A Crazy Little Thing Called...

Eric Francis is an astrologer and writer roaming the galaxy, currently sitting at the place where two rivers converge in the secret Zen country of New Jersey. Visit his homepage at planetwaves.net, or e-mail him at: eric@planetwaves.net.

For your Valentine’s Day gift, I have a word for you. It’s not in the dictionary, so don’t bother looking. The word is “compersion.”
Compersion begins the first time that we are turned on by someone else’s pleasure, or the idea of someone else’s love for anyone besides us. For some people it’s totally natural. We all know it’s possible. We may have an idea of how good it would feel to dissolve into the safety, freedom and unconditional acceptance of our lovers and all that they are, and to let them experience all that we are. This way of being is called compersion.
We’ve all found ourselves in a corresponding reality at one time or another: trapped by love. Loving someone, feeling open and real with them and sensing that it could last forever, and then, mysteriously, another soul enters the scene of our lives, conversations develop, minds meet, sexual interests may develop...we know that there’s not really a conflict, or that there should not be...and we are left with a huge question of what to do, because our present partner will probably just freak out if we tell them about our experience. And the contradiction is that the experience of this new person is so good. It is so real. And yet it threatens to destabilize what we call love.
When informed that love is growing outside of a primary relationship, most people are, at first, unlikely to respond with compersion; they may not be washed over with joy and tell you that your love for this other person is thoroughly beautiful. Usually, at first, people respond with fear—usually, the fear of loss of control. And it’s that control that we are called upon to give up when we embrace compersion.
If what I hear is true, then a lot of people reading this are already getting nervous. The idea of allowing our partner to be free may seem like a wild concept, the last thing we would ever do. Visions of this person, our very lover, in another person’s arms can burn through us like hot coals. But more to the point, the whole idea of really feeling our feelings without denial or resistance is a daring thing in itself. For so much of what we call love is really about resistance, and hiding who we are, and possessing the other and hence ignoring their reality, and judging ourselves for being imperfect. Hardly what you could call the divine light of freedom. But many people feel that freedom is dangerous.
Now, relationships are complicated enough without adding other people to the equation. Yet these other people seem somehow to add themselves. We notice them in this insanely isolated, fragmented world that we live in–especially so because the way we create our relationships is extremely isolating, in a time in history in which we so desperately need community. So when people we really like show up in our jobs and in our e-mail boxes and move into apartments next door, when we pick up on their scent and want to include them in our lives, it’s not something that we typically want to resist or hide from the world. It’s something to celebrate.
Having noticed reality, we may feel a need to keep going, to keep exploring. We need to allow ourselves to be free. And this will take work. We need to teach people to love us for who we are. We need to learn compersion for others—to feel and express the love that loves them for who they are. This is not as hard as it sounds. And taking the journey is all the more appealing if we realize that all the fear and insecurity that emerged when a second love interest entered the picture was already there all along, a kind of festering toxin that we were living with in a secret shadow world that always seemed to haunt the relationship. When the light is brought in and the toxins are purged and we are seen for who we are, we can really begin living.
So one thing you can count on, if you are in a situation where you need to teach another person compersion, is that they may relate to the fact that it’s better to be alive than dead. And the only way that they can love you is when they are alive. That means really free: really understanding and aware and loving you, not an image they have of you. And you need to learn to love them, not an image you have of them. It is tricky. It is challenging. But it is possible.
Compersion is an idea that emerged from something called the “polyamorous” culture, a segment of society in which people openly choose to have more than one committed lover. In such arrangements, it obviously becomes necessary to work through jealousy, but in the early days of the polyamorous movement, something else was discovered: Once jealousy was understood and the hearts opened, great feelings of warmth, pleasure and appreciation became available at the idea of peoples’ partners loving others. In other words, the bliss of love and sexual ecstasy would expand in a wave-like ripple. When people drop their guards and just feel, so much pleasure is possible—more than we ever imagined.
Sure, other stuff comes up; but it was already there, and it’s as though love is washing it out of us so that we can really be free.
But it’s a process. It’s relatively easy to get turned on witnessing another human being’s ecstasy or erotic joy. It’s a lot more challenging to live with the implications that this experience seems to have in our relationships, and is part of the delicate walk of negotiating our sense of security in the universe. We don’t want to lose this other person who is so dear to us, whether we lose them to another person, or because they can’t deal with their fear of losing us.
Love, as we often define it, is usually considered to be an exclusive rather than inclusive game. Someone loves you and therefore doesn’t love anyone else. But when you add it up, this usually comes out to a loss, because in our short visits to the planet, in a healthy state of mind, we might want to love everyone who is righteous and true, and to return the love of everyone who touches our hearts, and call that safety and nothing else. For living in the constant fear of loss and betrayal is hardly safety; it is hardly the security that we say we seek; it is a setup for total paranoia, but strangely, sadly, it’s called love.
It is true that if one’s lover has sex with another person, or even gets close to another person, they may choose to be with that person and not you. And this is a possibility that we have to face no matter what. Living the way of compersion brings this to the surface where we can see it and work with it.
Yet remember that more often, jealousy has nothing to do with one’s partner actually having sex or sharing love outside the relationship. It is about the imagined fear of loss. We can become jealous at the mere idea or suspicion of this, or at our partner’s fantasies, and even at the love shared with him or herself. In plenty of relationships people stop masturbating (or creating art or music or writing or taking long walks in the woods) because it’s perceived as a threat by their partner. And that is not life.
Compersion takes us to the next realm beyond. It is about being with and appreciating our partners for their desires, dreams, wishes and their personal journey to self-love. It’s about being real, and having relationships as real people.
And how do we get there?
Start by telling the truth. This is what we need anyway. Sharing this truth that we possess in our hearts, the essence of our being, is supposedly why we got involved with this other person in the first place. It’s important to tell the truth gently, clearly and without the fear or the intention of hurting the other person, but not holding back, either. Then, because we are claiming the birthright of love, we must love them through their reactions and responses. This is a commitment that it’s best to go into the situation with. And we must love ourselves through their reactions, which is to say, not feeling guilty about who we are. So listen carefully, and let your partner own his or her feelings.
We must be ready to put love—real love, which I am calling compersion—above any given relationship. So we must, on one level, be ready to let go of those relationships in which we cannot be free, if what we seek is the freedom to be who we are. This does not hold just for sex and affection; it holds for those walks in the woods and those paintings that never get painted and the short stories that never get written. It has to do with not living where we want and not following all our other dreams. It is all part of the same thing, and it never ceases to amaze me to what extent sexual freedom parallels all these other freedoms. And freedom means that change is possible; freedom by definition implies change.

This article has been modified to fit your magazine. For the full text, visit Eric’s website at www.planetwaves.net