Summary
Joe and Brett explore why emotions are fundamental to all decision-making, drawing on neuroscience research showing that people who lose their emotional brain center can’t make even simple decisions despite retaining full IQ. Joe explains that what we think of as “rational decisions” are always emotionally driven — we choose based on avoiding failure, seeking love, wanting to be seen, or fearing rejection.
The conversation goes deep into how resisting emotions creates the very problems we fear: resisted anger becomes destructive, resisted sadness becomes depression, resisted fear becomes chronic anxiety. Joe describes the developmental stages of emotional awareness — from identifying emotions, to expressing them, to deep somatic inquiry, to full emotional fluidity where feelings flow freely and decision-making becomes crisp.
Joe shares his personal journey of learning to cry after 14 years of emotional shutdown, going three miles off-trail so no one could see him fake-crying for months until real tears broke through. He describes how each “unkinked” emotion reveals its true nature: unresisted anger becomes determination, unresisted sadness becomes deep joy, unresisted fear becomes excitement, and grief becomes celebration.
Key Concepts
- All decisions are emotional, never purely rational
- Resisting an emotion creates the very outcome you fear
- Feel the emotion first, then take the action
- Don’t do emotions at people
- Judgment toward others signals an unfelt emotion in yourself
- Naming an emotion can become a way to avoid feeling it
- Emotional development follows predictable stages
- If you can’t love the emotion, love the resistance to the emotion
Key Quotes
“If I took the emotional center of your brain out you would cease to make decisions. It would take you a half an hour to decide what color pen to use.”
“Clarity doesn’t come from being logical because it doesn’t work. It comes from being okay with whatever emotional state arises.”
“You’re never overtaken by the feelings. You’re overtaken by the resistance to the feelings.”
“Every epiphany is the innocent beginning of a rut.”
“The unrestricted sadness is a deep joy and the unconstricted fear is excitement.”
“I put a picture of it on my desk and I was like okay I’m gonna learn how to cry. But a year later I hadn’t cried.”
Transcript
[Music] foreign the reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else is because they haven’t gotten angry by themselves they haven’t it takes them a while to build that kind of anger so go release your anger and then talk to the person go get really really scared and then talk to your boss about the race that you want you have the emotional experience and then go take the action welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson foreign [Music] many of us are taught to manage our feelings and to be logical especially when it comes to important or complex matters and what makes feeling so important that is a great question um so in a I think it’s a 2012 book called Descartes error and neuroscientist talks about what happens to people if they lose the emotional Center of their brain and it’s a little more complex than this but just to simplify it if I took the emotional Center of your brain out you would cease to make decisions it would take you a half an hour to decide what color pen to use it would take you four hours to decide where to have lunch and though your IQ would maintain the same in fact in the book there’s somebody whose IQ Remains the Same very high level IQ is incredibly intelligent but their business follows the part their marriage falls apart everything falls apart because they can’t make decisions and what it indicates to us is that we are thinking we’re making rational decisions but there’s really no such thing there’s only emotional decisions and you can think about this in in your in terms of your own life really simply just think about how many decisions of your life were made because you didn’t want to feel like a failure or how many decisions were made so that you could feel loved how many decisions were made so that you could feel like you were seen by your friends and how many decisions were made so that you wouldn’t be rejected tremendous amounts huge swaths of our decision making you can immediately see your are very emotional the intellect is really good at trying to figure out how to get to an end but the end that you’re trying to get to is always an emotional end and so Clarity doesn’t come from being logical because it doesn’t work you can’t do it in your decision making it comes from being okay with whatever emotional state arises if you all of a sudden are completely excited to deal with sadness and you’re completely excited to deal with joy and you’re completely excited to deal with deal with anger it’s not even deal with it’s like you get to you get to live that then all of a sudden you’re you have incredibly clear decision making and so that’s why it’s important and if you’re in those thoughts that are recursive and they’re just coming in over and over and over and over and over again guaranteed there’s an emotional reality that if you felt it it would clear up can you give me an example of what you’re talking about yeah absolutely so I’ll give you for instance so I work with a lot of married couples and what happens in a lot of marriages is that people stop being true to themselves because they’re scared of some results that’ll happen if they do and eventually the marriage becomes not palatable because they’re not themselves in the marriage and what I tell people in that situation is hey go mourn the heck out of your marriage like your marriage is over just assume it and go mourn the heck out of it like feel all the grief of being left to feel all the grief of 20 years down the tubes feel all the grief that your kids are gonna not have two parents like go through all of that stuff and at the end of that then then let’s find out what you need to do and what they do is they’re basically living through the result that they don’t want to feel so that they can act with clarity and so it’s that feeling of loss that they don’t want to deal with and since they don’t want to deal with it they’re not speaking their truth and therefore they’re not in a marriage that accepts their truth and eighty percent of the time they then speak their truth in the other person is like great or they’re like what the hell and then three months later they’re like great twenty percent of the time their partner is like no that’s not what I want they leave and they break up but it’s definitely a lot higher chance of success if somebody has already felt the thing they’re trying to avoid because then their actions don’t come from trying to avoid the feeling their actions come from what they want um and this is something that you learn you know in even like the Tibetan book of living and dying the um the samurai did this I think it was a sophist who did this many Traditions have done this thing where they basically visualize their own death to get over the fear of death so they’ve lived that fear so many times that they no longer fear death so it’s confronting the emotional reality that you don’t want to handle that you don’t want to feel and then immediately your decision making can clear up yeah recognizing that there is life on the other side of that emotion yeah exactly or that emotion is a deep friend right there’s no there’s no emotion I’ve run into that hasn’t been a benefit to me so what do you what do you mean by feeling these emotions if something hasn’t happened yet for example how do you actually feel the emotion associated with it to mourn the loss the first thing you need to do is just recognize that there’s always an emotional movement in your body it’s constant there’s no moment of Consciousness where there isn’t an emotional reality happening we might not want to admit it we might have been taught at a young age not to feel it but it’s constantly occurring and it’s very muscular in nature so you can really feel it through constriction of muscles if somebody has been told never to get angry their bodies contorts and so I can literally look at somebody and recognize if there’s repressed anger um you can recognize and I’m not the only one there’s tons of people can you can recognize who had the critical parent who was beaten who’s holding back their authenticity all based on muscular structure so the muscles and the emotions are tightly tightly correlated um so that’s the most important thing to know that it’s constantly happening and that there’s a muscular component to it how do you feel these emotions well you’re you’re feeling them the question isn’t how do you the question is how do you bring your awareness into it so oftentimes what happens is we’re feeling the emotion but we’re spending a lot of energy compressing that emotion and so it’s making it um a different version of itself the way I think about this is that there’s this emotionless called the emotion of anger and it’s flowing like a garden hose and if you kink it one way the anger looks like this no I’m not angry and if you kink it another way it looks like this oh yeah that’s fine I mean if you’re going to be a prick and if you kink it another way it sounds like this you son of a Bubba Bubba you goddamn blah blah blah blah all of those are kinks in the garden hose when there’s no kinks in that garden hose when it’s fully allowed there’s no reason to resist the anger it sounds like the anger of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King it’s clear it’s determined it’s we will not put up with this we will be equal that’s that’s also anger but that’s anger unresisted so the trick isn’t to feel it in the way that it’s like you have to go and conjure it because it’s there it’s really to stop restricting it it’s really to stop holding it down hmm yeah it sounds like one of one of the things you were saying is that the the first thing that people might feel is actually the the resistance to the anger like the this body tension for example might be the first thing you notice be like Oh I’m feeling a lot of tension in my body right now and then maybe the secondary thing you might feel is like I’m holding back this emotion right yeah it’s the resistance that’s actually painful right so when people are like I don’t want to feel sadness so there’s this way in which people talk about each of the emotions and there’s this common fear of each of them to let them fully ride right if I allow my anger I will destroy people I will hurt myself I will hurt others if I allow my sadness it will go on forever and I will be enveloped in sadness for the rest of my life if I allow fear I will be Frozen and I won’t be able to act these are the like traditional thought processes that people have about why these emotions aren’t safe right and the reason that they feel that way is because that’s how the resistance is when you’re resisting anger you do destroy and when you are resisting sadness it does last forever it looks like depression and when you’re resisting fear then you’re anxious all the time and you are frozen you’re not doing stuff so people have confused the resistance with the emotion or with the feeling of being overtaken by the feelings exactly you’re never overtaken by the feelings you’re overtaken by the resistance to the feelings and if you’re scared of an emotion you are currently being overtaken by the resistance of the feeling right yeah because the resistance is itself a Feeling it’s like a secondary and secondary feeling that Loops back and then fights the first feeling which is just a massive waste of energy correct it’s really important to recognize that it is a waste of energy and it’s also really important to recognize that it in itself also isn’t bad and it is there to be loved I have a saying it says if you can’t love the emotion love the resistance to the emotion if you make the resistance the next the next evil thing that you have to overcome that’s another form of resistance so you’re just adding a triple layer of resistance on it what about the danger of like if you if you have for example you have anger and it’s deeply resisted and you remove the first layer of resistance and you start to let the anger through but there’s still enough resistance around it that it comes out as an attack like it can be dangerous to be overtaken by like to let ourselves be partially overtaken by a feeling and you know still have it constricted in that way right yeah it absolutely can you’ve got you’re playing a short game in a long game here right the short game is how do I start getting in touch with these emotions in a way that isn’t destructive and then there’s the long game which is if I don’t do it now then what am I going to do continue to constrict it for the rest of my life like there’s a risk involved right so you have to risk a little destruction now to get to a place where the anger is clear and and moves easily and is fluid and right is enjoyable um but there’s some tricks to it and the tricks are the first trick is don’t believe the emotion don’t not believe it either it’s like it’s like when you’re having the emotion the important thing is to see yourself as an actor playing the part of you having an emotional experience so it’s like an actor always knows it’s not their emotion even even if they get caught up in it for a while they know there’s some part of their Consciousness that knows that the story is a story it’s not true so it’s it’s about keeping that aspect of your of your awareness awake so that you just know like oh this emotion is is just moving through me it’s not personal but it’s also allowing that emotional experience um in and and that requires like letting the emotion be garbly you know so it’s like intellect speaks like this it’s like a plus b equals c and b equals D therefore a plus d equals c that’s how logic talks the way anger talks is oh right that’s it I got it that’s how anger speaks and if you believe all the garbly googly glue of anger like that person’s an and that person did this to me blah blah blah blah then you’re never gonna get to that Clarity if you don’t allow all that garbly glue you also won’t get to the clarity so it’s this like interesting thing of listening to emotions in a different way than you listen to logic and if you start repressing it say well I know it’s really not them it’s really me and I I know that they’re trying their best or blah blah blah all that kind of stuff doesn’t allow the full expression of the emotion so you don’t get to the clarity so trick is not to listen to the story to see it as non-personal to see yourself as an actor just having it move through it’s kind of like going to the bathroom right you just it’s not a personal thing it’s just happening and then the last part is to just not do it at anybody and this is the most critical thing is don’t do it at people and that most people think of anger like don’t get angry at the person I’m speaking to that but I’m also speaking to sadness people get sad at people all the time you know to try to create manipulation or guilt or whatever it is I’m gonna get sad at you too make it so that you change your your thing so you’re never using your emotions to try to get someone else to change or afraid of people yeah exactly this is unsafe and exactly that’s exactly it yeah you’re speaking to feeling these emotions coming up within us and then like kind of viewing it as we are an actor acting out the emotion that’s coming up within us and it sounded like that could apply also interpersonally or if if our partner is coming at us with a lot of anger recognizing like oh they’re playing the part of their anger right now and I don’t need to take everything they say personally um and I could actually hold space for this to occur so they can find their Clarity behind it yeah absolutely and that’s a lot easier if you are good with your anchor right if you’re if you’re like I love my anger I can’t wait for my anger to arise because every time it does I find out some boundary that I haven’t been drawing I find out some way I haven’t been being clear I love my anger and then you see somebody else get angry you’re like oh I love that too and when somebody sees you love their anger man that anger changes you know they’re like like it happens with me and people are like God damn it Joe and I’m like oh yeah you’re angry come on tell me about it I want to hear this I see that you I see that you feel alone and I see that you feel rejected and I don’t want that let me hear what’s going on with you right and that changes their anger it just changes it right so you’re speaking to the like the short and the long game that’s being played and so like I think a lot of the a lot of fear of letting our emotions fly is that we’ll become worthless or unproductive or you know just the the last straw will happen if we’re if we’re deep in a relationship and you know we’re just like oh man but if one more outburst and they’re just done with me so I’ve gotta suppress this what happens if we just let our emotions fly all the time again just not at people to put your emotion at somebody to try to get them to change with your emotions subconsciously or consciously it’s emotional abuse it’s not healthy for them and if it’s happening to you draw a boundary and say I don’t want that like I’m happy to listen to your emotions if I give you permission but otherwise I don’t want the emotion at me so I I just say don’t don’t do that without permission and if you are getting your emotions out in a by yourself or with a close friend and you’re doing it then they’re not going to leak right the reason that somebody gets angry at somebody else is because they haven’t gotten angry by themselves they haven’t it takes them a while to build that kind of anger there’s lots of time before that that you can release it so go release your anger and then talk to the person go mourn and then talk to your wife about what you need from the relationship go get really really scared and then talk to your boss about the race that you want right like do the thing that you have the emotional experience and then go take the action so that’s it just just feel it how do you how do you recognize in the in the moment when you’re in this like a spin cycle and you’re like oh God this this person did this or whatever or oh what should I do here I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to do how do you recognize that like what’s the hook to get you out of that Loop to remember this exactly what you said so if you are doing one of three things you mentioned two of them if you notice that you keep on looping on the same thought it means there’s an emotion that you’re not feeling um if you are not clear about a decision you need to make then there’s an emotion you’re not feeling if you are judgmental towards another person there is an emotion you’re not feeling um a little bit more if I judge you for being angry I don’t want to feel out of control or if I judge you for being angry it’s because I don’t want to feel um the potential that I have to lose you so lost if I judge you for being uptight it’s because I don’t want to feel controlled or I don’t want to feel rigid so every time we have a judgment it’s just a way to suppress an emotion which is what makes our decision making really screwed up because if you’re judging very different than discernment right discernment is just a knowing of Distinction but if it’s uh if it’s judgment then you’re not clear you’re not looking at the data clearly you have preconceived notions of the data and then you can’t make great decisions or preconceived notions of intent on behalf of the other correct that’s right and then the last one another like cool trick is whenever you see your your mind in binary thinking you know I either have to buy the car and not buy the car instead of I could buy that car I could buy that car from 10 different people I could buy that car with different packages I can buy that car in different colors I could buy that car in six months whenever you’re in that binary black or white thinking then you know that there’s some fear there that’s not being felt so let’s get into a little bit deeper we’ve been talking a lot about the feeling side of this what is what do you mean by figuring it out what are some other ways that that can happen and that we can get kind of caught in that Loop figuring it out at its most essential is just your intellect it’s to strategize it’s to try to solve the puzzle it’s like this is the outcome that I want how do I get there that is the intellect and is really good at that but that’s what that’s what it means when you’re figuring when you’re intellectualizing that’s what it means it’s you the some people say it’s like in your head some people you know call it being tactical and there’s some really great uses for that it’s not a bad thing just a lot better when you’re not avoiding an emotion using it yeah it sounds like the the purpose of the intellect here is to take a very narrowly framed context of assumptions and goals and then figure out the path from A to B but then the emotions are what is creating those assumptions to begin with and the goals correct and and the risk profile elaborate on that now like if you really really really don’t want to lose your girlfriend yeah then your risk tolerance is really low if you’re like I could do it under certain circumstances then you’re more likely to be yourself right so um how madly you don’t want to feel the emotion really affects your risk profile yeah that makes sense but we should like figure some things out like wouldn’t it be kind of silly to just shut that part of us off and never use that part of our intelligence yeah I absolutely like I wouldn’t want to build a bridge without the intellect I wouldn’t want to you know you have this conversation without the intellect I would assume that would be horrible to listen to so yeah intellect is a beautiful amazing thing it’s just recognizing its incompleteness there’s a girdle’s theory of mathematical incompleteness which is basically a logical proof that all sets of logic are either incomplete or they are based on a postulate so it basically proves logic can’t be logical my favorite part of that is that he proved it with logic he actually used logic to prove the incompleteness of logic and it couldn’t have been done without logic right yeah Aristotle did it earlier in a different thing but he didn’t do it with the same kind of logic without the math you know so it’s a beautiful thing and and our postulates our emotions that’s what our postulates are in our logical way of thinking it’s why people can logically justify absolute opposite things it’s not because their rationale is good or bad it’s because they have different postulates behind their rationale right so figure stuff out is great and and the intellect is beautiful even in the spiritual journey or the transformative Journey the intellect is beautiful it’s great for deconstructing itself very good at hanging out in a way that allows you to describe what’s happened usually after you’ve gone through it right usually what I notice is that it’s not like here’s the description of it and now I go through it it’s more like here’s a description of it that can give me some sort of framework that I can rest on that I don’t completely understand then I go through it and then maybe like a month later I can describe it so the intellect’s really good for that as well so it’s I mean I love the intellect it’s I love watching great minds at work and at the same time it can become the Trap again too you can have you can have like this like major emotional movement or transformative experience or you know what not and then your intellect will step in and be like okay so what actually happened let me make sense of that and like oh this was the childhood thing that happened to me and then that was what I felt in this meeting and then all that interact and then this way and then you’re like oh cool now I have a model for understanding myself and then once again you’ve created this limited system that may be more useful than the previous one but then eventually we’ll reach its limits of understanding and prediction yeah that’s that’s right my words for that are every Epiphany is the innocent beginning of a rut right that every Epiphany they’re so important um to have these epiphanies but what’s really important about them is that it blows everything up and then we reconstruct it and then a new constraint is found and we need to have that new Epiphany to deconstruct or to destroy the the old Epiphany and the old rut and that’s just how that’s how transformation works that’s how Evolution works and it’s it’s a beautiful thing and yes there comes a point in this development where you can see um that every single thought that you have is both true and not true it comes at pointing development where you can’t believe any one of your thoughts and if you have emotional Clarity when that development point hits you become incredibly clear if you don’t have emotional Clarity you can use that same beauty of seeing both sides of every coin as a way to become indecisive as a way to beat yourself up as a way to limit yourself as a way to continue to constrict emotions so but yeah logic is a beautiful thing it’s just really important to know what it’s good at and what it’s not good at right now like what we’ve been talking about has been very much about the personal development Journey but I think we could actually apply this very very easily to um to business for example say product iterations you know every every Epiphany from your product research or your your market research to come up with a new Direction could it easily become the new rut that you’ve find yourself spending six months in a million dollars investing in right or a government that had a great Epiphany about a police force and then now that police force Epiphany is a rut that needs to be recreated and re a new Epiphany for as an example right there’s a thousand examples of how the solution of yesterday is the rut of today yeah and and we villainize it and we make it bad instead of just being like Oh we need a new iteration yeah that’s it yeah okay maybe we don’t need one president with a lot of power right or maybe we need a financial democracy instead of a voting democracy or maybe we you know thousands of new opinions some would argue we already have that and it’s a bad thing right exactly that’s another one right so so it’s like this it’s like every one of our epiphanies everything that locks us down was an epiphany at one point was somebody’s realization at one point the CEO of Netflix he in his per first business he he claims that he made everything idiot proof and then only idiots would come and work for him and so in Netflix he keeps a certain amount of chaos a certain amount of creativity a certain amount of risk involved so that people who want smart challenges people who want to be cutting edge who want to have more freedom show up and work for him and that’s more important than having things idiot-proof for him and it’s that same thought process of like what’s more important is that we’re constantly iterating that we are seen through the logic that we used and relied on yeah so that’s a great example of how how I like a leader of personal Journey can then show up in their company because for for a CEO to get to the point where they can just say hey you know what like let’s just let some chaos happen they have to learn to feel that loss of control and welcome it oh yeah so this is everything right so if I let me give a really sharp example almost every high-powered CEO I know has an issue of a feeling alone and B having a steep feeling of self-reliance that they need to rely on themselves [Music] and at the bottom of that emotional slide is this deep sense of helplessness that they didn’t want to feel you don’t learn to be self-reliant unless there was a point when you had this deep sense of helplessness that you didn’t want to feel right maybe it was an alcoholic dad or maybe it was getting really poor or whatever it was that sense of helplessness and saying I am not going to feel that again is what propels them into this incredible place in their life it’s also the thing that needs to be destroyed if they’re going to be great leaders [Music] right and they need to feel that helplessness they need to go into like that complete helplessness and I don’t think it’s any mistake that the CEO of Netflix had to go through the helplessness of losing a company to get to the place of allowing that feeling of helplessness all the time because somewhere in that Journey he found out that that helplessness was just a feeling and it had an incredible intelligence behind it and it was trying to tell him something and it no longer needed to be avoided it needed to be looked for and and to be excited when it shows up what’s an example of that happening in your life I have children [Laughter] having children is like uh is like getting a deep tissue massage if you resist you are screwed right like you have to constantly feel your own helplessness in your children yeah like as an example of that I think you have to feel that helplessness for me I think the first journey of it was abandonment it was like feeling emotionally abandoned I was recreating that experience over and over again until I felt it which is a really important part of this emotional journey is that my example is abandonment so I’ll use that as the example is you know I felt for whatever reason in my childhood emotionally abandoned and I didn’t want to feel it so I created a whole world to not feel that but in the way I created that whole world like everybody I re-introduced it over and over and over again this is why we all have that friend who’s been dating the same person six times in a row right and it’s not the same person as in like it’s it’s like the same person in a different body with a different background but wow you just picked seven different men who all cheated on you how did you ever do that right so I recreated people who would emotionally abandon me over and over again until I fell in love with the abandonment and once I fell in love with it my system didn’t need to recreate it I had found homeostasis right so if I there’s an emotion that I wasn’t allowed to feel I recreate that feeling over and over again until I fully allow that feeling and then I don’t need to recreate it and the other way to say this is the things that we are most scared of are the things that we’re subtly inviting into our life so if we’re most scared of feeling helpless we will invite helplessness unconsciously into our life so that we have that opportunity to yeah I’ve got a great example for that it’s like my growing up I always felt like I was being tightly controlled by like school and society and that control made me feel helpless and I just didn’t want to feel helpless anymore so I developed exactly what you described that like self-reliance complex and that self-reliance complex then made me feel like I had to be in control of everything that I was doing and made it difficult sometimes to cooperate or collaborate on something that I wasn’t going to have like the full Reigns over uh which would often lead me to feel you know alone and helpless yeah that’s right that’s exactly a beautiful that’s exactly how it works and then once we’re like cool helplessness and all of a sudden we don’t recreate the conditions because our body has just found that homeostasis it’s like oh okay I’m back to balance yeah I think addiction has a lot to do with that as well um that feeling of like avoiding helplessness feeling like you can control something like for example like a gambling addiction a lot of what I’ve I’ve heard about like slot machine addiction is it’s not necessarily that they those addicted things that they’re going to be winning any money they know they’re not they know the math they’re not stupid but the feeling of just hitting the buttons and experiencing the the spin occur like they’re just in a very tight looped system where the rules are almost like they’re designed to look like they’re almost figure outable but they’re not yeah I think there’s definitely a lot of emotional avoidance and addiction um oftentimes it’s shame like I’ve heard a saying that says shame is the locks of the chains of bad habits um shame seems to be a big part of an addiction cycle and there’s others as well but definitely there’s a big emotional component to addiction Cycles there’s also some physical and neurological components as well but emotional avoidance is a huge part of of it if you could just lift the shame out of people then most of the addictions would fall away so as as we move through our lives and start feeling more and more of these emotions that we’ve been repressing and what does that development look like emotional development looks pretty clearly the same way for different people but the starting points are different but the earliest starting point that you can get to is just recognizing the emotions you have so it’s just knowing that you are constantly in an emotional state as long as you’re conscious people think some of them especially if there’s been more emotional abuse or emotional repression in the home people will have a very specific experience of not being able to feel their emotions and so this is um similar to somebody who’s been physically abused if you’ve been physically abused and I put a quarter in your hand or a key in your hand you won’t actually know which one you’re holding because you’ve learned to cut off your sensations of your body emotionally you might also have learned how to cut off those Sensations so the first thing is to feel that sensation and that is just to identify that what the emotional experience is happening at every given moment because the way that we feel right now is slightly different than the way we feel right now which is slightly different than the way we feel right now and so identifying those emotions is a really good thing it’s a great Epiphany it will also become a rut later on but it’s a really great first stage and then the second stage is an expression of that emotion so to really allow those emotions to be expressed through the body through words in a way that is not at anybody so it’s just having that kind of full expression of emotion and then that moves into kind of an emotional inquiry which is how does it feel in your body and what color is it and where is it in my body and how dense is it and it’s a literal like what is the physicality of my emotions and having a deep inquiry into that and then also having a deep inquiry of oh when I relate to my emotions differently how do they work when I’m angry at my emotions what does that do when I’m in love with my emotions what does that do when I am trying to get rid of my emotions what does that do when I am tickling my emotions what does that do so you’re literally playing with different relationships you can have with your emotions and then there comes this place where you’re just deeply in love with your emotions and then emotion emotions become very fluid and it becomes just like this beautiful flow of life it’s so exciting and so pleasurable to feel your emotional fluidity and it allows for just very crisp decision making and it allows for very decisive action to have that emotional flow and to give you a great example of this Epiphany rut thing um I did not have a lot of emotional awareness when I started this workout all in my 20s and I got into this point where I realized how I’m having emotions and one day I don’t know a decade later or something I was saying to somebody I’m like um I’m feeling angry right now and they said no you’re not and I said excuse me and they’re like you’re naming an emotion so you don’t have to feel it they were so right I was like son of a gun you know like I’ve named it so I don’t have to feel it and and the thing that was once freeing to be able to see it and name it had become the new constraint and then I realized oh the feeling of it is a completely different thing and and and when you feel the emotion it’s all about letting the body just move it’s like it’s like dancing with no um without being self-conscious it’s just like your emotions know how to move your body your emotions know what to do if they don’t fake it they’ll figure it out don’t judge them don’t tell them how they’re supposed to look that’s not crying that’s not fear so many people who aren’t good at crying when I see them cry for the first time they think they’re like that can’t be real tears because it doesn’t feel like that one time I cried but there’s 20 different ways of crying you know you can cry of joy you can cry of sadness you can cry of grief you can cry in a way like when you’re yawning there’s so many different ways that sadness expresses and it’s not your job to judge them it’s your job to just like watch it like uh like you would watch the Grand Canyon right yeah it seems like each each stage here is like a meta awareness a new level of meta awareness around around our emotions the first level being just recognizing that there is emotions here and that we are not just a logical machine figuring things out and that there is always a emotional context that that exists for us and then we get deeper into that and we start to be in the emotional context not just recognizing that one’s there but we flow in it and with it and then another level seems to be the meta awareness around the emotion being like oh wow okay as I’m letting this anger move through me I’m actually clarifying my boundary or as I’m letting the sadness move through me I’m I’m grieving grieving the loss of something tangible or even just an idea and that this whole process of letting these emotions move through us is actually changing the assumptions goals and the context and you know the risk profile of all of our future logical thoughts exactly we are limited everybody talks about limited thoughts but in reality The Limited thoughts have a deep correlation with the way we limit our emotional reality it’s almost as though the thoughts are just the tip of the emotional Iceberg like they are actually a part of the emotions they’re just the emotions that are most finely uh the part of the emotion that is working in the finest detail it depends on the perspective which is the tip of the iceberg and which is the underside of the iceberg but what I do know is that they are in an intricate dance and when one side isn’t working the other side definitely helps so it sounds like what we’ve what you’ve been saying all along is that you know this the intellect is very useful and we do we we do want to use it to figure stuff out but first we want to get our emotional context right and allow our emotions to shift us into the place that is most aligned with our reality in Our Moment and then in that space figure stuff out yeah I wouldn’t use the word right but but generally directionally that feels very right um I would say it’s uh when your emotions are blocked or when you’re trying to deeply avoid an emotion then your decision making can’t be clear it’s just as simple as that so feel the emotion whenever you can and that allows for clarity and it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that and see it as a process that maybe at the beginning when you realize that you’re not clear on something and the there’s emotion involved it’s going to take a while to get through it but pretty soon as you get older in in the journey then the emotions flow so quickly and the recognition of it can just make the whole thing really really clear really quick you know it’s it’s common for me on a daily basis to have a cry or shake or get angry it’s relieving of stress it changes my neurochemistry it clarifies my decision it doesn’t take but five minutes it’s just just moves it’s almost like you could do a daily emotional yoga indeed I did for years yeah indeed it I did it for I didn’t I don’t think I ever did it daily but maybe like five times a week I would take 20 to 30 minutes to do literally emotional yoga where I would feel everything that I was not feeling and teach my body how to feel it and how to accept it and how to unlock right because as the emotions start to be felt in the musculature unlocks and then you can feel it deeper yeah and your cortisol levels will shift and your metabolism will you know update and start releasing the right right releasing an amount of energy into your body that is appropriate at the moment yeah that’s right and the other thing to know is that each of these emotional streams that I talked about like anger so there’s anger that’s constricted is constricted in a lot of ways but the and the unrestricted anger is that Clarity and determination the unrestricted sadness is um a deep joy and the unconstricted fear is excitement right there’s a saying that says excitement is uh fear with the breath or the fear is excitement without the breath it’s a from an acting school and it’s like each of these things when they’re not resisted become something very very different right and grief is a celebration of what you’ve had yeah right yeah absolutely yeah I mean and grief is kind of this anger sadness fear all together wrapped up in one the feelings of these things coming through you when they’re unresisted change deeply so you you don’t even can’t even recognize them and they start blending all into one emotional state it’s like one stream that’s happening so this is this all seems to really kind of tie into something that we were working on a lot in your courses which is this phenomenon where we can understand something intellectually you know something about our story or about our about our traumas or somebody could be listening to this podcast and understand it intellectually and we can still not get it all the way until we’ve had the emotional movement to consolidate it yeah this is really something that happens in coaching all the time right you get somebody who intellectually understands yes okay my boss is managing me and I’m angry um but I intellectually really really understand that they’re they’re trying to get me to do my best work but I’m feeling it as criticism and so intellectually they understand that their boss wants the best for them uh but emotionally it’s just criticism it’s just what Dad was doing you know when the person I’m coaching was 13 or whatever it is and then once they get it emotionally when they grok it in their whole body then all of a sudden it’s like oh thanks so much for the feedback I appreciate it I really appreciate you wanting me to do my best work here and so it’s on so many levels it’s it’s it’s even grocking complex ideas in your body completely has an emotional component to it so if somebody sees like oh here’s this really complex marketing thought process and they don’t fully understand it they can intellectually get it but they don’t it’s not second nature it’s not just what they do it means that there’s some emotional component of that marketing something like oh my God I’m going to be asking people for stuff or oh my God marketing is bad and dirty there’s some emotional component of it that when that emotional component is fully felt then then it’s understood it might not be used it might be used but it’s it can’t even be fully understood until that emotional component has been felt yeah until your emotions align with it it reminds me of Einstein where you know for him the theory of relativity was a spiritual experience to be like working in yeah and many many scientists and prominent scientists have said have said similar things um Feynman for example absolutely yeah there’s a you cannot have certain ideas without certain emotional Clarity you cannot have certain ideas or certain epiphanies without an experiential understanding of what’s going on right you can’t do the theory of relativity until you see through your own limited perception of time that Society has has taught you right or even your your senses your physical body has taught you yes that’s right right so so how do how do we then stop resisting these emotions what is what are some takeaways from from all of this that that are some concrete practices yeah so first of all if you are resisting emotions and you try to stop that’s more resistance as we’ve already talked about so love the resistance that’s the most important thing um you know fake it till you make it my personal story was you know I looked in the um in a photo album when I was I don’t know what I was like 20 something years old and I saw a picture of me crying and I realized that oh my parents weren’t comfortable with the emotions I was having because they were taught to be uncomfortable with their own emotions and so one of the ways to make sure that I didn’t like make everybody uncomfortable was to tease me around my emotions and so they would at one point they took a picture of me and then they put it in the photo album and I found this picture and I was like huh that’s probably it was a picture of me crying and this picture was you could see both me crying and you could see me kind of dumbfounded that I was having a picture taken of me and and I was like oh that’s probably why I haven’t cried in 14 years you know so I I put a picture of it on the on my desk and I was like okay I’m gonna learn how to cry but a year later I hadn’t cried so then I was like okay I’m determined I need to go and really give this thing a go and cry and so I went out into the woods and I went like to a far away Trail then I went off Trail for three miles so that nobody could see me cry that I had that much shame around it and then I would just fake crying and I did that for like three months I would just fake it and then and then all of a sudden it just happened started happening for real and when it happened it was such a relief that I let it happen for four days you know I could have stopped it but I was crying like when I was brushing my teeth I was like my body was just like years of tension just evaporating in days and then all of a sudden I had a deeper access to my tears and then that led deeper and deeper accesses to my tears and then that led to oh every single heartbreak of mine increases my capacity to love I cannot wait for more heartbreak like even just saying that it’s just in that in itself it makes me want to cry how blessed I am for loving heartbreak and for seeing how much freedom to love that gives me hmm that’s beautiful yeah well this has been a great episode thank you very much Joe and we’ll catch you again next week yeah man what a pleasure to be with you thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com [Music] foreign