprised that it shifts into something else, right? So it started as this discomfort in my stomach, and then as I sat with it, it went to my throat and then it went down to my feet, right? So people notice that it shifts, that it tends to not stay static. Another thing that tends to happen for people is that sometimes when they actually sit with a physical sensation, it becomes a very, very clear pathway that opens up often like memories, sometimes from childhood or memories from a past painful relationship. Often when you actually sit with a sensation and not just with the storytelling, it becomes very clear to people very quickly like, ooh, this is from when I was 12 years old. This is what, my body is remembering that. Wow, that's interesting. And again, that's just like insight. Or the third thing that happens sometimes is literally you just feel it for 5 minutes and then it goes away. And it doesn't mean that then what comes whooshing in is all the joy and compersion. That's never happened to me. But it is just like there are so many emotions and feelings that come up for us that really just want to be felt and not suppressed and not distracted away from. They just want to let themselves be felt. And then once they're felt, then they shift into something else. But it does require that courage to be able to actually just sit with it for about 5 minutes or so. My caveat again, my asterisk on that is, Shinzen Young, who's another mindfulness teacher, he talks about how sometimes you just can't ignore the second arrow. Sometimes the story around it is just too loud. It is too painful. It is too old. It is too overwhelming to just drop and let it go away. In which case, what he recommends is you can just do the same thing, right? So instead of getting all caught up and like, okay, I have this primary pain of feeling lonely while my partner's gone, and also, oh my God, this story about how I keep failing at this, I keep failing at this, I keep failing at this. And like maybe that story of I keep failing at this again is too old, too loud, too powerful to just try to drop it. In which case you kind of take the same approach, which is also leaning into it, like letting that tape keep running, letting that tape keep running. And it's kind of like if you then can resist shooting yourself with a third arrow, then that's kind of the practice. So again, that story of I keep failing at this, I keep failing at this, I keep failing at this, it's like that comes with its own energy and its own sensations to feel into as well.
Marie: Yes, that's so important. Thank you for that caveat. I see it in terms of creating and dismantling inner wars. If we're waging one war against our emotions, but then we're waging a second war against the part that's waging the first war, we're caught in such a fuzzy hairball, it's gonna be easier to deal with the other.
Dedeker: Yes. Yeah. And I want to— I feel like, I mean, I could talk for many more hours about spiritual bypassing, 'cause I've been great at it historically. Again, there's this other really wonderful Alan Watts quote where he says, "You're not a stone Buddha." Like, you're not a stone Buddha statue, you're a living Buddha. And when a living Buddha gets hit on the head, she says, "Ouch." And so again, I think that's another reminder for people that around the discomfort of this, again, it's not about, I sit with it and I meditate through it until it's all gone and then I'm just enlightened and then nothing my partner does or doesn't do affects me, no, you're a living human being. Part of this is you being a human being. And sometimes we say ouch, like, really, you should be saying ouch about getting hit with an arrow, about the first arrow, and it's okay. It's okay to say ouch about it.
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Marie: I love that. I love that. Yes, yes, we are humans and emotions are not our enemies. Ultimately, the way—
Dedeker: So...
Marie: People who might be listening and thinking to themselves like, well, if I don't have the second arrow, if I don't question my primary emotions, if I don't kind of fight against my jealousy, am I just going to turn into an asshole? Am I just going to turn into an eyeball to weaponize my jealousy against my partner? Is there going to be no checks and balances?
Dedeker: I see. So the idea that the second arrow is being the check and balance on what happens when the primary pain moves through you.
Marie: Right. Especially when primary pain is of a certain nature that wants to attack and wants to hit back. And oftentimes jealousy carries that energy of—
Dedeker: Yes.
Marie: Hurt somebody.
Dedeker: Well, I think this is going to be a callback to the blog that I wrote about hatred. A few years ago when I was on retreat with a Zen teacher, it was very confronting when he said to me, well, let me back up a little bit. I go on silent retreat about once a year or so, and it is so fascinating, all the emotions that you go through on a silent retreat. And for me, amazing how I can have full emotional relationships with people that I'm not even talking to. Like just people in my space. And the ones that stick with me the most are the people where I'm just like, I hate this person for no reason. Like literally I'm just picking up on like, of course they sit like that, or of course they're gonna make that noise, or of course they always wanna sit down next to me. It's so fascinating how much we can project. And this Zen teacher talked about how we're so trained into like, hatred, that's the feeling you should never feel. You should never ever feel hatred. You should never say that you hate something. But he's like, "But you know what?" Like literally his quote was like, "Good little boys and good little girls still feel hatred." We still have those moments where we see someone and it's just like, "I really wish you weren't here," right? Or wish you would just disappear. And that's not to say that it's the most wholesome mind state to be in all the time, but it is just a feeling and a body sensation that is completely out of our control to feel it. And when I say hatred, it's that also extends to other unwholesome feelings like envy, like jealousy, like anger and rage that when it comes up in you, it's highly unlikely that we chose in that moment, yeah, this is the thing that I wanna feel right now. And so I do think that practice of setting the 5-minute timer, letting yourself feel the body sensation can help because you do realize literally just sensations in your body in the same way that if your stomach grumbles, and you didn't pick for it to grumble. Your stomach is doing the thing that stomachs do. So the sensations of jealousy, of envy, of aggression, whatever it is that's coming up, it's like those are not within our control. And of course, what is in our control, at least the Buddhist way of putting it, is that is our actions, right? That our actions are the only ground on which we stand. And so, I guess the question is, I could understand why we might have the story that, well, I have to beat myself up for feeling jealous because if I don't shame myself and beat myself up for feeling jealous, then I guess I would just fly off the handle and do something terrible or something like that. But I can understand why I think in our brains we might create— it seems to check out on paper. The reality with most people though, I find, is like, if you're already self-conscious about not feeling compersion, to me, I read that as like, you already have enough of an observer that is online that is gonna keep you from just destroying the house the minute that you start to have those feelings that come up.
Marie: Right. That's a good point. And that kind of inner observer, that awareness of what is happening for me and why and where is there a gap between those primary emotions and my value system? I mean, I think that's kind of the key, to practice mindfulness, which is kind of a wide umbrella term to talk about different kinds of meditation or really awareness states that allow us to slow down the reaction and being able to respond rather than react to primary pain points. And in the middle of that, I think there is an opportunity for self-compassion. Instead of self-shame and self-judgment. Develop the practice of observing and then actually sending ourselves love and compassion for what we are observing, the parts of us that are in pain, because of course we are human and we are going to be in pain. And then to the best of our ability, choose a response that's aligned with our value system.
Dedeker: I know something that's been very helpful for me because I historically have definitely been one of those who's judged and shamed myself for feeling jealousy or feeling insecure, right? It has not helped, having so many years of experience in Polyamory. It has not helped being someone who creates content around non-monogamy because then it becomes even easier to tell that story. Well, I should know better by now than to not feel this thing, right? And so, it's like, I'm definitely one of those where I can shame myself out of, or try to shame myself out of feeling jealous. When I do that, it also hampers my ability to be honest with a partner about what I'm feeling. So that's one piece of it. But the other piece of it though is that I've found that the more that I cannot engage with that second arrow, the more that I can not engage with the storytelling, the shame, the judgment, the resistance, that frees me up to then say something like, we're talking about this right now and I'm just noticing, I don't know, I'm noticing my chest feels a little bit weird. I'm just gonna take 10 minutes. I'm gonna go take a 10-minute walk, right? And just kind of see what that's about and feel that and then come back. And for me, that feels weirdly, maybe this is just me, that feels like both a more vulnerable thing to say to a partner, but also a less activating thing than like, I'm jealous about this, I'm insecure about this, you need to fix this. Or like, tell me, let me tell you my emotion and make it your problem. And it's a little bit more in real time of like, ooh, yeah, this has brought up something for me, and let me figure out what it is. That enabled me to— gosh, this happened probably a year ago or so, where my partner was out on a date. It was a relatively new connection. And it was, again, the same thing where everything was operating according to how it should have been operating. I wasn't being lied to or hurt in some way. Like everything was above board. But then, in the middle of when he was gone, I had this weird feeling come up. And I decided to sit with it almost instantaneously. As soon as I sat with it, I had that experience of like, oh my God, I just had this memory when I was 12 of this thing that happened with my parents. And I had never thought about that memory ever, basically had never connected it to any of my own insecurities or feelings. And it just suddenly came up. It was like this, oh yeah, my body totally has reproduced this same feeling that I remember. I was able to chew on that, reflect on that. And then it wasn't until months later that I got to share with him that of like, hey, this thing came up for me. And it wasn't about you did something wrong because you didn't do something wrong. It wasn't about the other person did something wrong because they didn't. And it wasn't about I did something wrong. It was just like, whoa, I noticed that these conditions that I was in made me remember this thing. And then I had this weird body sensation. And isn't that interesting? And I think that it enabled me to not only have more curiosity about what was going on, but enabled him to have more curiosity about what happened to me. So it's like the point is that often in my work, especially in my somatic work, is I'm kind of trying to convince people like you have everything from the neck down, you have a whole treasure trove of things to discover. And I know that right now it feels like walking into a house of horrors, but I'm gonna help you walk through so that it doesn't feel like as much of a house of horrors. And then over time, as you sit with it more, you start to realize that it really is this treasure trove of a lot of insight and wisdom about how you tick and why you feel the things that you feel when you feel them. That's the juicy stuff that excites me about my work with people.
Marie: Yeah. And I love how that, what you just explained, being able to really inquire about what's inside of us with curiosity rather than harsh judgment can be done both personally, for us to sit with our own body, our own emotion, do so much of that process of investigation and discovery, but also with a partner when we feel safe and we sort of have that agreement that we want to help each other and that second arrow, and make room for what is true and what's emergent and what is coming up. And practicing the art and the skill of communicating about difficult emotions without blaming each other.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Marie: I think that is such a key and it's not something that we do spontaneously. And I'm working on that in my own relationships, getting about my pain without blaming myself or blaming the other.
Dedeker: Yes.
Marie: Yeah. Like kind of being a, being co-investigators and co-explorers.
Dedeker: Yeah. I like co-explorers for sure. This is also making me think of, to rope the Buddhism piece back into it, the more that you're able to hang out with everything that happens from the neck down, I find that for me, it's opened up kind of many more shades and flavors of what compersion actually feels like for me. Because over the course of the 15 or so years that I've been practicing non-monogamy, of course I've had the moments of, I shouldn't say of course, because it doesn't happen for everybody. But I've had the handful of experiences of compersion that feels like fireworks. I'm like, oh my God, I feel so joyful. And my partner's joy. Wow, I'm so happy that this happens for them. Again, that's a minimum of my experience. It's not, I wouldn't call it normal by any chance, but it has happened. The more that I've learned to be present and to get curious about what's happening in my body, the more I've started to see like, oh, there can be these very, very tiny, very subtle shifts around joy, around gratitude, around safety, around ease, even in circumstances where a partner is out with somebody else. And I think, I'm pretty sure it was Thich Nhat Hanh, or it could have been Ajahn Chah. I confuse their quotes all the time, so my apologies if I get this wrong. I think it was Ajahn Chah who talked about how when you have a toothache, it's all you can think about, right? It's intensely painful and it takes up all of your awareness. And the only thing that you wanna feel when you're wracked with the pain of a toothache is to not feel the pain anymore. And we don't realize that on a day-to-day basis, you're feeling that, he calls it like the not toothache sensation all the time. Like if your teeth aren't hurting, right? But we don't think about it 'cause it's part of our day-to-day experience. And I think that something similar can happen with things like jealousy, insecurity, fear around non-monogamy is that, yeah, when you're acutely in it, it's like the worst thing in the world, right? If you're under a complete attack of jealousy or fear, insecurity, it's awful. And the only thing you want is to not feel that. But then we don't tune into that kind of not jealousy sensation the rest of the time if we're feeling safe. And for me, I feel like that's also a flavor of compersion is just like, oh, in this moment, maybe I'm not feeling those fireworks of compersion and extreme gratitude, but I'm also not under complete duress, that extreme pain and fear. Like, I'm not feeling that either. And sometimes kind of feeling into the neutrality or even the quietness there. Again, to me, I've started to put that under the umbrella of shades of compersion.
Marie: I just love that. Yeah. And that totally matches my research in terms of mapping the terrain of compersion and it not just being this one kind of stereotypical definition or archetypal thing of, "I'm so happy and I'm so bubbly because you're with someone else and you're happy and like, oh my gosh, I want to hear every detail." But those kind of quieter flavors, like you said, like benevolent neutrality is one of those I talk about in my book and attitudinal compersion, which my research participants described as this low-pitch compersion. It's just like quiet, positive interpretation of your partner's other relationships. And yes, we can call it maybe a little more cognitive than embodied, or it can just be this quiet emotional contentment state. And yet many people would not call it compersion, but I do.
Dedeker: Yeah, I mean, why not? Like, why not make the game easier for us by expanding the flavors and definitions? Exactly.
Marie: It has been so interesting and so illuminating. I feel like we could talk for so much longer, but I would love to say to be continued because there's so much more to explore, I think, at the intersection of Ethical Non-Monogamy (CNM) and Buddhist philosophy and your Buddhist philosophy.
Dedeker: Buddhish, yes.
Marie: Oh, that was for a lot of nuance. I love that. So thank you so much for agreeing to have a conversation and start discovering those topics.
Dedeker: Yeah, definitely. No, thank you so much for having me on. If anyone's interested, if you're not familiar with Multiamory already, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. And the three of us, I'm the most Buddhish of the three. However, the three of us are pretty Buddhist-friendly. And so we regularly kind of stealthily or sometimes less stealthily slide these topics into our episode roster as well. So if you're interested in more of this, then please check out the podcast.
Marie: Amazing. And if you're interested in compersion, check out my book, What Is Compersion? Very easy to find. So thank you so much to everyone who's tuned in. And thank you, Dedeker Winston. I can't wait to keep exploring these topics. It's always so illuminating. It makes me want to go write 10 other books.
Dedeker: I hope that this conversation was helpful to you. And if you want to find more of Marie, you can find her on Instagram @drmariethouin. So that's @drmariethouin. The best place to share your thoughts on this episode with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post about it in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Jase Lindgren, and me, Dedeker Winston. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is "Forms I Know I Did" by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on multiamory.com.