TL;DR

1. Mudita and Compersion are two strikingly similar concepts from two different worlds

2. Conscious relationships are steeped in joy at a partner’s happiness

3. When my partner(s) experience happiness in any form, including romance and sex with others, I feel joy, and maybe you can too

Conscious Relationships Come from a Place of Abundance

Last year I read a book called Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay and Katie Hendricks that affected me in a very powerful way. It struck me how closely it matched my personal experiences about vulnerability and communication in relationships. The message was delivered in such a masterful way; it inspired me to make drastic changes in my life. Little did I know at the time the path that book would take me on.

The book talks about the steps to co-commitment that include learning to love yourself, feeling feelings, claiming creativity, speaking the microscopic truth, and keeping agreements. I found the book to simply be about how to be a human and have feelings. Reading this book caused me to wonder about how I would approach writing about the topic of conscious relationships.

This excellent book doesn’t have a chapter on two concepts important to me that originating thousand of years apart from each other; mudita and compersion. Both are related to feeling joy at another’s happiness. My version would have these additions.

Relationships Are Organizations

People adapt to the organizational systems they find themselves in. This is especially evident when contrasting a mechanistic hierarchical organization to an evolutionary organic organization. Mechanistic hierarchies thrive on scarcity, while organic organizations flourish with an abundant mindset.

The people in organizations raise or lower their level of consciousness to match their surrounding structures, often times without even being aware. The same is true in relationships. Partners adapt to the unwritten rules of the relationship they find themselves in. Just as corporate organizations are evolving, relationships based on love are too.

In my view of the world, true love comes not from scarcity, but from abundance. When living from a place of abundance, I can’t “run out” of love. Love always begets more love. A romantic relationship is a specific type of organization, and people adapt to the structure of any organizational system they find themselves in. What type of romantic relationships have you unwittingly organized into?

A romantic relationship that starts from a place of scarcity will result in acting from a place of scarcity. However, starting from a place of abundance will allow for an abundance of love, attention, and connection. All love, joy, and happiness experienced by all partners in the romantic relationship will raise the level of love, joy, and happiness for everyone connected to the relationship.

Mudita

In Buddhism, there is a practice called mudita. It is one of the Four Immeasurables. Mudita is a Pali and Sanskrit word for sympathetic joy. An interesting start to a wonder statement might be “Why does Mudita has no equivalent word in English?”

Hmmmm.

The closest definition I’ve found so far is “the opposite of jealousy.”

While compassion is kindness towards the suffering of others, mudita is kindness towards the joy of others. Think of a time when you saw a baby take a first step, or giggle in joy at doing something for the first time - the glimpse of a first butterfly, the first taste of ice cream, the first recognition of their mother’s face. Remember the happiness and joy you felt at experiencing that child’s joy? That’s mudita.

Somewhere along the way through our socialization, we lost the ability to feel that abundant joy towards each other, and it was replaced with a fear based on scarcity. It's a fear of having less, missing out, not getting your our taste of ice cream, and losing our lover to someone else. Instead of feeling happiness at seeing a loved one's joy, we feel jealous and angry.

Except I don’t. I can’t get jealous anymore.

Compersion

Just as we have no word for mudita in English, we have no popular romantic relationship models to emulate that come from a place of abundance. I certainly have never seen one portrayed in books or on screen.

The closest I’ve found comes from the relationship organization pioneers in the polyamorous (poly or ethically non-monogamous) community. In these communities, the feeling of experiencing happiness and joy for someone else is referred to as compersion. Within the poly community, this word is used to define feeling that joy when your partner(s) have a joyful experience with another person. It might involve an outdoor activity they love, romance, falling in love, sexual expression, or anything that brings them joy.

Compersion, like mudita, struggles still for a clear definition in English. Here are a few attempts:

Compersion: An empathetic state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy. — Wikipedia

Compersion: The feeling of joy one has experiencing another's joy, such as in witnessing a toddler's joy and feeling joy in response. —Wiktionary

Compersion: A feeling of joy when a loved one invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship. —Urban Dictionary

Don’t feel bad if you have not used this word before; it is not in the English dictionary and has only recently come into use. The first recorded usage of it is from 1998 in Romantic Jealousy, Causes, Symptoms, Cures  by Ayala Malach Pines.

The Buddhist part of me that wants to see the world from a place of love and abundance that resonates with the enlightened relationship structures from the poly community. Witnessing the intelligence, compassion, bravery, and love in complex poly relationships is inspiring. The levels of self-awareness and advanced communication skills required to navigate relationships outside the sphere of socially accepted relationship organizational structures are a training ground for the skill required in conscious relationships.

Learning Through Experience

In my version of a book on love and relationships mudita and compersion would be woven throughout. Finding joy when witnessing the happiness of a partner is essential to dismantling jealousy and building a relationship of untethered partners who all can live their best lives. Likewise, writing about how to hold space for a partner to fully process feelings of jealousy is just as important. The journey from jealousy to compersion is a difficult road for most.

You have options other than a relationship based on the addictive-clinging of desire for your partner(s) to give you love and make you happy. Your options are just not very easy to stumble upon. There aren’t great role models in popular media that demonstrate other types of relationships, and it’s definitely not something taught in school. For most of my life, I didn’t even know I had options. I was doing the best I could with the tools I had available to me, and I was getting pretty shitty results.

My relationships were co-dependent. I was focused on what I could do to “earn” the love of another. I didn’t know how to truly love myself. I didn’t know how to truly love others. My life was very transactional, not externally, but internally every ounce of love, appreciation, and attention needed to be hard-won. My behaviors matched my internal beliefs. I was angry or sad most of the time. I had a sense of lack and longing that never went away.

I noticed a pattern of going from sourcing my own love, approval, and appreciation to gradually outsourcing those needs to a romantic partner. I was quick to give up my power and ability to self-love to another. The results were disastrous for myself and the relationship. I began to look to my partner for my basic human needs instead of myself. This included permission to feel certain feelings and my ability to make decisions. I quickly lost connection to my YES and NO.

What this looked like was me trying really hard, feeling really deeply, and being in drama most of the time. I concealed my true desires and longed for what I wasn’t getting. My feelings came out in self-destructive ways. The drama I created produced adrenaline and fed my addiction to escape the present moment uncomfortableness with a hit of mind-clearing chemical escape. I had no idea how to really live a conscious relationship.

Conscious Relationships

A conscious relationship is one where all members of the relationship are co-committed to using the relationship as a personal spiritual practice to learn whatever they are most supposed to learn in this lifetime. Being fully revealed, being the source of your own love, approval, and appreciation, and living in an abundance of the same from your partner(s) are aspects of a conscious relationship that Gay and Katie talk about in Conscious Loving.

Conscious relationships are a fuck-more about context than content. For most of us, the same facts produce wildly different stories we make up, depending on the context of the situation. For a partner who needs more family time, Sunday movie night is barely enough to sate their desires. Conversely, for a partner who is feeling smothered, a weekly time commitment for movie night is suffocating.

The only facts are that they do Sunday movie night every week. Everything else is context. The context is all the thoughts, feelings, and stories we all make up about the same facts. Drama in relationships is always about the stories, never about the facts.

So, what is the context? Is there some magical way to look at relationships in a conscious what that creates a fertile field for compersion and mutida to flourish?

Yes. In a word; abundance.

Explore the concept of abundance more deeply in my posts Fuck Goals and Manifesting Abundance.

Conscious relationships must come from a place of abundance. The notion that our sexualities are exempt from the abundance-inviting practices of acceptance, love, and support that our other basic human needs deserve is irrational. Sexual expression is just another basic human need. It does not go away when entering into a relationship.

While the book Conscious Loving comes from a point of view that a relationship should be sexually monogamous, the core teachings of how to have feelings, and come into connection with your partner, are fantastic tools necessary for any relationship configuration. New levels of complexity can arrive when there are more than two, and the tools of conscious relationships become even more important to living your best life while in relationship with others.

Wired for Joy

It has been a long journey to the realization that I’m just not wired for monogamy. It does not fit how I experienced myself and the way I relate to others. I feel a deep love for so many and varied people in my life. I find deep joy in knowing about the life experiences, adventures, and escapades of partners. I feel deep sadness when a partner is not living their fullest experience of life. I have no expectations of forever.

It has not always been this way. It has been a journey to learn to love myself. I spent years trying to be something I was not. I feel sad that I didn’t take the opportunity when younger to discover who I am. I was scared most of the time. Today the fear of myself still comes, but it does not overwhelm me like it once did.

I know I changed. I know I grew into this more authentic version of myself, and I know you can, too - whatever that version of you might be.

For me, it all starts with love, abundance, and joy. Every day I expand my capacity for love, abundance, and joy - for myself and others. When I remember that we all come from the same source of love, all the pettiness of ego-self, “mine”, and jealousy melt away.

I know we are all wired for love, and we are all the same love. We all came from, and return to, the same source. Letting go of jealousy and scarcity is just a simple as dropping it. It’s scary to drop it, I know. When the fear comes up it’s a sign of the work you have to do in that area. Become friends with that fear; the fear of being alone, not having enough love, attention, affection, community, or sex is the work you need to do. Investigating what’s under that fear is how you will free yourself.

Release the fear by learning to be the source of your own love, attention, affection, community, and sex. That is the inner work will unlock a life of sympathetic joy.

xo

—Jason

Do you still get jealous? Do you feel joy at the thought of your partner(s) falling in love with someone else? Tell me what you think in the comments below ⇩.

Sign up for my mailing list —> 💛

1. "Mudita: The Buddhist Practice of Sympathetic Joy." Learn Religions, Apr. 17, 2019 http://www.learnreligions.com/mudita-sympathetic-joy-449704

Read more | Stay in touch | About the author | Instagram

Further Reading