Summary
Joe and Brett dive deep into one of the core concepts of the Art of Accomplishment work: emotional fluidity. They define it as the capacity to feel all emotions and allow them to move through without resistance — not controlling them, but not being controlled by them either. Babies demonstrate natural fluidity; adults learn to constrict it.
The conversation covers what emotional fluidity is NOT (detached watching, reluctant acceptance, “letting go”), why it matters (life hurts without it; it creates blind spots, identity traps, and stagnation), and its benefits for head (better decisions, less judgment, faster learning), heart (more joy, love, connection, less depression), and body (less chronic pain, more pleasure, changed relationship to addictions). Joe emphasizes that true fluidity means enjoying all emotions, including the “negative” ones.
They also explore how resistance to emotions often comes from having been manipulated by others’ emotions as children, and how emotional fluidity ultimately reveals one’s inherent goodness and dissolves rigid identity.
Key Concepts
- Emotional fluidity is feeling all emotions without resistance
- Welcoming emotions is different from accepting them
- Resisting an emotion changes its expression entirely
- Emotional avoidance creates life blind spots
- Practicing pleasure builds emotional fluidity
Key Quotes
“Emotional fluidity is the capacity to feel all of your emotions and to allow them to move through you without any resistance.”
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“You can’t let go of an emotion. You can let go of a thought that changes your emotional experience.”
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
“Each emotion that you start allowing has its own little flavor of positivity that comes.”
“If I can feel all this stuff, it’s that I am inherently good.”
Transcript
there’s a line that I really love from the Gospel of Thomas quote if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you I really love this as kind of an intro to one of the core pieces of of our work which is emotional fluidity and I’m really excited to finally get to this topic which feels so core to the word and in 85 episodes we’ve only talked about it through nearly every episode without directly addressing about it so yeah yeah so let’s let’s do this sounds good yeah let’s start by talking about what it is what is emotional fluidity yeah so emotional fluidity is the capacity to feel all of your emotions and to allow them to move through you without any resistance so and that’s partially in time like sometimes it’s important to compartmentalize things like if you need to save your child from a car accident you don’t want to start feeling grief you want to like go and save your child from the car accident um but generally it’s also kind of a mark of time it’s like how long do you hold on to emotions and do they stagnate in your system so it’s how how well you can process how quickly you can process how fully you can process your emotions and let them flow through you if you look at babies they’re great examples of emotional fluidity they can go from happy to sad really quickly or angry or upset and they and they don’t hold on to anything in the past right it’s just it all kind of moves through them that’s not to say that it’s emotional fluidity like a baby in the fact that you’re out of control of your emotions though it’s odd you are out of control in your emotions but your emotions don’t control you so when you’re younger it’s often that there’s this feeling like your emotions control you and so you go through this natural process of trying to manage or contain your emotions and then you can learn that you can have your emotions without them controlling you and then the fluidity is really important to allow them all to move through you but it’s like they they don’t they don’t control you at the same time you don’t control them meaning the emotions are going to come you don’t get to decide what they are you don’t get to decide well that’s irrational to have that emotion it’s like nope those are the emotions that are here and they’re all going to move right through me so that’s what emotional fluidity is yeah beautiful so the the capacity to allow emotions to move through us and I also noticed like there’s an with emotional fluidity there’s an absence or at least a fluidity within shame or guilt or resistance how does how does that show up yeah that’s right so the yeah so if you look at like judgment or guilt resistance shame those are often stag they often stagnate the emotions the core emotions get stagnated with those emotions and so it’s allowing yourself to feel those completely and then pretty soon they stop arising very much if at all and so so but even if they arise they don’t stagnate your system so often times like somebody feels guilty about something or they feel shame like they might have done something wrong they’ll just go over and over and over the emotional Loop and so seem or dissociate from it yeah that’s another example yeah yeah so one one way of kind of describing this is that there’s or maybe one metaphor for this is that it’s like a like range of motion for your body but in your in your emotional system yes yeah yeah you could think of it is emotional like flexibility like yoga right you have like a bigger range of emotion and it also means that you’re not avoiding any emotional experience anymore so it’s not like I don’t want to feel that so I’m going to rrange my life not to have to feel that I’m I’m going to avoid these conversations I’m going to avoid these people I’m going to avoid these business opportunities yeah um so it’s also making it’s also the fluidity allows you to make friends with all the emotional experiences and then you don’t have to avoid them you don’t have to spend your whole life you know trying to have a particular emotional experience yeah yeah in the in the body metaphor there it would be like like favoring a knee for many many years and then developing all this extr musculature and other habits around avoiding something going on the body if we do the same thing for our emotions then we’re going to end up having having a lot of patterning around that yeah and I I would say the other thing that’s that’s beautifully put and the other thing that happens is that um so you you have this fluidity in the emotional experience and in that fluidity there’s also something that happens which is a bit difficult to explain but it’s the best way I would say it and it’s and it breaks people when I say this so is you enjoy all the negative emotions there’s actually like an a deep enjoyment of what what was once considered a negative emotion and because you’re not resisting it it doesn’t control you anymore so there’s like this just deep enjoyment of of anger or heartbreak or sadness yeah yeah yeah there’s a distinction there between acceptance like reluctant acceptance of an emotion and enjoyment which brings me to the next next series of questions here what is not emotional fluidity specifically what is not emotional fluidity that people commonly associate with it or would associate and and call emotional fluidity yeah um I don’t know how much people would use the word generally but I think that there is something like oh I felt everything in like a meditative space you know I would not call that emotional fluidity the the The Watcher of the em like if you’re identified fully in The Watcher which I think is a fine thing of the emotion experience there’s nothing wrong with that by any stretch but that’s not emotional fluidity unless it’s embodied like The Watcher can still be online but there needs to be an embodiment with it so there needs to be a for emotional fluidity to work you’re not trying to manage it through through watching it you’re you’re actually in love with it and you said it’s an acceptance yeah you’re experiencing it and and as some point you said oh it’s like acceptance of is this is an acceptance I would say it’s a welcoming it’s like oh I can’t wait to I can’t wait to feel sad again I can’t wait to feel upset or jealous it’s like there’s there’s lessons in it for me there’s it’s a pure signal it’s um I can enjoy it it teaches me how to be a better human and and that’s what I think breaks people is when they’re like how on Earth could I ever enjoy being angry or how on Earth and and yet it like I watch people find it all the time so it’s definitely possible yeah something that struck me about what you said there is it’s it’s okay to observe it but also we need to experience it and I’m curious what happens if we flip that around if you are just experiencing it but you’re lost in it and there’s no observation or perspective on it could be another way yeah yeah that would be extremely slow process that would also could potentially get you lost for decades yeah so it’s it’s really important to have that self-awareness and the experiencing of it both um the more that you can see it not as yourself and just as like a wave coming through you the quicker emotional fluidity happens um but it you’ll stall it if you don’t experience it if if it becomes like this something that is like so detached from you or you’re so dissociated with so it has to be embodied for the whole process to work really well and smoothly and quickly yeah and how about letting go like I’m going to let go of my sadness it’s time to let go of my grief I look I was angry but then I just let go yeah no fact no no again you don’t get a choice on on what emotions you’re feeling so to just say let go is like the emotional experience is the emotional experience you have what you might let go of actually is a as a thought pattern like like they hurt me and therefore the emotion goes away with it right or they’re they’re the they’re the bad one and I’m the good one that that could hold an emotional experience in place for a long period of time so there are definitely thoughts that you can let go of that that you can see through and then the emotional experience will change that that can happen um but you can’t and also I would say that you can fully feel an emotion and then the thought changes that happens all the time I see people finally release anger and all of a sudden they can see clearly so many things um it’s particularly around the things that they were clear about are the things that they hadn’t drawn boundaries around um yeah but but you what you can’t do is just like go an emotion emotion is like braathe you’re always having an experience of one and you don’t get to choose what what it is so you can’t let go of an emotion you can you can let go of a thought that changes your emotional experience right just as much as you couldn’t let go of having an experience in this moment right now that’s correct happening yeah it’s happening yeah I can’t stop it right yeah okay so so why cultivate emotional fluidity what’s so important about it life hurts without it like life is life like there’s a lot of stagnation um it’s harder to get to Clarity um but Mo mostly it’s it hurts it’s like like look at any part of your life that hurts and then notice that there’s emotional stagnation there it’s like really really common that there’s emotional stagnation in this those areas so that’s one of the things um it creates blind spots for us so if we are avoiding certain emotions because we don’t want to feel them like feeling like a failure or feeling not valuable or feeling sad then we’re going to create an entire life experience like I I don’t know how many people have come to me who are like really high-powered Executives and they want to start something on their own and they their entire life has been based on not feeling feeling valued feeling like they’re providing value and then they’re not sure how they’re going to do that on their own they don’t know who they’re going to provide value to and so it’s it stops their entire entrepreneurial experience so it totally changes your experience um that’s another one um I think the other thing is um there’s identity identity that can be lost in an emotional experience too and so if you can’t move it like I don’t know how many people identify as angry or just the other day someone’s like can you help me with being a dick and it’s like you’ve identified with being a dick which means you’ve identified with anger like because you’re not actually having full fluidity on that emotional experience so it also kind of like limits us through that kind of um that kind of identification thing I’d say the the interesting thing about it is that I think it’s really important to say this I think when what could be happening in some people’s Minds when I say emotional fluidity they might think like oh that means that I easily get angry at anybody and start yelling at them or I easily cry at people or um I’m like wildly out of control my anger because like and and it’s like hurting everybody around me or or My like I have temper tantrums or whatever I hold people hostage with my emotional experience that is not at all what what I’m speaking about when I say emotional fluid it and in those cases the emotions are very constricted there’s a lot of Shame around having the emotions there’s a lot of trying to control other people with your emotions none of that is welcoming your emotional experience so I think that’s a really important thing to say even to the point where the other day I was talking to somebody and they were saying to me they were saying oh how you define anger is different how the rest of the world defines anger and and it’s and it’s I’m I’m defining the energy wants it’s unresisted instead of the energy resisted so that energy of like anger or let’s do sadness sadness resisted can be like I’m not sad it can be a form of low-level depression it can be it can be somebody being passive aggressive you know like I’m sad but I don’t want to feel it so I’m going to attack you all of those can be but that feeling of sadness unrestricted that actually is like an A Joyful relief almost like it’s a sad release but it creates this joyful release that’s that’s how I would describe it and so that all comes with emotional fluidity as well that as you allow and welcome all these emotions your experience of them changes because they’re not resisted and so like your experience of anything changes whether you’re resisting it or not resisting it right I feel like what you just said traces back to a kind of cultural belief system around emotions being seen as manipulative like a lot of times people say when people refer to an emotion they’re referring to the behaviors of projecting that emotion at somebody yeah not necessarily the direct sensory visceral experience of being with that emotion and just fully enjoying it right I don’t want to be angry because I don’t want to do what my dad did to me by controlling me through anger I don’t want to be sad because I don’t want to be weak like my mom because Mom was actually trying to get people to take care of her through her sadness right like so absolutely I think that the resistance that people have to the emotional experience is because they’ve been manipulated by it or and because they don’t love it in themselves yeah okay so these are these are a number of ways that the lack of emotional fluidity affects our lives how about what does emotional fluidity bring to our lives how does it open things up for us when we have it when we’ve opened up to it so so so many ways like I can’t even begin to tell you like the the goodness that it brings into your life uh so let let’s let’s uh let’s let’s turn it into a way of thinking like how does it benefit your head how does it benefit your heart how does it benefit your body I think are really good ways to think about it and by head I mean like your intellectual experience by heart I mean your emotional experience and body um that’s going to that’s going to capture a lot maybe a little nervous system and a little um musculature because when we resist emotions we hold our muscles and so it has a huge effect on our body so okay so let’s start with that so if we were going to go with head for instance um wow so many things um it really prevents bad habits often times bad habits are something that you do because you don’t want to have a certain emotional experience um it makes decision making a ton easier because oftentimes as I’ve talked about so many times on this that it’s our emotional center of our brain that makes the decision so we’re using logic to try how to feel a certain way or not feel a certain way and if you welcome emotions you have a lot more flexibility to feel whatever way so it really helps with that um decisiveness um in decision decision making also that emotional fluidity does a tremendous amount for decisiveness because you’re not so worried about getting it right or wrong all the time and usually people who are indecisive are really scared to get it wrong um or sometimes get it right um which is ultimately associated with a feeling right is exactly exactly yeah the wrong feeling wrong yeah exactly um reduces judgment because judgment is something that we do to not feel um it um increases clear-headed discrimination so for instance if I really want to feel successful I’m more likely to buy into the scam like a pyramid scheme if I really want to feel abundance I’m more likely to buy into a pyramid scheme if I’m really want to feel like a successful venture capitalist I’m more likely to buy into you know some technology that somebody has raised a couple hundred million dollars on so a lot of clear-headed stuff happens because you don’t need to feel a certain way you’re not scared to feel a certain way um it speeds up learning because there’s less shame you’re what you’re you welcome the all the ups and downs of the learning process so it speeds that up um it stops the stagnation of like um that people have like going over the same thing over and over and over again because they’re trying to avoid an emotional experience how about the heart the heart um heart heart heart yeah uh what is do so the most important thing it does is it really increases joy and love it um that that like Joy is as I’m sure I’ve said this Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome the other way to think about this is like you’re a dock and you have one a place for one ship and the ship that is naturally there is Joy but if you have another one parked there and it hasn’t moved you’re not you’re not going to get to the Joy is not going to be there there you’re going to be in a depression or whatnot so so it totally increases your capacity to love because there’s nothing to defend against anymore it increases your capacity to feel Joy because which is a very natural state like if you look at kids when they’re not like two or three year olds when they’re not experiencing a different emotion when all the emotions have moved through it’s like Joy is just the thing that’s kicking around in there more tenderness more connection more trust because you’re willing to feel the Heartbreak of of love right all love comes with heartbreak all love comes with disappointment all love comes with being let down from time to time and if you’re willing to feel those things you have no reason to avoid the love um and so therefore more connection also less emotionally avoidant behaviors like less things where you’re feeling like shame and therefore oh I feel so much shame right and I don’t want to feel the shame and therefore I’m going to drink or therefore I’m going to smoke a lot of pot or therefore I’m going to do anything like that and less spiraling and wallowing and kind of circling in it in a collapse yeah less depression all those things happen yeah it’s I mean it’s it is it is amazing how like how quickly life changes if you feel the that up for you to feel in the moment it’s just insane how quickly Life Changes how much how much more joy and happiness and Clarity there is yeah just an overall vitality and aliveness of it yeah like drinking drinking from the fire hose of life if if you don’t have your full emotional experience you’re missing a significant chunk of your overall potential experience in life your kids come to you with their Joy that’s natural for them and like how much can you be with that joy and allow it to move through you as well yeah my my my personal experience of it is it’s like the difference between using your phone black and white and color it’s like huge difference and I remember when this was really like when it first like you know when anything like this cracks open widely there’s like a moment of like holy this is so different the contrast points it out and I remember I used to say that it felt like life had become a dream that I never thought possible coming true that was the experience of life it was just like it was very vital and very alive very um like it just had a broad spectrum to it that it hadn’t before yeah and and I could love easily even if someone didn’t love me was you know or hated me even it just changed a tremendous amount yeah which which speaks to another another component here is that your joy becomes less contingent on external circumstances less contingent on other people’s emotions being a certain way for you to feel something you could be in deep Joy with your kids being angry right and that shows that changes the way that you show up in your entire life and the way that others experience you yeah that’s right yeah yeah and there’s like a there’s certain emotions like incapacity for instance like to feel really incapable to feel helpless in a situation they do it does certain things like it allows you to be far more um capable oddly right like if you fully allow that feeling then you stop you stop trying to control things you can’t control and there then you start really focusing on the things that you can so that each emotion that you start to allow yourself to feel has its own benefit you know anger allows ghost creates some clarity sadness creates like a certain kind of joy and fear creates excitement like more excitement in your system so each one of the emotions that you start allowing has like its own little flavor of positivity that comes yeah yeah yeah so so let’s talk a little bit about how it shows up in the body yeah so as I was saying about this the um so right now if you’re listening to this podcast and just like allow yourself to feel let’s just use a simple one like allow yourself to feel scared for a moment right we’re all living with a little bit of fear somewhere so you you know you allow yourself to feel scared feel what that’s like in your body and then now stop feeling scared no matter what you do make sure that you do not feel scared and I guarantee what just happened is that your muscles constricted a little bit because you can’t stop an emotional experience without a physical holding and so if you’ve been holding the same thing physically for years and years and years you’re going to get chronic pain and stress you’re going to have muscular skeletal issues um it’s why you’ve heard probably heard of people who have been doing like you know particular kinds of yoga where they start crying in the middle of the yoga class because they’re like releasing a certain emotional experience that they’ve been holding on to for a long time um I’ve had experiences of people some some of them have been public about this which is like they had like a certain thing happening in their throat and then they released anger and the pain in their throat just totally changed so I’ve seen that kind of thing countless examples of that kind of thing in our in our work yeah and a lot of a lot of disease traces back to Aces they call them like adverse childhood experiences and that’s that’s an example of like something that can happen in your childhood that creates an emotional constipation of sorts a traumatic experience that doesn’t get processed and how a lot of the research has been pointing to that being a major cause of Downstream disease of all sorts later in life right yeah absolutely and and the other thing is that um the other thing that happens is that there’s like the a lot of people have issues where they dissociate they numb they can’t even identify the emotions that they have all of that stuff and their body starts going away they become far more perceptive of their emotional reality they’re more in touch with it they don’t numb they don’t want to numb that’s another thing that happens in the body and I think the last thing is it just like Your Capacity to feel pleasure really increases in that process your sex will change your orgasms will change your like all of that kind of pleasure experience also deeply changes as you allow the emotional experiences and and what I noticed too is like if I have a room full of a 100 people and I’m like okay we’re all going to feel sadness and cry like people will go for like 45 minutes and they’ll be totally focused on it or an hour hour and a half even we’ve seen it or anger and then I’m like hey everybody okay we’re gonna just experience pleasure and after like five minutes half of them are dissociated they’re like you know they don’t say this but they’re like thinking about something else they like ah it’s like wait you have full permission to feel pleasure and you’re like ah so that’s another another thing and even if you just if you’re listening to this if you you know practice feeling pleasure it’s a great way to increase emotional fluidity as well because as you start practicing that feeling of pleasure other things will come up to prevent that experience from happening and then you can process them and then go back to the pleasure yeah yeah something else that we see often is also your what you want changes a lot on a physical level since we’re talking about the body here the foods that you want to eat the substances that you want to regulate yourself with or not or yeah just by by shifting your overall Baseline state of how much you are comfortable being in your state as it is and how much you’re trying to leave it or how attuned you are to your body’s signals and how much it’s really craving chocolate or how much it’s really just I often crave chocolate or how much it’s just wanting to have some kind of experience some kind of dopamine hit yeah or noticing these things becomes easier yeah yeah so for instance on all the addictions you know coming from for me coming from a house that was like had a large amount of dysfunction alcoholism I obviously brought some my own addictions in like you know um I I wrestled with nicotine marijuana in my 20s in all of those cases a certain emotion that I allowed release the addiction so I like when I really got in touch with my anger and that became really fluid marijuana became completely uninteresting to me as an example so so it it does change how you want to regulate yourself or how you want to eat or what you’re avoiding it doesn’t by the way it doesn’t change it all the way so don’t don’t don’t this isn’t like a a cure all for that stuff because there is like a physical addiction part of it there’s some other things that have to be addressed um so I don’t want to but I don’t know anybody who’s increased their emotional fluidity who their their destructive habits haven’t changed for their better but I I also haven’t met anybody whose emotional fluidity really increased and all of their destructive patterns went away entirely there’s you know there’s other things too um but yeah so that’s how I’d say it yeah yeah I think I think ultimately ultimately is this is a weird way to say but ultimately what happens with emotional fluidity like at the end of the day is you get in contact with your inherent goodness in a way that you weren’t before and um because you’re because so much of what we consider bad like oh I’m bad and I don’t deserve or I don’t I can’t trust myself or what did I do wrong all all that stuff or I kind of deserve that behavior that somewhat abusive behavior all of that goes away with emotional fluidity and you’re just left with like oh I’m like if I can feel all this it’s not if I can feel all this stuff it’s that I am inherently good and feeling all this stuff really allows me to see that yeah yeah another another piece there is that it pulls you out of identity which I think is a different different way of saying the same thing yes because that’s right emotions are something that just happened you can yeah you can sort of predict how you’re going to feel in certain circumstances but research shows that we’re notoriously bad at predicting are future emotional responses and so if you are the more that you are just with your emotional experience the more that just opens up awe and wonder for oneself and for one’s reality and just yeah deepens your presence into it and really helps to loosen up and dissolve some of the preconceived notions or the the kind of ossified identities that we often live within and that are that are also ways that we stop ourselves from feeling yeah I think there’s you as you’re talking about it it like brings something in it’s like there’s certain things that the identity uses to secure itself and like um comparative mind like if I compare I can tell the difference between me and you and therefore there’s a me and here and this is how I Define myself um another way is known reaction like oh and if you can’t know your reaction like if I was like Brett you could no longer predict your reaction to anything who would Brett be right and most of our reactions that we’re predicting are emotional reactions it’s not what we say it’s how we say it it’s the emotion behind what we’re saying and so that it does dissolve the the identity in this really neat way it does do that and beautifully put beautifully seen yeah and I love the example of comparative mind too because you can intellect compare yourself or two paths you might take or a decision you might make but if you are following if you are fully allowing an emotional experience there’s going to be much richer data for you yeah and it’s going to be much more present how does this feel how does this feel rather than right here’s the pros and cons right which is a useful frame at times but it’s not the only one right and even even I thought you were going somewhere else which I thought was really cool too which was like even if you compare yourself if you’re comparative mind and there’s no emotional friction behind it it’s not like most people when they compare themselves it’s like they’re better than me or I’m better than them but if you let go of that feeling of being better or being worse than then all of a sudden even comparative mind doesn’t have the same kind of yeah it’s just data collection it’s not not making a new meaning to suppress yourself with yeah yeah yeah awesome beautiful that’s cool this is fun all right thank you so much that was a great topic I appreciate it yeah yeah I did too finally got around to this one awesome all right good to see you you too by thank you everybody for listening uh please share this if you really like this episode please share it with a friend uh give us a rating or review and uh if you have any questions actually if you if if you really like this episode hold it for yourself and don’t share it with anybody ever yeah keep it keep it secret keep it safe keep keep it secret if you share it with somebody it’ll only hurt you you’ll only lose part okay probably should cut that but what the all right uh we’re leaving it in all right okay thanks everybody thank you Joe bye