“If you’re trying to feel it then you’re creating resistance. The trying is in itself the resistance that prevents it.” Joe points out that trying to feel joy assumes it’s hard to get—that it isn’t your natural state. This assumption creates constriction, like saying “I want to breathe, I have to try to breathe,” which immediately tightens the airways.
Joy, like breathing, is natural. It requires nothing. The attitude needed is “it’s already there within me”—the work is removing layers rather than building toward something. Discipline can help get the engine running (practicing pleasure, living a principled life, feeling emotions daily), but at some point you must let gravity take over.
Joe describes the Zen parallel: teachers adjust posture endlessly—sit like this, sit like that—until the student tries so intensely they finally give up. That moment of surrender is the moment of awakening. “You can’t get there by trying the whole time… at some point you have to give up and just be like oh it’s just what I am.”
The distinction matters: forced positivity (“everything’s great!”) without feeling other emotions is just another form of resistance. The path runs through allowing all emotions, not bypassing them to reach joy.
Related Concepts
- Trying is resistance to experience
- Craving pushes away what you want
- Managing yourself kills the practice
- Trying to feel your feelings is as much resistance as trying not to feel them
- Intensifying a feeling moves you through it rather than trapping you
- The discomfort of emotions is the resistance to them, not the emotions themselves
- Craving is the pushing away