Kelly worries that if she lets the sadness, anger, or anxiety in, it will go on forever. Joe draws a sharp distinction that resolves the fear: feeling an emotion in order to get rid of it doesn’t work. Only loving the emotion transforms it.
“If you’re feeling your emotions to get rid of your emotions, then it doesn’t work. You have to feel your emotion.”
The reason traces back to the golden algorithm—what we resist persists. If you’re “feeling” something with the secret agenda of making it leave, that’s still resistance, and it keeps the feeling around. But if you genuinely welcome it—“I cannot wait to feel anxious”—it moves and changes on its own.
Joe compares it to a workout. Lifting two hundred pounds hurts, and you can still look forward to it. Leaning into emotional experience is the same: it’s healthier, and it stops you from recreating patterns. The orientation that frees you is love for the emotion itself, not a strategy to be done with it.
“If I love my emotional experience, then my emotional experience just transforms.”
Related Concepts
- The golden algorithm: we invite back the emotion we avoid, in the way we avoid it
- Resisting an emotion is exactly what invites it back
- Trying to feel joy is the resistance that pushes it away
- Resisting an emotion creates the very outcome you fear
- Fully falling in love with the avoided feeling is the quickest way to stop a negative pattern
- We recreate painful circumstances to finally welcome the avoided emotion
- You can’t think or shortcut your way past an emotion — you have to let it move