Pleasure isn’t separate from sadness, anger, or fear — it’s available within all of them when they’re fully felt without resistance. Joe says there’s “so much pleasure to be had in getting angry… in being scared… in being sad and grieving.” When you enjoy these sensations rather than managing them, everything changes.
This reframes pleasure not as a specific emotional state but as the quality of noticing any sensation moving through the body. Since sensations are always moving, pleasure is always available — even in grief, even in rage.
Importantly, this works better as discovery than prescription. In emotional release work, telling people to “do anger with pleasure” confuses the system and creates avoidance. Instead, going fully into anger without shame leads to the natural discovery of pleasure within it. The post-anger-release photos — smiles, contentment, wonder at the world — all represent this discovered pleasure.
“There is so much pleasure to be had in getting angry… in being scared… in being sad and grieving. And it really changes the way that all those sensations happen if you’re enjoying them.”
Related Concepts
- Pleasure as emotional fluidity practice
- Joy requires welcoming all emotions
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses all
- Deep pleasure dissolves the boundary of self
- Joy dissolves identity and that’s what makes it scary
- Pleasure requires receiving not effort
- The discomfort of emotions is the resistance to them, not the emotions themselves