Joe Hudson guided Ali Abdaal through an exercise alternating between memories of love and memories of sorrow, noticing what happened in the body for each. Ali found that sorrow produced a “squeezy feeling” below his left rib cage, and love created an easing or spaciousness—almost an expansion outward from the lower ribs. When asked to hold both simultaneously, Ali felt the squeeze of sorrow alongside a lightness from breath and expansion.
The key discovery was that love didn’t eliminate sorrow—it created spaciousness around it. The constriction was still there, but it was held in a larger container. This points to an essential truth: love and sorrow are not opposites that cancel each other out. They occupy the same body, often in the same moment, and trying to have one without the other doesn’t work.
Joe emphasized that breath and emotion are not separate phenomena. “Any emotion that we withhold requires us to constrict our muscles in a particular way.” The expansion Ali felt during love was the emotion, not just a breath. This understanding dissolves the intellectualized separation between “physical” and “emotional” experience.
Related Concepts
- Grief and gratitude coexist
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses all
- Joy requires welcoming all emotions
- Longing and loneliness are love in disguise
- Chin position controls emotional access