270 - Habitual Mindstates
Default moods and mindstates
In episode 222, Annalisa Castaldo, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, joined us to talk about Zen Buddhism, mindfulness, and relationships, and this week she’s back to discuss habitual mindstates and the Buddhist concept of the six realms.
Even though this is a Buddhist concept, everyone can benefit from learning about habitual mindstates. These can be recurring states, or even default states, that we return to because they’re familiar and comfortable. These habitual states aren’t necessarily good things (sometimes they can be depression, anger, etc.), but it’s important to recognize them to be able to more easily get through the ups and downs that we all experience in life and relationships.
The six realms
The Buddhist concept of the six realms focuses on rebirth and existence, and correspond with different mental and emotional states:
Deva, or God Realm: material wealth, freedom from want and long life, but is also the realm of indolence, indifference to others, and addiction.
Asura, or Demigod Realm: jealousy, envy, competitiveness, desire for power.
Human Realm: confusion and doubt, but also the only realm where change and/or waking up happens.
Animal Realm: survival, acting on instinct, fear, focus on sensual pleasures (including food, sleep, etc., not just sex).
Hungry Ghost Realm: craving that can never be satisfied.
Hell: hatred and unreasonable anger.
Listen to the full episode to get Annalisa’s full explanations and perspective on habitual mindstates and the six realms. You can also find more about Annalisa at sojizencenter.com, or check out the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar to learn more about Buddhism in general.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about habitual moods or mind states that crop up in our relationships and also in our everyday lives, in our relationships with ourselves and the world. To help us with this topic, we are joined once again by Annalisa Castaldo. Annalisa is an associate professor of English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. She also has a master's of education in human sexuality. Teaches a course on non-monogamies, and is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. We had Annalisa on this show about a year ago on episode 222, where we talked about mindfulness, Zen, and relationships. Definitely go check that out if you haven't already. Today we're going to be revisiting some of that but talking specifically about habitual mind states, which are these places that it's easy for us to fall back into mentally and emotionally. I'm really excited to get into this.
Dedeker: Can you believe, Annalisa, that it's been a year since we last had you on?
Annalisa: No. Absolutely not. I really thought it was about six months.
Emily: It feels like it was just a really quick blip. It wasn't that long ago at all.
Dedeker: I don't know about all you all, but where I was a year ago and where I am today, exactly the same. Nothing's changed. Just super chilled out these days.
Annalisa: Just here in my house, grading papers, talking to friends. It's all the same.
Dedeker: Yes. It's all the same. It's all exactly the same. Haven't gone to a restaurant in a month. It's about the same as where I was last time.
Emily: I know. I can't wait.
Dedeker: For those of who you are tuning in, currently you're maybe tuning in in the future. We are currently recording during the COVID crisis. We're going to try to not be talking about only that today and trying to be talking about stuff today within a lens that is relevant to times when we're not in a pandemic as well. Annalisa, I am curious to talk to you about and actually I want to hear about this from all of us, but what has this particular period of isolation taught you about yourself and your relationships?
Annalisa: About myself, it has taught me to embrace who I am. I'm an introvert, and as I think I mentioned last time I was talking to you, I have rheumatoid arthritis, so when I have flares, I tend to spend a lot of time at home. I'm like, "Welcome to my world, everyone." The adjustment for me has been more about moving my classes online, which was mind blowing. I'm not a techie person, and suddenly there I am running Zoom classes, messing up in every way possible, and also helping to build a virtual Zendo. We took Soji Zen Center, and moved it all online.
Emily: Wow. That's amazing.
Dedeker: What has that been like?
Annalisa: Interesting. We figured out how to do virtual sittings and to give Dharma talks virtually. It was a little shaky at the beginning, but we're doing pretty well now. I'm very proud of my teacher, who's in Roshi. He's 80 years old, and he is in there doing interviews online, and figuring it out.
Jase: That's so cool.
Dedeker: So impressed.
Emily: Lovely.
Dedeker: Gosh. It's been a lot for all of us to have to adjust to right now. It's interesting you talk about the arthritis thing because I have seen a lot of that online of people who have chronic illness being like, "It sucks, doesn't it? Having to stay in when you don't necessarily want to stay in for your own health."
Emily: Absolutely. How are the two of you doing?
Dedeker: How are things going on in your relationships in the midst of all this?
Annalisa: Luckily, in terms of my primary or my nesting relationship, Alex and I have a lovely home with enough space for us to be separate. We're managing great. Sadly, his local partner and my local partner have decided they're not comfortable coming to see us or going to see them. I haven't seen Nathan in two months now. Alex is FaceTiming with his girlfriend, but it's of course not the same. Their relationships are managing, but they're definitely frayed a little because just lack of touch and engagement is always hard.
Dedeker: Definitely. I know that's something that we're going through right now. Although with Jase and I, we do count ourselves somewhat fortunate. We joked that we've trained for this a little bit already. We already got used to spending periods of the year apart and connecting mostly via Zoom calls and video calls and stuff like that. We're trained. It is not the same though.
Emily: No. Along those lines, has your practice helped you with currently what's happening in your non-monogamous relationships or any other type of relationships for us during this time?
Annalisa: Absolutely. That's true for everyone when I talk to my fellow practitioners at Soji, they'd all talk about, "How can anyone do this without the practice?" It's really important for me to meditate everyday, sometimes multiples times a day, and to ground myself in what I know from the practice. Especially the being present. This is what is. It's not going to change no matter how much I want it, and since it's not going to change, instead of fighting it, resenting it, or trying to hide from it, just be present for it.
It actually unlocks and softens the negativity around it to just accept what is and move forward.
Dedeker: Just the simplicity around having a practice that's so built in just being present with the way things are. Whenever I read about things like that in Buddhism or Buddhist essays or things like that, that was always something that was always very confronting as it is, and especially now. Just this idea of having to sit with the way things are. More or less, we're all being forced to do that, but it's still hard, gosh darn it.
Annalisa: It is. It is even for me after I've been practicing for two decades. I look at Facebook posts about people protesting, and they're like, "I have to get out and I want all this stuff and I miss it." I'm like, "If you reorient your thinking and think less about what you are missing or what you don't have, and just be thinking about what you do have and what is present in your life now, it can really help to just relax you, and make it all okay," or less un-okay.
Jase: I like that.
Emily: I feel like a lot of what this has taught me and the people around me is what does really matter in life. It's not necessarily the things that you can buy or the places that you can go, but the people that you surround yourselves with or that you take the time to even reach out to. I know, for myself, it's given me a really cool amount of time to spend with my partner in a way that I haven't been able to probably ever in our relationship, just simply because I'm not commuting two hours a day or something along those lines. It is interesting to have that reset and that pause, for sure, even in the times of greatly feeling like I'm claustrophobic and need to get the hell out of here.
Annalisa: I don't know if this is going to sound way too Zen-y, but there's this idea that things are perfect just as they are because they can't be other than they are, so this is what you get.
Jase: Way too Zen.
Emily: That's good advice. I love it.
Dedeker: That's too Zen-y.
Emily: That's great.
Dedeker: I don't know. For me, what I've mostly been learning about myself is that when I'm confined in a space that any of my own baggage and moods and issues gets projected on to whoever happens to be around, which right now happens to be--
Emily: Sometimes it's us.
Dedeker: Happens to be my partner, Alex. I'll be having a mood, and he'll come into a room and be like, "Hey. How are you doing, babe? You're feeling all right?" I'm like, "You have issues with your mother."
Dedeker: I exaggerate only a tiny bit. That's how it feels. That's what I've been learning about myself is that. I mean really though that so often when I'm annoyed with what a partner is doing, our partner's behavior that it feels like nine times out of 10, it's not actually their behavior. It's more of something that's going on inside me that's just decided to latch onto that behavior as the reason why. That's been cool.
Emily: At least acknowledging it.
Dedeker: I'm working on it. It's a practice. It's always a practice.
Jase: I was noticing an interesting thing recently because I was thinking about being introverted versus being extroverted and how in some ways introverts are now like, ha ha. Now, I'm the one who's well adapted to the world as opposed to before where at least for me, I always felt like extroverts were the ones who were the well-adapted ones to the world and I was the one who had to overcome this difficulty. I think there's an element of that. What it's led to me though more recently, like as this has gone on longer and I've talked to more people about it, it reminds me a little bit of what we talk about with jealousy where people will put this label of jealousy on a whole host of feelings, on a whole host of different feelings.
I feel like a similar thing, I've noticed myself doing a similar thing and I think other people are doing this as well of putting this general label of whatever you want to call it, like claustrophobic or lonely or something that we're putting that label on it, when maybe it's like if you really examine it and look at what are the individual pieces of this, that it might not be just this one feeling. For example, I found that as an introvert and part of what being an introvert means has to do with your threshold for how much stimulus you can handle. How much stimulus is energizing for you versus what's taxing for you? I found for myself doing the multiamory hangouts twice a week and having calls with that Dedeker and Emily and talking with my friend Eric and all this stuff, I've actually found days during this isolation when I'm literally in a house by myself for a month now at the time of this recording that I'm finding times where I'm like, I want the world to just go away because I'm overstimulated, which is a feeling I would normally have if I was doing a lot of social engagements or I was at work around a lot of people and realizing like, huh, that's a feeling that I associated with, not this.
You would think I wouldn't ever be feeling that, but realizing like, Oh, okay. It's not quite so simple as just like, are you around people or are you not? I'm getting maybe more being around people that I'm comfortable with sometimes, yet the touch side, yes, I miss touching or cuddling or things like that, but I don't know, I guess I found it helpful to tease those apart so I can at least identify this one thing rather than just this like, I feel bad and I don't know what to do about it.
Dedeker: That makes a lot of sense. I think that actually sets us up to transition into talking about our main focus for today, which is habitual mental states, recurring moods or emotional states. I'm going to give the disclaimer to our listeners that even though we are speaking with someone who is an ordained Zen priest, you don't necessarily need to prescribe to the tenants of Buddhism or of any particular faith really. Looking at this topic from a Zen and mindfulness perspective isn't meant to encourage anyone to convert or anything like that. We're just hoping that what we can talk about today may offer a useful psychological tool for getting through the ups and downs of isolation or the ups and downs of just life in general and relationships. Like we said, when we first brought Annalisa on the show almost a year ago, let's look at these things through the realm of practice and practical applications to your life rather than through the lens of religious or spiritual belief.
Jase: We talked about this a little bit of what we've been learning during this time of isolation, but if you had to just real quick off the cuff be like, what are the recurring moods or mental states you've been experiencing over the last month or so of lockdown?
Dedeker: Chaos. Is that a mood?
Jase: I guess that's a mental state.
Dedeker: -state of being? Yes, extreme frustration.I come back to on a pretty recurring basis right now.
Jase: Is that different from normal life?
Dedeker: Probably not. I think just right now it's like the volume's turned up to 11. That's what I've noticed.
Jase: What about you, Em?
Emily: I've been really frustrated with certain things like our nation's unemployment system for example and just like incredibly high levels of frustration with that. Also, incredible levels of sadness and then sometimes like just being fine, pretty okay. Yes, all of those things are the same as I usually am. Those are like the three states in which I operate like doing well, like happy go lucky, kind of extreme sadness or frustration.
Jase: That's interesting.
Emily: It's not really that different, which is interesting, but I agree with you, it is heightened. It has turned up.
Jase: That's funny because I've been finding myself bouncing back and forth between feeling like I'm not doing enough, I'm not accomplishing enough or helping people enough or something like that.
Dedeker: Which is how you always are.
Jase: or feeling like super motivated and getting a lot done and just being in the zone, working on things and being like, fuck off everybody I'm working right now. I guess those two are the big ones I'd come back to. I had this realization just maybe a couple of weeks ago, but those are always my habitual states. I can't tell if it's that the volume's turned up or that I have something to blame for them or that I'm being more allowed to feel them now because it's like, "Oh, well, of course I have this reason to be." I don't know. I've been pondering that and I don't have an answer.
Dedeker: How about you, Annalisa?
Annalisa: I have an answer. For me, I've been ping-ponging back and forth between feeling fine, feeling like I'm okay, and depressed. That's my default bad mood, is like depression, sliced in or interwoven with guilt. I'm very good at this guilt-shame- "I'm not doing enough. I should be doing more. Why am I not helping people 24/7?" I go back and forth between those two and I really love that you all said, "Hey, these are our normal moods. They're just turned up to 11," because that's exactly the point of the six realms that we have home realms that we naturally fall to. It's a default reaction to things.
Emily: Via email, Annalisa and I have been chatting about this concept from Buddhism, known as the six realms. Annalisa, can you just first maybe very briefly, give us just the surface level or the literal rundown of what the six realms are?
Annalisa: I will try to be brief. Originally, this was attached to the idea of rebirth and that either we're literally reborn into these different realms, but they work perfectly as psychological states. There are unsurprisingly six of them, and they represent psychological profiles. What's important to understand is that they are not good or bad, they're all moments in time that you want to leave behind and move to a state of clarity rather than saying like, "Oh, I want to be in the good state or the bad state," even though, as you'll see in a minute, some of them are much more scary than others. There's the God realm, the demigod or jealous God realm, the human realm, actually humanity is actually a separate realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm, and the hell realm.
Jase: Okay. That last one sounds bad.
Annalisa: It is bad, but it is again also it's a mood that people move in and out of. Starting with that one, hell is representative of extreme anger and hatred. The important thing to recognize, we all enter that realm at certain points. When we're watching a certain politician with orange skin talk on the news, or road rage, that moment when you're just like, "I want to kill you for cutting in front of me." That's an instant in the hell realm.
Dedeker: Em was nodding and pointing at herself in a very annoying way.
Emily: I'm pretty sure I'm the one who drives the most out of at least the three of us. I have to deal with that a lot, although surprising, well, not surprisingly in the last two months, not at all.
Annalisa: It's been less hell realm for you.
Dedeker: Yes.
Annalisa: The next realm up is the hungry ghost realm, which is for our culture, I think, an incredibly important one. You have to imagine the hungry ghost in Buddhist mythology is a ghost with a tiny, tiny pencil thin neck and tiny mouth and a huge belly. The idea is that you're constantly wanting things and never able to satisfy them. It's craving. It's clinging. It's a desperate desire to feel better about yourself. It's when you eat the entire box of cookies and then you're like, "And now I need more cookies, even though I feel sick." It's when you've broken up with someone because you know they're bad for you, but you sit there staring at your phone for hours wanting to count "Just one more time, just one more time and then I'll be over him." It's that desperate clinging feeling that is so prevalent in our capitalist uncertain society.
Jase: That makes a lot of sense.
Emily: The imagery of that, it's--
Dedeker: It's very Miyazaki in my mind. There's probably a Miyazaki thing out there like in Spirited Away that reminds me of that.
Emily: I feel like the hungry ghost, like you said it comes from Buddhist mythology, so there's like a lot of artistic depictions of that. It feels very confronting because as soon as I hear that, I'm like, "Oh, wait, so that like all the time," like every waking moment. It's just constantly can't get no satisfaction basically.
Jase: Just to clarify, does that include that not being satisfied with what you're doing yourself, like that you and I were talking about before, Annalisa, or does that fall into more of a different realm?
Annalisa: No, it's definitely about not being satisfied with yourself. Hungry ghost actually is the realm of depression, because it's the realm where you turn in on yourself and believe you're never enough and you never will be enough and it's just all doomed and it's a very hopeless, helpless feeling, the hungry ghost realm.
Dedeker: That's my other state. It's more like victimizing myself. That reminds me of that state.
Annalisa: The next realm up is the animal realm and the idea here is that if you're reborn in the body of an animal, not literally, but figuratively, what you care about is survival and about sensual satisfaction. Not just sex, but food and drink and sleep. It's a dull state. It's a state that is very motivated by fear because the drive for survival, this constant worry about getting hurt or getting attacked or getting-- I'm blanking, I'll just move on.
Jase: Getting eaten?
Annalisa: Getting eaten, yes. When you're in this state, you want a safe nest. You want to crawl under your bed and hide, you want to curl up with your fluffiest blankets and have some ice cream. It's not desperate feeling of needing to eat everything in the house of the hungry ghost realm, but it's wanting comfort and not caring about anything but the comfort. I think that's a really common state right now.
Emily: I was going to say that actually feels very, very familiar when it's described that way. It's interesting that you describe it as like a dull state because I know something that's been coming up for me recently during isolation is definitely like wanting to numb essentially where it's like on both sides of the same coin, like one side being comfort and the other side just being numbing. It's like that focus on central pleasure of sugar or video games or a glass of wine, drinking, or things like that where it is that wanting to just like dull, which is interesting because I think that intuitively I wouldn't have put that in the animal realm, but it makes sense when you explain it that way.
Annalisa: The other thing that I want to mention here is, again, none of these states are actually bad. Anger can be motivating and wanting to retreat from the world can be very important in terms of repairing your mental stability. It's when we get caught up in a realm that we have problems. These are just different emotional moods or as you said habits of mind that as long as you're in control of them, great. If you're not in control of them, not so great.
Jase: What's the next one?
Annalisa: I actually want to skip over the human realm because that's the hardest one to explain because people are like "I'm always human, aren't I. What's going on?" Let me do the demigods and the gods which, the demigods are my home realm and might sound familiar to many people who are interested in non-monogamy. It's the realm of the possessive, jealous, desiring people who want everything for themselves who seek power, who seek good things and are jealous of anyone else who has them. Although I'm not typically jealous in relationships, you put me at work and I'm like, "She won an award and I didn't. What has she got? What do I have to do?" If the hungry ghost realm is the depression and turning inward and saying, "I'm not good enough," the demigod realm is the turning out and blaming everyone else, "You're the ones who are making my life difficult."
Emily: That's interesting. It's almost almost like a going to war aspect of it, like going on the attack to a certain extent or going out to grab something externally from someone else, rather I guess like the hungry ghost just chipping away at yourself internally.
Annalisa: The hungry ghost or ghosts, they don't have the ability to get things. They can just hope somebody gives them something, there's actually a Buddhist chant where we dedicate food to the hungry ghost. The demigods, they're going out and attacking and trying to take things from mostly the gods, demigods, and they are constantly sure that they don't have enough stuff and that that's because other people are hoarding it.
Jase: Rather than feeling like "I'm not good enough," it's like, "I was just dealt a bad hand," or like, "If I had what they have, then I'd be fine." Or like, "Once I get to that, then I'll be okay."
Annalisa: "If I get promoted, if I get this new house, if I have another relationship a new boyfriend or whatever then I'll feel good, then I'll feel fine." There's also that tinge of, "And the reason I don't have those things is someone else's trying to keep them from me." The God realm is the realm of long life, beauty, luxury, pleasantness, safety, and you're all thinking sounds great. Sign me up. Where do I go? How do I get there? Here's the problems with the God realm. First of all, it ends. When you have something wonderful and then you lose it, it hurts. Second, having that much luxury, safety, and pleasantness around you, blinds you to other people's lack and suffering and you lose compassion.
Emily: Gosh, I feel like we've seen that so many times. We can see that so much on the surface level of what we see with class structure and privilege and stuff like that. Also on a personal level of when we do get dealt a good hand or when things are going good for us, that empathy gap can just get so big without us even realizing it.
Annalisa: We all want to believe we're good people, so if we get things, we're like, "Well, I deserve it." The flip side of that though is if I have things and deserve it then people who don't have things didn't deserve it and this is the mindset of the god realm.
Jase: It reminds me of the secret and all the proponents of that where it's like, if things worked out well for you, it's very easy to say, "Oh, well, it's because I manifested it and you just must not be believing it enough. That's why you haven't gotten it yet." It's very easy to say that when you're in that god realm place of like it's "Things are working out for me right now."
Emily: I hate the secret.
Jase: I was really into it a long time and that's part of why I really dislike it now because I know how easy of a trap it is. How it feels like it makes sense and it feels empowering, but anyway we don't need it. We don't need it yet.
Annalisa: Anyway let me backtrack to the human realm. The human realm is the realm of doubt and confusion and it's a good place to be because in Buddhist psychology, the human realm is the only place from which you can move towards awakening or enlightenment. The reason for this is that it actually is a state where you recognize your own lack of certainty. All the other realms have this solidity to them. When you're angry you're just like, "Yes, I have a right to be angry and I'm going to kill everything." When you're depressed, it's just impossible to think you're ever not going to be depressed. You have to move into the human realm to understand that things are impermanent and that things can change and that you can change. It is a great realm to be in, but it's a hard realm, because it feels so unstable because, guess what, life is unstable.
Emily: Yes. I am assuming that this is also kind of the mental realm, the mind state of questioning, of not being sure, maybe questioning your beliefs or questioning your practices or things like that, which like you said, it seems like it's a necessary thing if your mindset or your opinions or anything is going to change but gosh, it's uncomfortable being uncertain, isn't it? Isn't it though?
Annalisa: I personally find myself clinging to my depression because I'm like, "but it's stable. I understand." My teacher says, "People cling to their pain because they know how big it is, how much it weighs, what color it is. It feels safe."
Dedeker: I feel like right now we're living in such an uncertain time also that into a degree like all of us are in a state of unknowing, like what is the world going to look like, how different is it going to be from here on out? I do agree it's this really uncomfortable place to be in.
Jase: I feel like being in a state where a lot of people are freaking out about the unknown actually makes it even harder to be in that state because it's like, "No, I got to get away from that" which is why we go-- Maybe why a lot of us are going through more alcohol than we normally do or you're going to one of these other states to like dull things and get out of that state.
Emily: We're going to take a quick break from this conversation to talk a little bit about support for this episode and ways that we can keep offering this show for free.
Dedeker: Well, so with all of this we did talk previously about the realms that we do tend to live in a lot or that our minds like go to habitually. You just talked about depression or even like the demigod realm. With those, do you have like ways in which you can move yourself out of those realms? Are there habits that you are able to break in some way?
Annalisa: The first thing is to realize that everyone has one or maybe two home realms which are not like you're constantly in this realm, but if there's a change in behavior that startles you or circumstances change and you have a reaction, you'll default to that reaction unless it's unalloyed happiness and pleasure. If you are a jealous person and something happens, your first response is you're like, "How is this taking things away from me? What's the threat?" If you're a depressive person, sort of an hungry ghost person, you're like, "Well, that's- of course, fine. I'm no good anyway." If you're an angry person, you react out of anger. To just recognize what you're home realms are and to recognize that that doesn't mean that reaction is appropriate or called for. It just means that it's your default. It can help already loosen up your reaction and make it easier to get back to that human realm where you're questioning and thinking about what is the appropriate response here.
The second thing is in terms of getting out of realms, the overall goal of Buddhism in terms of the psychology of the realms is to leave all of them. In literal terms, it means to achieve Nirvana and not be reborn, because the traditional idea in Buddhism is that you get reborn over and over again until you achieve a karma-less state and then you transcend. If you don't believe in rebirth or reincarnation, this still works because the idea is to stop having automatic unthinking default reactions and instead to be relaxed and intimate with what's occurring and then to engage with it from a position of compassion and openness rather than a reactive default position.
Emily: Oh gosh.
Dedeker: Cool is the trend.
Emily: Yes, but it's like your first step is needing to be able to step outside of yourself and see that this is a thing at all. Because I know that's definitely something for me is that everything's great when things feel in control and you feel like you can predict what's going to happen. You're in your routine and everything's going along fine and then the moment something unexpected happens, that's when it's so easy for the defaults to just come rushing in and it feels so solid. That's the thing that I've noticed you talking about a lot is that there's such a solidity to it. I'm wondering what would be some practical advice for our listeners of being able to even cultivate that ability to step outside yourself and even notice and then once you notice then what you do. Because I know that sometimes I get hung up on like, "I noticed that thing. Great. I noticed it. Now I'm going to get right back into it sometimes."
Annalisa: I know it's so great. You're like, "I'm doing that thing. I like that thing." I'm going to do the thing plus. The first step is if you-- whatever model you use, this model or some other model to recognize what your default patterns are and then to be kind to yourself when you realize you're in the middle of them because, for years and years, you're going to be in the middle of them before you realize it takes so much training to see a default mode coming and sidestep it. According to my teacher, you never a hundred percent get there, so you just learn earlier and earlier to catch your mode.
The thing I personally find most useful is to ask myself what is true right now. That question can often stop me in my tracks. Well, I'll give you a very specific example. When this whole sheltering in place, quarantine, et cetera stuff started, Alex and I both teach. His school decided to take a week off, just cancel classes for a week. My school went right into teaching. For a week, I was spending hours putting stuff online and figuring out how to run classes and he's playing computer games. I was getting more and more and more frustrated with him and angry. I had to at a certain point stop and say, "What is he actually doing to me?"
I was jealous of his time. I was jealous of his freedom. I was jealous of how much work I was doing when he seemed to be loafing around. I made a lot of assumptions about his laziness and his not caring about me and how could he sit there playing computer games and streaming them and talking constantly when he knows that bothers me. I was like, breathe. What's true right now? Do I actually know that he's aware that he's bothering me? No, I don't know that. Do I actually know that he's lazy and not stressed? I absolutely do not know that. I know he plays games when he is stressed. Do I actually know how the future is going to unfold?
What do I know right now? I know that I feel stressed. What do I do about that regard? Like not expecting Alex to fix it, not expecting the situation to change. How do I deal with that right now? Just asking myself what do I actually know for sure, what is true at this very moment? A Lot of times this very moment is actually really pretty good. I have a nice house. I have cute cats. I'm safe. I'm warm. Why am I so upset at this one second in time? Why am I so upset?
Emily: Then it makes sense like you said that you have to come to that place of doubt and questioning first in order to be able to get out of that jealous, envious, competitive mind state. I feel like I need to go crawl up in a corner and think about some things.
Dedeker: No, I love that though, genius.
Jase: You're going to the animal realm in response to this instead of care.
Emily: I guess I would count, I guess going to a cave probably counts is a pretty animal thing to do.
Dedeker: What you just said reinforces the fact that this is a thing that you do unilaterally. It's not about what your partner is doing and how they can fix your problem, but rather like, "Hey, let's look at what is true right now and what is it that I can be doing to help myself move out of this state." That's really great and a great thing to think about regardless of the situation.
Annalisa: I'm a hardliner when it comes to relationships. I really truly believe that in every circumstance, your emotions are your own. They're not caused by other people. That's not to say you should be this perfect person who never gets upset. It's just that it's in your decision, your mind, your control how you deal with things. Maybe at the moment, you deal with them in a default sort of lizard-brain way, maybe that's what you need to do, but when you calm down, maybe what you need to say is not-- this person is abusive, but I don't want to be abused anymore. I'm out of here. Let me quickly say, there are very practical reasons why people can't leave abusive relationships sometimes.
I'm not at all discounting that, but in most many circumstances where people hurt each other, it's either person can just say, "That's it. I'm done with this and I'm walking away." As opposed to "If you would just change, then I would be happy." I do draw a very strong line there probably firmer than other people do.
Jase: It reminds me a little bit of the distinction we make when talking about boundaries that the part about boundaries that can be really helpful for people and very empowering is that part where it's like you have all the power to enforce your own boundary. Again, I do think with all of it, it is worth considering situations where someone truly doesn't have any power to do that. In the case of like on the extreme human trafficking or something like that where it's like very literally don't have power to escape, but I think for most of us in most of our lives, it's not that level.
I do think that can be a really helpful thing to think about of like, "What can I do to change this?" rather than "What does everyone else need to do to change this?" That is a distinction I think we try to make with boundaries, and so it's interesting you bring that up in this context too.
Annalisa: I'm a big fan of boundaries.
Emily: Good.
Annalisa: The way you described them.
Jase: We want to talk about the six realms and how that changes your approach to relationships, which I think we've been getting into a little bit. I guess something I was curious about is you mentioned that most of us will have one or maybe a couple of these that tends to be our default to go to. It seems like there could be something really helpful in identifying that about ourselves to maybe, I don't know, maybe make it easier to notice when we're going into it. I'm just curious about that part of the process.
Annalisa: Actually, in an odd way, it's like the five love languages, where if you recognize that you and your partner have different realms, that can help you to understand why your partner reacts the way they do to something when you know you would react for it differently. One reaction might be "That's unreasonable, why are you reacting that way? That makes no sense," but if you're like, "My partner is a God person" and just wants to be safe, and luxurious, and will do anything to have that sense of luxury, and pleasure, and your realm is maybe animal realm, and those seem similar, but if you recognize the differences, you see that.
I mentioned this because sometimes Alex will be like, "Why did you eat all the cookies?" and I'd be like, "Why do you ask me why do I eat all the cookies when you know the answer?" Like he can eat three cookies and then walk away, and I'm just like, "I don't get it, but it's a thing I've seen him do." He's also seen me eat the entire box of cookies and he still doesn't get it, so it's like not recognizing this is a default mode and what it signals is that the person is reacting out of instinct rather than thoughts.
Emily: Which one is which? Which one is the animal in that situation and which one is the god realm? Is the person who eats all the cookies the god?
Dedeker: Right, the cookies are for luxury and the is survival.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Annalisa: No. Actually, I guess you're right.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Annalisa: The god realm is all the cookies and they're the best cookies. Actually, I forgot to mention, by the way, you might not find this makes sense at first, but the god realm is the realm of addiction because it's about pleasure at any cost. Whereas the animal realm is about pleasure but in terms of survival.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: I also like that the god realm is like this freedom from wanting. It also seems like this opposite from the hungry ghost, which is about craving all the time.
Annalisa: Right.
Jase: I could see on the surface, those might look similar where it's like in the god realm, to be free from wanting, I'm just going to indulge in all these luxurious things, but then in the hungry ghost realm, it's like I'm grabbing all these things because out of like a sense of desperation, that's like the motivation's different even if it might seem like the thing you're doing is the same.
Annalisa: Yes, and you can even break it down into like the hungry ghost realm as the craving you have before you get the hit. I know I keep talking about junk food, but it's my thing. I can feel a physical craving in my body when I want chocolate and don't have it. Once I eat it, there's this sense of relaxation, and luxury, and peace, and I keep eating to reproduce that feeling, which is a sort of an addictive model. I move from the hungry ghost realm to the god realm if I can get to the store, but I bypass the human realm where I might say, "Is eating an entire box of cookies really going to help you with this problem?"
Jase: Right.
Emily: In true saying, oh, God.
Dedeker: Looking at all these and thinking about this particular psychological model, I feel it's pretty easy to see the ways that people who are pursuing like non-traditional relationships or non-monogamous relationships can think about this. I think in non-monogamous relationships, we're often faced with things like attachment crises or plans changing or really having a complete reversal of our thoughts and values around a particular thing, having childhood baggage come up, having trauma come up, all kinds of things can come up. These things that can really knock you off your balance, and so it's really, I think, easy to understand how you have a lot of opportunities to see what's my default in this situation?
I know for myself personally, I think about times when I've been at home and my partner has been on a date, and for me, these days, mostly that's okay, but times in the past where sometimes that's not been okay. Literally seeing myself go through literally all of these states; going through the anger, going into the craving, going into the jealousy, then going into the cookies, and then going into the wine. For me, often I think my manifestation of the god realm is the detaching and wanting to just be above it all and pretending like it's not affecting me at all. That feels like that would fit into that particular realm, if that makes sense.
Emily: It does.
Jase: Like there's a spiritual bypassing, like, "Oh, well, I'm still above all these." It can actually itself be a state that you can habitually go through.
Dedeker: Yes, a whole thing. It makes sense that what I find myself often telling my clients, especially clients where they're going to go through their first time with their partner being gone for an entire night or for a sleepover or whatever, and they don't know how to deal with the time alone that I have found, often, I end up telling people just to expect that you're going to go through a bunch of different moods, and need to be there on your feet to expect that. It makes sense that this is a model that maybe matches up with that.
Annalisa: One of the things that I find to be really useful about it is casting your moods as realms that have these little pictures attached to them; the animal realm, the god realm, automatically distances it a little. You're not feeling like, "I'm angry." No, I'm in the hell realm. That's a thing you're in that you will then get out of. So by the very act of trying to figure out what realm you're in, you provide a little bit of distance to allow yourself to then crawl out of whatever realm you end up in.
I find that to be very useful in these circumstances where, especially in relationships, where it can feel kind of life or death, it can feel like the emotions are so powerful because this is bonding, and connection, and intimacy, and if you lose that, as human beings, if we lose that, we die. It can feel really important and not at all optional. Not at all something that might fade and emotions can just be overwhelming, but if say, "I'm in the hungry ghost realm and I'm craving an intimacy to show that I matter." It's like, "Okay, well, if I'm in a realm, I can get out of a realm and let me think about how to do that." It's a neat trick.
Emily: You're not an angry person, you're maybe just angry right at that moment or something along those lines. I like that.
Jase: It reminds me of something that I learned years ago from a guy who teaches prana energy work. It's like one of the many modalities of energy work stuff, but specifically, a thing he was talking about was changing from identifying with our feelings as like they define me versus I am feeling that feeling. Like you talked about being hungry, for example, and that we say like, "I am hungry," as in like the thing of being hungry, I am that that, that is me. Just it's built into our language that way, as opposed to "I'm feeling hungry."
Even though the meaning's the same that he was talking about how you can have more control over your feelings by distancing yourself from them in terms of whether you think that is your identity or not. Whether it's, "I am anger and carnage" or "I'm in the angry realm." I actually like the realm thing, it's maybe easier to conceptualize it than just saying, "I'm feeling it rather than being it." I like that of having that moment of like, "Which realm am I in?" because it's more clearly like, "I'm in it, so yes, it's big, but it means I can also get out of it." I like that as a way of thinking about that.
Annalisa: The other thing that is useful to think about with the realms, especially in terms of relationships is to recognize when you say, "I'm in the hell realm," no one put you there. You wandered into it yourself so you can also take yourself out of it. I think a lot of times people who especially are renewed in non-monogamy, their partner goes out on a date and it feels bad being at home. It feels threatening or you feel unimportant or you feel insecure and you don't want to feel that way, and so you say like, "If my partner would just check-in." Your partner might check-in, you might still be in the hungry ghost realm. The important thing is to recognize that everything is impermanent.
In Buddhist psychology, there's eight levels of consciousness and I won't go into those, but the ego, the idea that we exist as a unified ongoing person is the job of the ego, it's a whole level of consciousness. The ego very much wants to believe that. The ego's whole job in life is to pretend that you, Jase, or Emily, or Dedeker, are always the same and you're solid and fixed, and clear cut, and you have a soul and all that. So if you say to yourself, "I am angry," your ego is like, "Check. Okay, there's a part of my personality and it can never change because that would mean I'm not permanent and fixed, and so, okay, anger it is."
I think when we cling to feelings long past the point where we should maybe get over them, it's because our ego is doing what we've told it to do. If we just let our ego relax a little, if instead of saying, "I guess I'm just a jealous person," you say, "Right now, I'm in the demigod realm, but that can change," then when it comes time to stop being jealous, you can recognize it. It's like pain, everyone thinks you're in pain in this solid way, but if you actually sit down when you're in pain and just watch your pain, you'll see that it rises and falls and sometimes it disappears. Oftentimes, you don't notice when it disappears. You're so busy doing other stuff, you miss that you're not in pain anymore.
Again, that attention to the present moment, like, "Okay, here I am in this realm because my partner is on a date and I'm really furious at him,' and then five minutes later, "Actually, I got totally distracted by the cute thing the cat did and I'm not in that realm anymore," and that's fine because nothing is permanent.
Jase: It reminds me a little bit of something that we learned about on the retreat that the three of us went to a year ago before we talked last time, which was about the fact that we often as people don't remember to focus on the here and now when the here and now is good. We forget to focus on what does feeling good or feeling normal feel like, instead it's just like, "Where's the next thing that might make me feel bad?" or what feels bad now even if there might be some things that feel good. Like you said, we're not paying attention. It's like, "I was feeling good while I was doing these other things and I missed it almost."
Annalisa: Yes, one of the things I've learned from practicing with pain is that our default are our expectations that we won't be in pain. So like if you have a toothache for like the minute or two or five minutes after the toothache goes away, you're just like, "This is bliss." Then you're onto the next thing and for like the next 10 years, you don't have a toothache and you don't ever say, "I'm so glad my mouth doesn't hurt." You never say that, you just expect it to be so, and you get pissed off when it happens again.
Dedeker: I think that is something really interesting to focus on right now as well that there is a lot that can be celebrated. I think that can be easy to set up this expectation of like, "Okay, I got these six realms, and they all sound crummy, and I got to avoid them." So I can only celebrate once I'm avoiding all of them and I feel super Zen and super blissed out and just ecstatically enlightened and that's what I can celebrate.
Emily: When does that happen?
Dedeker: Oh, gosh, I don't know, you tell me when it happens.
Annalisa: It usually happens after the third glass of wine.
Dedeker: Right.
Emily: Take some hallucinogens.
Dedeker: I think it's interesting to think about this idea of there's still something to celebrate and lean into just when there's any kind of shift, just when I'm like, "Okay, I recognize that I'm in the hell realm right now and I recognize that, and I'm going to move into questioning and doubting that, and that that in itself is something to really lean into, and celebrate, and feel good about." It is those little things that I think we don't. like you said with the toothache, the bliss only lasts for so long, and then it is just business as usual after that.
Annalisa: The other thing is impermanence feels scary. If you can learn to embrace impermanence, it becomes flying rather than falling.
Jase: Okay, hang on, there's like a "Come on, I have to sit here and think about it for a second."
The uncertainty of the human realm when we're grasping to certainty feels like we're falling, but if we can embrace it, it feels like flying.
Annalisa: To expand a little onto come on, recognizing and coming face to face with how impermanent life is can feel very groundless. I think for a lot of people in this current situation, as things changed literally overnight, everyone's like, "Oh my God, people are dying in this situation and the economy is shutting down." It was always like that, we just pretended it wasn't, it's coming face to face with the unreality of stability. The impermanence of life is shocking, and so it feels destabilizing.
It feels like you're falling off a cliff and you don't know what's going to happen when you land, but if you realize that the impermanence is always there, that it never goes away, we just pretend, then you're never going to hit the ground. Instead of falling and wondering what's going to happen, you're flying because you're just soaring on the impermanence. Sometimes maybe you're on an updraft, and sometimes you're on a downdraft, but you never have to worry about hitting the ground because there is no ground.
Dedeker: It reminds me, to bring it back to just the relatively small scope of relationships relative to just the big expansiveness of uncertainty of the universe. I think something that we do say on this podcast, something I find myself saying a lot to clients and reminding myself of also is that, especially when you're in a relationship that's very nontraditional, that colors outside the lines, it can be really scary to feel like, "Oh, gosh, you don't have a script for this situation. No one has socialized me, no one has taught me the rules of how I navigate a friendship with my metamour, no one's taught me the rules of what happens when my partner does this thing unexpectedly that disappoints me," whatever.
That it's like not having the script for how this particular kind of relationship is necessarily supposed to go can be really terrifying but also really empowering at the same time because it does mean that there is this expansiveness, this freedom, this ability to start crafting and writing your own script. Maybe it's not necessarily a perfect analog, but at least that's what it reminds me of within relationships.
Annalisa: I think it's a great analogy or connection or analog. It reminds me, so in the lineage I'm in, there's Zen peacemakers and they have three tenants and one of the tenants is not knowing his most intimate. What that means is that if you go into a situation without scripts, without expectations but you really engage with what is actually happening, then you become intimate with it. If you can enter into this non-traditional relationship and say, "I don't know what's going to happen, but we'll make it up as we go along and I trust my partner, and we're going to work through this together in an honest, vulnerable way," then you really connect, even if bad things happen, you really connect.
Whereas if you go and saying, "I know how we're supposed to do nominal argument, it's supposed to look this, and if you do this thing, it's bad." When people set up rules ahead of time, it's all about thinking they know when they really don't.
Emily: That's a great thing to say to people. who are constantly reading up and trying to do all the research beforehand for years and years before they actually take the plunge. I love that, I think that's a great note to tell to those of you out there who are maybe still in the waiting game, in the like, "Let's research more about this game."
Dedeker: Yes, so stop listening to this podcast and get out there.
Emily: I'm not saying that, I'm just saying keep listening for more clips like that from Annalisa.
Dedeker: Of course, some knowledge and research is obviously good. I'm a scholar, I spend my life researching, that's what I do, but at a certain point, you have to have the experience and the experience, there's a saying, I keep doing this to you, I'm sorry, but there's a saying in Zen, reading the menu is not eating the food.
Emily: I think that applies to a lot of people who are new to non-monogamy, they read all the menus, which in non-monogamy, the menus are very long books for the most part.
Dedeker: Very, very long menus.
Emily: Dedecker.
Dedeker: Who keeps writing these long-ass menus? It certainly applies to me right now when I walk to the grocery store and I wistfully look at the menus of all these shuttered restaurants and just be like, "Oh, man, that sounds great."
Emily: That side about it, yes.
Dedeker: Man.
Jase: All right, so we're coming up on time here, but, Annalisa, if people want to find either more of you or more of resources for this, if they want to learn a little bit more about some of these principles and things, where should they go to get that?
Annalisa: First of all, you could go to sojizencenter.com, S-O-J-I, Zen Center, all one word or if you just search Soji Zen Center, Philadelphia. That's my home Sangha, that's my teacher. Right now, we're doing virtual sit so you could sit with us from anywhere. I find that Lion's Roar, lion like the animal, R-O-A, Lion's Roar, it's a magazine.
Emily: That's a thing in yoga, I was like, "Lion's Breath?" Exactly.
Annalisa: No, it's the name of the Buddhist magazine, and I find their articles to be really good non-denominational, they're not just Zen, they're Tibetan and to be positive and all that, but they have a really nice clear way of putting things, and I'm not being paid to say that, but I just I've always liked their stuff for beginners. I'm more like, "I know that I know all this stuff, let me read the hardcore Zen sutras," but do not start there. Definitely, don't.