Welcome to "That Other Lifestyle Podcast," where host Jason delves into the world of ethical non-monogamy discussing the essence of compersion - a unique form of happiness derived from witnessing another's joy. Join us on a unique journey towards nurturing compersion in relationships, exploring insightful metaphors, and contrasting societal norms.
In this enlightening episode, learn to combat 'the pinch,' a sense of missing out, and effectively handle jealousy and resentment. With compelling analogies, Jason helps listeners understand how compersion in relationships is akin to caring for a garden, transforming potential 'weeds' of negative feelings into blossoming happiness.
Whether you're new or familiar with compersion, this insightful episode is perfect for you. Enrich your lifestyle and learn how to sow seeds of joy in your relationship garden. An open-stage for all backgrounds, we're here to share an understanding of ethical non-mongamy in a frank, honest narrative.
Caution: This episode contains adult content and language. Intended only for mature listeners.
We delve into deep discussions around compersion, crucial to strengthening both marital and external relationships. Our talk underscores the necessity to maintain open lines of communication to confront any arising negative feelings, and the importance of not suppressing them.
With an enlightening analogy of compersion to gardening, we highlight the need for constant nurturing of relationship plants. We extend the philosophy of compersion beyond sexual relationships, explaining how this mindset attracts positivity in our daily interactions and life overall.
We conclude by emphasizing the importance of mental health coupled with the emotional well-being of your significant other. We invite everyone to discover and explore compersion and its possible rewards.
Transcript
Speaker1: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you may be, I hope you have blue skies and tell a friend about the lifestyle. Welcome to that other lifestyle podcast. I am your host, Jason. Take a listen and let's leave vanilla behind. In the lifestyle and the world of ethical non-monogamy, the conversation about compersion is never truly done. There are always little nuances to the concept of compersion. I did a previous episode on what is compersion and how to embrace it. Go listen to that one. That's your homework. Today, we are talking about how to cultivate compersion in your relationship and in yourself and gardens. I promise that's going to make sense. Subscribing to the podcast is free and fun. Hit that subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening at. I promise you may have an orgasm or two. You don't believe me? Try it. I'm hosting a live webinar on Thursday, May 23rd, 2024 at 6 p.m. Eastern time zone on sdc.com. Please come hang out with me. You can see me live, kind of, virtually in person, ask questions about the lifestyle and meet me. If you don't have an sdc account you can find a link to sign up for a trial account on my website that of the lifestyle dot com i do have a patreon patreon.com slash that of the lifestyle head over there if you want ad-free episodes and other spicy bonus content please note this podcast is intended for adults only it is not safe for work we will talk about adult or sexual topics and i will use salty language often. This content is for for adults only. It is not safe for work. We will talk about adult or sexual topics, and I will use salty language often. This content is for entertainment purposes only, and again, only for those over 18 years of age. I also try to be as inclusive with my language and terms as I can. It can be challenging to formulate and write and say all the inclusive terms in every instance. For simplicity's sake and time management, I may use terms like husband or wife or partner or spouse for the purpose of the narrative I'm sharing. This podcast is for everyone though, no matter your background, gender identity, gender expression, or whatever truth you may be living. Everyone is welcome, no matter how you personally experience a lifestyle or ethical non-monogamy. I want to do another episode building on the idea of compersion and how to actively cultivate these feelings. Talking it over with my wife, I'll run some errands over the weekend. She had one of those brilliant flashes of insight and inspiration. Of course, I was driving and I couldn't write any of it down. She compared compersion to a garden that must be cultivated and tended. Then she started connecting the dots and describing how different aspects of gardening is like compersion. This whole time, I am telling her please slow down so I remember it all and I can put it in this episode. The garden analogy for cultivating, increasing, and getting better at compersion. This whole time, I am telling her, please slow down, so I remember it all and I can put it in this episode. The garden analogy for cultivating, increasing, and getting better at compersion is just fucking awesome. It fits so damn well. So let's talk about gardening and compersion. For those dropping in on this episode, hanging out with me for the first time, hey, welcome, thanks for listening. What is compersion? Compersion is also called sympathetic joy. Compersion is the pure happiness you feel when others experience joy. It is a selfless feeling, not just a sex thing. It is sympathetic joy for another that does not directly involve you, nor was the joy that other person feels caused by you. Maybe your spouse received an award at work. You feel happy for him. You had nothing to do with him getting that award, but you're still happy for them. Your kid hits a home run, and you can see the pride on their faces, which causes cheerful feelings in you. Compersion applies to many life situations outside of the lifestyle. It is joy for another. Compersion is a really big deal in the polyamory world. A person may have a primary partner, so think like a spouse, and their spouse dates another person. There is compersion in seeing their spouse happy with another person. The thought is my spouse is having a nice date with someone they really like. I am happy for them being joyful and that happiness is not directly a result of anything I did or that involves me. In the lifestyle, compersion may manifest when your partner has a great sexual experience with another person, which in turn causes you to feel good. It's not a kink or a fetish. It could be, but generally it's a good feeling that two people share in the lifestyle together. Compersion is an emotion that enhances our enjoyment of this hobby. A lot of people I talk to say they are happy when their spouse is being sexually fulfilled or flirted with or is a person of interest of another. They do not know the word for that feeling, though. You enjoy seeing your spouse have a good time, but what do you call it? That word is compersion. What if you don't feel compersion, though? The thought of your spouse with another person, you think it's cool, no particularly negative feelings about it, but you don't feel any overwhelming sense of happiness from it. You are not broken. You are valid and okay. Compersion is not necessary to enjoy the lifestyle. Compersion is a muscle that must be exercised and conditioned. That's why I wanted to do this episode. If you're a person who thinks, I don't feel compersion, or you wonder how to increase that feeling, that's why I'm here to help out. We must actively cultivate our feelings of compersion for each other and for our spouses. If you are new to the lifestyle, this is a totally alien concept you may be encountering for the first time. The thought of your spouse with another person may turn you on, though society tells you that is wrong, like super wrong. How dare you have that nutty little feeling? This is wrong, because in the view of the vanilla world traditional monogamy you should not have this feeling the thought of your spouse with another person that should upset you and cause jealousy and anger and bitterness that's why we're different we are okay with these new feelings we acknowledge them maybe we act on them there's nothing wrong with compersion nothing wrong with being sexually excited by the thought of your spouse with another person. That's where compersion clicks in. Granted, it's not an easy feeling to experience at first because we are told our whole lives that anything approaching this feeling is nasty and dirty and wrong. It's not. Not at all. Is joy bad? Is happiness bad? Society teaches us that any kind of joy is bad. All kinds of joy, not just compersion. How many times have you been happy in your life? Maybe you had a great vacation and you came back to work all smiles and you were met with people looking to tear you down. You go to a family gathering and have to deal with that one jackass relative who does nothing but insult you the whole time. Family can be total shitheads and just because we are related does not mean i have to put up with them nor like them people will actively try to make us feel bad bitter mean people who cannot stand the thought of someone else being happy for any reason they are horrible people and you know at least one person in your life that you are forced to deal with who never wants anyone around them to be happy for any reason. For some stupid reason, we are taught in the vanilla world that cheerfulness is bad. If someone else has happiness, then we must ruin it, pour salt on it, and steal it. There's a prevailing attitude that there is only so much happiness in the world and that it's a finite resource. If someone else is happy, then that means someone else is not happy. This is all bullshit. It is a scarcity mentality being applied to an emotion that everyone is capable of and can feel any time, perpetuated by greed, marketing, and the ideal that there's only so much of a particular resource to go around. Joy and happiness are infinite. They are not limited in any way. I've said it before. A single candle can light a thousand lights and never be diminished. That's one of the really cool aspects of compersion. It is accepting that joy can exist outside of ourselves, independent of us, and that's okay. We do not have to hoard happiness or snatch it away from others. Other people are allowed to be happy for reasons and causes that do not involve us.
Speaker2:
In the lifestyle, this is expressed by our ability to be delighted for our spouses, usually in a sexual way, but not always. Learning how to embrace and grow your feelings of compersion increases you and your spouse's contentment, not just with swinging, but life in general. And that is where that guarded analogy comes in. Oh my God, if it's so perfect. To foster compersion in our lives is as complicated or as simple as we make it. A plant will grow whether you create the perfect setting for it or it cracks in the concrete. Compersion is a seed. It can grow to a majestic tree or it can lay dormant. You cannot force it to grow, but you can give it the best environment possible to create a flower, create happiness, blossom in fruit, and become a tree one day. I am conflating a bunch of different types of plants here, but you get the point. How do we cultivate compersion? Like a garden, there's prep work, hard work, patience, and the right combination of factors, which good news, we can control like 90% of that. This compersion seed, we're going to run with this for a minute, stick with me.
Speaker1:
This seed exists within every single person. We all have the capacity to be happy for others. I believe what happens is we lose it. We lose the seed because it is so small, though it has so much potential. The world, society, other humans just kick us in the back of the head and laugh at us every chance they get. And when we stumble, the seed falls from our hands. But it's never really gone though. Every morning we wake up with a new chance to be happy, to be happy for others. So in our hand is a new compersion seed ready to be planted. Swerving wildly to the other side of this analogy. Gardens and plants. What makes plants happy? We need dirt. We need soil. We need sunlight. Not too much. Just enough. We need water. Again, not too much. Just enough. Maybe a pinch of fertilizer. What the hell does this have to do with human emotions? Stick with me. The soil for our compersion seed needs to be just right. Not too firm. Just like our hearts. You must have a good foundation in order to grow plants. And for compersion, a good foundation is a solid marriage built on trust and love. That is the soil we will plant the seed to grow. A relationship must have a good foundation to be successful at the lifestyle. And I ain't talking about success as in like the number of couples y'all may have sexy time with. No, success is measured by personal enjoyment. If y'all can never play and do anything, just stick to your own partner if you enjoy the lifestyle and everything else it brings, I call that a success. I don't know if you've ever planted a garden, but you have to get the soil just right. Not any old topsoil will do. You need that good dirt. And for the lifestyle, not every marriage is a right fit. Not to disparage anyone's marriage, but I know it takes a special connection with your partner to even bring up the subject of swinging. There has to be a connection that is strong and solid. You have to know that no matter what happens, you two are still together and okay. That may come with time or living through some hard shit together, or maybe it happens right off the bat. I know and you know there are some marriages, you can think of a couple, that are strong, but they're not a good fit for the lifestyle. If we're planning that seat of compersion properly, you must have the right soil and the right kind of marriage, free of jealousy, free of resentment and pettiness. It's hard to define what the right marriage looks like, and that is a personal decision for each couple. For a garden to grow, you need sunlight. Sunlight for us and our lifestyle is communication with our partners. There must be constant and honest communication. Plants will not grow in darkness, just compersion will not grow in the darkness of no communication and you have to be honest with your own feelings. Share with your partner when you feel good about an encounter and when you feel not good. That is some eloquent writing right there. Some plants like direct sunlight, some prefer shade, but they all need some sort of light just like our relationships need some sort of communication. Compersion can only grow when everything is out in the light. No hidden secrets, no darkness. You can only learn from bad encounters if you're honest. You can only grow in the lifestyle if you are honest with your spouse. Even the little things that are hard to define need to be talked through, like pinching. A friend of mine told me about the pinch, and I need to share this man's wisdom with the world. I have personally felt this feeling, and like most things in the lifestyle, did not have a word for it, didn't know how to express it, and damn it, this man came through for me and I appreciate it. The pinch. The pinch is when you feel like you missed out on the joy of another, be it your partner in a sexual manner or just missing out on the joy someone else is experiencing. Here's the example of giving a kid a present. Yeah, you want them to have the present and enjoy it, but you also want to be there when they open it for the first time and play with it. You want to be part of that feeling for them. And when you miss out on being able to experience their joy, it's like little pinch in your soul nothing major for sure but it's enough to notice it's enough to make you feel hollow or like you missed out it's enough to notice that something some little thing is off the rational brain can tell you that this other person still had fun and experienced joy but your lizard brain the emotional brain wanted to be a part of that joy. And all this translates to the lifestyle I promise. Your partner may get more attention at a party than you did, or there was a really good moment during a naughty escapade you wanted to be a part of and just miss the moment. Nothing intentional, just bad timing. Your attention was occupied at the exact moment you wanted to be watching something else. If you ever feel that pinch, talk to your partner about it. Tell them why you felt that way. Work through your feelings and examine the situation that led up to it. No one can correct a situation or know how to handle a future situation unless you communicate. If you don't communicate, then you're cutting off vital sunlight to your garden, which means nothing will grow. And in the absence of compersion growing, then the weeds of jealousy and resentment take root. And talking about weeds, you can create the absolute perfect flower bed for your compersion garden and weeds will still sneak in. Weeds for us are jealousy and resentment and anger and feelings of being left out. Preventative measures help with this. Talk to your partner and have a set of operating rules for different situations. Maybe have a set of rules of behavior when you go on a date or a set of rules for when you engage in group activities with others, like lots of others, like five to ten people in the same room. Both people in the marriage need to have input on these rules to avoid resentment. Both people need to understand the expectations of the other person. Having these discussions ahead of time can go a long way to mitigate future sour feelings. But Jason, what about after the feelings pop up? What if you have an encounter that leaves you feeling jealous or maybe one of you crossed an ill-defined line? Two ways to deal with these feelings. Address them before they happen and deal with them after they manifested. One of these options way more than the other but again the answer is communication flipping this around if your partner comes to you and expresses they felt a negative emotion be receptive compersion is delicate and the way you deal with emotions of others goes a long way in attaining and maintaining a good stable compressed relationship let people be valid in their. Do not minimize or negate them. If someone is upset, acknowledge and talk about it. There is a big difference between moving past a negative encounter and understanding the encounter to avoid future bad encounters. Know what else plants need? Water. I guess humans need it too. But water for our purposes, for this pretty garden of compersion we're growing, is relationships, both with your spouse and with others. Plants, plants need water. It's what plants crave. Relationships need water. Compersion needs water. Water is your relationship with your spouse. But ah-ha-ha, Jason, you already said that a solid marriage is the soil from which compersion grows. You can't double dip on analogies. Yes, it is. That is the foundation going into the lifestyle. Water is how you nurture your relationships in the lifestyle. Your relationship with your spouse is the most important aspect of what we do. It's not the sex. It's not the parties. It's not the people you meet. The most important thing is your ongoing relationship, marriage, commitment, whatever you call it. You have to water plants every day. Part of the routine of having a garden and in marriage, you have to reinforce your personal connection to your spouse every day. Compersion needs this to grow. You must work on your ability to be happy for your spouse by constantly paying attention to your own relationship. And that means checking in with them before, during, or after a sexy romp. It means checking in with them on a random Tuesday morning, Saturday afternoon, whenever you feel the need to. This also extends to your friends in the lifestyle, your connections with other people. This means like having that unfun conversation prior to getting naked. This means making friendships honestly and openly with others. We are allowed and encouraged to form real friendships with people. Those friendships we make with other couples, that is the water that nourishes our garden. You can be happy for your spouse. Know who else you can be happy for? Your friends. You can cheer them on when they start getting wild at a party. You can cheer them on when they cut loose. You can be there when they have too much to drink and you need to hold their hair. You can be a good friend to others and apply the same ideas of comparison to those relationships, thereby growing your garden even more. Water is life and part of life is growing and extending ourselves onward and outward to connect with others. See, I got some growing metaphors in here too. Sometimes your garden is going to need a little fertilizer. That's where self-reflection comes in. We address communication with our spouse, communication with others, but what about communication with ourselves? The lifestyle is a deeply personal activity and we need to be able to tap into our own psyche in order to communicate outward our feelings and emotions. That's where the need for self-reflection comes in. You have to be able to sit with your emotions and see the whole picture. When you look at your garden and all the different plants in it, remember, you are not a single plant or emotion. You are the whole garden. The individual plants are our emotions, anger, joy, sadness, fear, all of them. Each one exists within this confined little space in your head. You are not a single plant in that garden. You are the whole garden. You are not a single emotion. This is some deep stuff here. All right, you pull out one plant, let's say fear, and you focus your whole being on that one plant. Now you've become fearful for getting all the other plants in the garden. If you put it back, then it's just another plant. This metaphor is, again, really good for self-reflection. For instance, you will experience jealousy at some point in the lifestyle. I promise you that. But you are not that jealous emotion. You're not that jealous plant. You have to step back, see the whole picture, your whole self. Ask, why did I feel jealous? Why did I feel this way? What triggered this feeling? Why? How? When you can put together the answer to those questions, then you can take it to your partner for their input, not solutions, not anger. You grab the jealous plant out of the garden, you take it to your partner for their input not solutions not anger you grab the jealous plant out of the garden you take it to your partner and you say i have this jealous plant look at it help me understand it not kill it throw it away or blame them for this plant existing you want your spouse to give their input their perspective so when you put the plant back in the garden it is no longer a focus but merely a piece i am totally stretching with the metaphors here, but they can help us wrap our heads around these super nebulous concepts. And you think, this all sounds so great, Jason. Where do I start? Just like with any old garden, start with something easy. Don't try to grow heirloom tomatoes because of temperamental little bastards right off the bat, which translates to not walking into an orgy your first encounter. Start simple, y'all. Think a rose bush. Those bastards are immortal. You can totally ease yourself into the lifestyle. Start chatting with another couple. See how you feel when a person flirts with your spouse because it's going to happen. You need to know how you will deal with the little stuff before you deal with the big stuff. If you are bothered when someone flirts with your spouse, this ain't the garden for you or hobby because when the moment comes for another person to have sex with your spouse, you might lose your damn mind. Remember that sex, that moment is not something you can come back from and I caution everyone to be ready for it. So again, start small. See if you're comfortable with innocent flirting before y'all progress to more. And be patient with the process. Be patient with the lifestyle and your personal journey through it. As any gardener or farmer will tell you, you have to be patient. You cannot force a plant to grow any faster, no matter what you do. Nature will take its course as nature does. And it's the same with compersion. You can't force the feeling, just let it develop naturally. Oh, and don't compare gardens. Tend to your own garden. Tend Thank you. course as nature does and it's the same with compersion you can't force the feeling just let it develop naturally oh and don't compare gardens tend to your own garden tend to your own relationship because that is the one that matters most in all of this what i mean by that is don't get caught up in the drama of other people you are not here to fix anyone else's garden you are not responsible for the feelings of compersions experienced by others you your, your mental health, and your spouse's mental health are the highest priority in this. All right, so metaphors and analogies are great to get the concept, but what about practical real fucking advice, Jason? What can you do? Throwing a handful of dirt at your wife in the middle of the night and screaming, compersion, and running away does not help. The practical advice on cultivating compersion. What can we do to increase this feeling in ourselves and in our relationships? Focusing on the sexual side of the lifestyle. An interesting method or friend suggested is to videotape your spouse with someone else. This advice could send people's brains into a tailspin, but there's some merit here. If you're a visual person or if you need like visual stimulation when you masturbate, this might work out really well. It is the best porn ever because you know the actors personally. I will always say that one of the benefits of the lifestyle is seeing our partners as sexual beings, especially if you're coming from the vanilla world where we tend to become de-sexed as time goes on. Our spouses transition from being sexual beings in our eyes into career beast or just a parent or something. This could be a great way to stimulate those feelings of compersion, so give it a shot. Another option is just to watch. Watch your spouse in action. Maybe sit at a turn and just watch them with another person. Search for your feelings in that moment. Ask yourself, am I okay with this? Am I enjoying these sensations? It can be very eye-opening sometimes to just like sit down and check in with your own brain. For the feeling side of the lifestyle, I want you to connect better with your emotions. When you do feel the pinch or you do feel a pain of jealousy or a moment of elation, seize the moment. Don't focus on the emotion itself. Look at the triggers that caused it. Again, look at the garden, not the plant. We are isolating a moment in time to analyze it better. Ask what led up to you having that feeling. What did your spouse do? What did other people do? We want to separate the emotion from the situation. And yeah, there is a time and place for discussions of emotional nature, which might be during your post-boying session debrief you have with your spouse. If there was a feeling of jealousy, do not accuse and do not assume ill intent. You have to take that feeling you're having and share it because then it becomes more than just your feeling. It becomes both of your feelings and emotions. It goes from being a singular emotion of a person to a group problem that can be addressed by two people instead of one. Remember, mine becomes ours when we share. Same principle applies if you have a moment of brilliant compersion or happiness. Share it. Look at the triggers and analyze how you could recreate that moment with your partner. There is a focus so often on the negative, on negative emotions or situations. We want to celebrate the positive. Find the positive moments, capture them, and feel them. Being able to say to your partner, I really enjoy when you did this. Be it a sexual thing or just them doing a chore for you. Either way, this is the positive reinforcement we all need to get better and be better. Sometimes you have to take a different perspective on compersion. Take sex out of the equation. Yeah, our hobby is having sex with other people we meet on the internet. But for this exercise, we need to remove that hormonal-driven biological lust. You want to cultivate more compersion in your life, you need to look for more opportunities outside of sex. Sex is but a brief moment. The rest of your day, week, or month, that's where we need to grow more compersion. Find moments to be happy for others. Release the tension and negativity that society makes us think we must feel. Hold the door for another person. Say something nice to somebody. Look for chances to make the world a better place, one step at a time, and you'll start to notice all these little pops of compersion coming into your life. And really, if we boil compersion down, strip it down, it's happiness. It is a variation of happiness. Happiness and joy, they're not constant states of being. No, you may not feel overwhelming joy when you go to work every day. You tolerate work and you tolerate a lot of other moments in your daily life. That's okay. Our whole society functions on our collective ability to just tolerate. No, happiness may be brief. Happiness is a supernova flashing in the sky. However brief though, it can have an impact outside of ourselves. And yes, you will encounter people who are jaded and mean and can't stand the fact that you have a smile on your face. It happens. Do not let them steal your joy. Comparsion can also have a physical effect on our bodies. So if you're the person who may not be super connected to your emotions or you have trouble isolating your brain thinking pictures, look for physical cues to help you identify moments of compersion. Science, we are all hardwired by nature to be able to identify certain emotions. Anger may elicit a fight or flight response. This was super useful for prehistoric humans running from woolly mammoths. Not very useful for us dealing with traffic, but that surge of adrenaline, that tells our bodies to be ready for action. So you know that feeling. But what if that same surge of adrenaline is brought on by another situation? A situation that means we are happy versus, ah, we're in danger. Looking at this from the sexual side, you may experience a surge of adrenaline like your hair stands on end and your breathing is shallow and your heart rate increases in moments where you're really turned on. Turned on by seeing your spouse in a sexual situation. That's a physical cue for compersion. Stepping away from the frisky side, have you ever had like 50 people sing happy birthday to you? It is nuts. Everyone's staring at you and smiling and oh snap do you feel uncomfortable in that moment. is happy for you though they're expressing compersion in that moment towards you and it makes you super uncomfortable you're not uncomfortable because a tiger is after you you're uncomfortable with the attention your body is prepping for that fight or flight response probably leaning towards flight and it was triggered by an outside factor but if we stop right there we, we spin it around. You are experiencing a physical cue of compersion. It feels super uncomfortable because you're not used to the sensation or you cringe at the thought of being the center of attention. But that physical cue though, that gives you valuable feedback on what's going on in your subconscious brain, thereby affecting your body at that moment. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Learn to embrace those physical cues, recognize them, and you're going to gain a lot more insight into yourself and your relationship with others. And you might even feel a little compersion. I always appreciate hearing your feedback and comments on episodes or suggestions for topics, so feel free to reach out to me. Go take a look at my friend's website, www.gentlemans-almanac.com. He wrote a really good book for gentlemen in the lifestyle. My personal disclaimer, I am not a medical professional nor a trained and certified educator of any kind in any way. I am a guy with a microphone sharing my personal experiences with you. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only, and please join us for the next episode. Whatever you may do today, I hope you have a fantastic time doing it. Know that you are appreciated and loved. Have a great day.
