1 July 2009

From Guilt to Compersion

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Abandoned industrial building on Washington Ave. in Kingston, NY. I don’t think it was the scene of a fire, unless someone installed a new telephone in the building after it burned down.

Any definition of compersion that you read will tell you that it’s the opposite of jealousy. That is useful, but it doesn’t tell you how to get there. I have another idea, which is that it’s the opposite of guilt. Of course it’s a little crude to define something by its supposedly opposing force, but this adjustment may help orient the concept in a way that makes it more accessible.

I’ll start with an example. Let’s say I am with a lover and our agreement includes her having the freedom to explore sexually and emotionally with whomever she chooses. I will handle that two ways. The first by having the confidence that she wants me in her life; that what I have to offer, she cannot find anywhere else. In part, compersion is based on trust, and it’s based on having a strong relationship to someone. To a meaningful degree, compersion is based on self-confidence.

Second, more basic, is that I love her free. I love her capacity to make choices, to explore her desires and to give herself what she wants. I’m willing to hold the space for this as a relationship partner. It helps that I’m capable of being deeply turned on not only by what she does but also by who she is.

That is compersion: recognizing intuitively that she defines who she is, and that if I actually love her, that’s going to feel good. Well, it will if I’m feeling balanced and have some basic needs met, so I have incentive to do that.

Looked at one way, I am giving her the freedom to not feel guilty about her emotional and erotic feelings. The way I am doing that is not by turning the other direction; not by tolerating her; but by appreciating and being turned on by who she is and what she does. It’s not my intellectual ‘consent’ that has the ability to help her unhook any potential guilt she might feel by having a life outside the relationsihp; it’s my soul-level, intuitive and emotional response to her existence and her experiences that actually assert her freedom.

Most people who would dare in some way to explore emotionally or sexually outside their primary partnership – that is, who cross the line, in the words of Mark Sanford – will feel guilty about what they’ve done, no matter how right it felt at the time. And this is true even of many who have the consent of their partners.

Guilt is a complex emotion, and in Gestalt terms it boils down to resentment at feeling powerless and controlled, which is directed at oneself when it’s really about rage at someone else. Said another way, it’s resentment (a form of anger) turned against itself.

We all feel guilt. The bigger problem is that most of the time our relationships have guilt as one of their most tangibly exchanged emotional mediums. We think it’s normal and we think it’s a healthy or at least practical way to govern our emotional interactions with others. It is neither; it’s like wrapping one another in barbed wire, holding onto the end of one another’s threads.

It is probably easier to release your partner from any obligation of guilt toward you than it is for you to ask them to release you. That does not necessarily set them free; but it does open the way. You can release yourself as the one capable of compersion. When we build relationships and interpersonal communities that are based on allowing one another the space to be who we are, that is compersion.

29 June 2009

Compersion: Love as Space

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Photo by Eric Francis.

This article is being discussed on the Planet Waves blog.

There are good reasons compersion feels like such a radical idea; why for example feeling good about your partner’s relationship with someone else feels so radical. It does; to most, the notion seems unconscionable. There are the ordinary ones: we ‘don’t want to think about that kind of thing’ or we equate monogamy (or the appearance of monogamy) with loyalty. That loyalty is the razor’s edge between being ‘with someone’ and ‘being alone’.

But let’s say you’re willing to go past the primal fear; you’re willing to think about it, even willing to feel it, and it starts to make sense that your partner is free and part of that freedom is opening the space inside yourself and in the relationship for them to have any experience they want. Let’s say you figure out that logic leaves you no choice but to extend your partner all the freedom they want or need.

What is so loving about attempting to define, limit or control the emotions or experiences of another person? Nothing at all; we just call it love to make it sound nice. Not all monogamous relationships have this as their basis, but we tend to see and experience this dynamic pretty frequently.

Then let’s say you sort out the difference between loyalty and monogamy. This is a big one, as just this morning a friend was telling me about her soon-to-be ex-husband and father of her kids hounding her over who was the subject of poems she wrote when she was sixteen years old.

If we’ve done these two things, we’ve covered the superficial basics of the issue. But we might feel disoriented; we typically use jealousy and the fear of jealousy perhaps more than any other force to orient in our relationships; if someone is jealous, you ‘know they love you’. If they are not jealousy, then you might wonder. Let’s say you see the madness of this, as well.

Now finally we can come to the subtler and more complex matters such as how we attach our identity and our gender identity to our role in our relationships. This would allow us to explore compersion as being specifically about releasing those moorings within our relationships, and then by extension, in a much wider social space; it’s pretty clear that society is organized around the concept of a one-on-one relationship, the experience of one, or spending your entire life seeking one.

I believe this is similar to coming out of the closet as some other sexual orientation, which is often about a complete re-evaluation of the same things: gender identity and the role our society tells us we’re supposed to have in our relationships, our communities and so on.

I’ll give you an example, using gender pronouns and a heterosexual framework. Once you’re in an established relationship with a man, you’re supposed to be the only woman, or the most important woman, in his life. That may be the difference people have in mind when they make a distinction between ‘friendship’ and ‘relationship’.

This immediately establishes a structure, indeed, power structure. The idea of a structure defines space: this relationship is at the top, or at the center, and the rest are beneath it, or around it. Within the relationship, someone is likely to be more confident and someone likely to be less confident; someone is likely to have a more pronounced control agenda and someone is likely to have a more submissive tendency. So the power structure is related to the structure of the relationship within what I will call social space.

When we add a factor like being free to experience intimacy with another person, the entire power structure has to be reorganzied, or rather, it is reorganized around that fact. For example, are both partners free to explore intimacy and pleasure? Is it equally easy or difficult for both partners to be present for the other person’s experiences? Do both have an equal desire to do so, or does one person have more of a desire; or even one person want to, and the other does not want to?

When that couple walks into a room, the entire shape of the social structure changes around their particular relationship choices. But closer to the nucleus, within each of those individuals, they must dismantle certain expectations they were taught to have about relationships. For example, if you expect to be the most important woman in someone’s life, or even the ‘only woman’ (which to some extent all woman expect from a relationship with a partner), one must entirely reorganize that psychic structure and indeed many others in order to be with a person who is free to explore other intimacies. You need to change powerful expectations, and those expectations have defined who you are.

As we know from gender studies, that definition is often political in nature. So this is a pretty radical change in how you relate to yourself and to society. For example, there are plenty of subcultures where someone’s personhood is dependent up on having a monogamous partner, or the appearance of one. And without that certification of monogamy, one’s personhood can be reduced; it can be shamed; it can be trivialized; one can be seen as a threat to the other monogamous partnerships that surround them (which must not in fact be so monogamous, given the extent of the threat).

All of this, from wanting to explore intimacy outside your primary partnership? Or from wanting to open the space for your partner to do so? Yes – that’s what I think is involved, and what I’ve experienced. It’s not only a complete reorientation within social space, it’s a reorientation within one’s inner space. This is not easy to communicate; I will see if I can describe how that feels in the next entry.

27 June 2009

for yourself

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Geneve. Photo by Eric Francis.

Along the way I recognized something simple, but which turned out to be the core of my struggle: the other side of compersion is feeling it for myself; and this means approving of my own desires and my experiences; loving myself for granting myself freedom and for being open to my particular kind of emotional pleasure. There is also something here about experiencing myself as equal to the beauty I see and feel. I think this experience has more to do with imagination than I thought previously.

In little bits, I have set my imagination free. I had plenty of help from art, mostly the process of making art, which I used as an excuse to allow me to experiment in many different ways I might not have otherwise. Creating art is an experiment in freedom. That is the simplest way to put it.

Kelly Day’s mom once accused of her of being an artist so she could do anything she wanted; to which Kelly said, you got it. But sometimes art gets an opportunity to use me, or we take each other out for a ride.

That evening I was sitting in my friend Stefan’s pizzeria, talking to his wife’s parents. I adore his wife, Cait, and by extension I include her parents in the spiritual container of that love. We were having a fabulous time.

Her dad was telling surveillance stories from the streets of New York, where he worked for a long time in Manhattan as a high level tactical cop for the fed. We were getting the nonclassified stories; when you’re on an observation mission you see a lot of things unrelated to what you’re actually looking for, and he was telling one story better than the next, culminating with the one about the little old lady walking very slowly across the street.

A driver in a car at the light became impatient when the light turned green; she was not going so fast. So he started to lean on the horn, hoping to speed her up a little. The lady, in reply, whacked the front of his car with her handbag, tripping a switch, blowing up the airbag in the guy’s face. She had no idea this even happened. She just kept walking. A skateboard guy with a video camera caught the thing on tape and it became an internet sensation for a while.

Hearing this kind of story firsthand is one of my favorite forms of entertainment on the entire planet, and I was laughing till I cried on a few occasions.

This being said, I kept noticing the young woman in the yellow dress.

I was noticing how she moved across the restaurant, such as her hips and the way her legs glided. I was trying to figure out if I recognized her or not.

Her face made me want to melt into a hot puddle. It didn’t seriously occur to me to talk to her. I never imagined she would be interested. Then our paths intersected. While I was going upstairs to retrieve a photograph, she and her friends were standing around outside. And I said, “Do you guys belong to a theater troupe?”

Her friend, a dark, weathered woman who looked like she was visiting from the rainforest, said, “In fact yes, well sort of, we’re all involved with the same television crew” and so on. She asked how I knew and I didn’t say, “well, what I really meant was your friend here looks like some kind of very talented actress.” I played my opening line off and introduced myself as the neighborhood fine art photographer, invited them to see my little gallery, and Rain Forest looked at her friend in the yellow dress and said, “Oh, you should let him photograph you.”

She asked if I worked at night. “Come on up!” I suggested; there were about five of them. Her friend in the yellow dress was game and I shook her hand and introduced myself; she said her name was Geneve. There were also three men. Everyone came up. I offered them wine and other libations from my private stock.

After a while, Geneve and I went into the photo playspace and began creating images of her. I don’t know how it happens but her face evokes such emotion in me, such yearning for freedom and I think a closer glimpse of humanity. Something about her face reminds me how beautiful all women are. Honoring that freedom and that beauty, witnessing it, and my own impulse to experience it are the rudiments of compersion.

26 June 2009

Compersion

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Tori. Photo by Eric Francis.

Compersion may be the one way we reach across the distance between us. I could describe it as any factor assisting us do that, any boat that gets us over the emotional ocean that seems to separate human beings. Anything that helps us remember we’re soaking in the same water.

The original definition is usually thought of as the opposite of jealousy, or as feeling good about your lover having a beautiful experience with someone else. Yet so much growth is usually needed to get there that it feels like more of a Zen path, or Firewalking for Amateurs.

I often questioned myself as to why I needed to feel this. This may relate to liberty: the transcendent freedom of allowing another person to feel what they will feel, what they want and need to feel; which is another way of saying, allowing them to be who they are.

Jealousy is a fundamentally controlling emotion. So to embrace something else what we are letting go of is control. It’s also about embracing love while unafraid of being alone.

25 June 2009

Rhyming in

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Zoe West. Photo by Eric Francis.

At the moment I’m on the overnight break between finishing writing Planet Waves and the morning production session. I’ve got a Band concert called The Last Waltz blasting, an appropriate theme for these days where so many we’ve heard of have, known and loved have crossed the dimension.

It’s been nice taking a break here. I’ve spent my Blue time redoing the commercial side of the website and dusting out the corners of the studio with my intern Fizz. Tonight as the thunder rumbled overhead, blasting the Nirvana Unplugged dvd on the other iMac, we organized a closet and a storage area as I bounced between that and tomorrow’s article, Beyond Hopeless.

As usual I’ve written a lot of slippery hot emails late at night and made a few new friends; masturbated with a few new friends; moved with a lover through the death of a parent for the first time in my life. While her father was dying, my father called me from his lawyer’s office to get my ss number for some legal maneuvers surrounding his will.

Solstice morning a woman invited me to cum all over her pussy and lick it up; an honor I never imagined I would have in our particular time of world. I did not photograph this but there may be a next time. This has been such an 8th house journey this year. There are days I really feel like someone new.

I’ve been feeling out where I want to go with this Blue story, where I want to spread myself, and I circle around to compersion again and again. What is this feeling, of wanting your lover to have the hottest sex of her life. Do we have to ask if this is a good thing?

14 June 2009

Short break

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Photo by Eric Francis.

I need to take a short break from writing this series. It may be a day, it may be a week, it may be a year. In the past few days I’ve been involved in some stunning photography sessions, and I need to let those processes catch up with me and vice versa. And I need to feel which way I’m moving. Which once again does seem to be inward. I think it may be like breathing, this cycle of human relations.

There are additional archives, below and to the left, quite a few in and out breaths – or maybe just one.

If you’re in the mood, you’re invited to write to me at egg@bookofblue.com. Detailed emails invited, too.

Yours from Six-D

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