Emotional Fluidity - Emotion Series #13

There's a line that I really love from the Gospel of Thomas, quote, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." I really love this as an intro to one of the core pieces of our work, which is emotional fluidity. 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. How are you doing today, Joe?

I'm doing really well, really well. How are you?

I'm doing lovely. And I'm really excited to finally get to this topic, which feels so core to the work. And in 85 episodes, we've only talked about it through nearly every episode without directly addressing about it. So yeah, yeah, so let's, let's do this.

Sounds good.

Yeah, let's start by talking about what it is. What is emotional fluidity?

Emotional fluidity is the capacity to feel all of your emotions and to allow them to move through you without any resistance. So, and that's partially in time, like sometimes it's important to compartmentalize things, like if you need to save your child from a car accident, you don't want to start feeling grief. You want to like go and save your child from the car accident. But generally, it's also kind of a mark of time. It's like, how long do you hold on to emotions and do they stagnate in your system? So it's how, how well you can process, how quickly you can process, how fully you can process your emotions and let them just flow through you. If you look at babies, they're great examples of emotional fluidity. They can go from happy to sad really quickly or angry or upset, and they, and they don't hold on to anything in the past, right? It's just, it all kind of moves through them. That's not to say that it's emotional fluidity like a baby in the fact that you're out of control of your emotions, though it's odd. You are out of control in your emotions, but your emotions don't control you. So when you're younger, it's often that there's this feeling like your emotions control you, and so you go through this natural process of trying to manage or contain your emotions. And then you can learn that you can have your emotions without them controlling you. And then the fluidity is really important to allow them all to move through you, but it's like they, they don't control you. At the same time, you don't control them, meaning the emotions are going to come. You don't get to decide what they are. You don't get to decide, well, that's irrational to have that emotion. It's like, nope, those are the emotions that are here and they're all going to move right through me. So that's what emotional fluidity is.

Yeah, beautiful. So the capacity to allow emotions to move through us. And I also noticed that with emotional fluidity, there's an absence, or at least a fluidity, within shame or guilt or resistance. How does, how does that show up in this definition?

Yeah, so if you look at like judgment or guilt, resistance, shame, those are often— they often stagnate the emotion. The core emotions get stagnated with those emotions. And so It's allowing yourself to feel those completely, and then pretty soon they stop arising very much, if at all. And even if they arise, they don't stagnate your system. So oftentimes, like, somebody feels guilty about something, or they feel shame, like they might have done something wrong, they'll just go over and over and over the emotional loop.

Or dissociate from it.

Or dissociate from it. Yeah, that's another example.

So one metaphor for this is that it's like a, like, range of motion for your body, but in your emotional system.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. You could think of it as emotional flexibility, like yoga, right? You like a bigger range of emotion. And it also means that you're not avoiding any emotional experience anymore. So it's not like, I don't want to feel that, so I'm going to arrange my life not to have to feel that. I'm going to avoid these conversations. I'm going to avoid these people. I'm going to avoid these business opportunities. Yeah. It's also the fluidity allows you to make friends with all the emotional experiences, and then you don't have to avoid them. You don't have to spend your whole life trying to have a particular emotional experience.

Yeah, yeah. In the, in the body metaphor there, it would be like favoring a knee for many, many years and then developing all this extra musculature and other habits. Yeah, around avoiding something going on the body. If we do the same thing for our emotions, then we're going to end up having a lot of patterning around that.

Yeah, that's, that's beautifully put. And the other thing that happens is that, so you, you have this fluidity in the emotional experience, and in that fluidity there's also something that happens which is a bit difficult to explain, but it's the best way I would say it. And it breaks people when I say this, so, is you enjoy all the negative emotions. There's actually like a deep enjoyment of what was once considered a negative emotion. And because you're not resisting it, it doesn't control you anymore. So there's like this just deep enjoyment of anger or heartbreak or sadness.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a distinction there between acceptance, like reluctant acceptance of an emotion and enjoyment. Which brings me to the next series of questions here. What is not emotional fluidity? Specifically, what is not emotional fluidity that people commonly associate with it or would associate and call emotional fluidity?

Yeah, um, I don't know how much people would use the word generally, but I think that there is something like, oh, I felt everything in like a meditative space, you know. I would not call that emotional fluidity. The watcher of the emo— like, if you're identified fully in the watcher, which I think is online thing of the emotional experience. There's nothing wrong with that by any stretch, but that's not emotional fluidity unless it's embodied. Like, the watcher can still be online, but there needs to be an embodiment with it. So there needs to be a— for emotional fluidity to work, you're not trying to manage it through, through watching it. You're, you're actually in love with it. And you said it's an acceptance. Yeah, you're experiencing it. And, and I would say it's a welcoming. It's like, oh, I can't wait to— I can't wait to feel sad again. I can't wait to feel upset or jealous. It's like there's lessons in it for me. It's a pure signal. It's, I can enjoy it. It teaches me how to be a better human. And that's what I think breaks people is when they're like, how on earth could I ever enjoy being angry? Or how on earth? And yet I watch people find it all the time. So it's definitely possible.

Yeah, something that struck me about what you said there is it's okay to observe it, but also we need to experience it. And I'm curious what happens if we flip that around. If you are just experiencing it, but you're lost in it and there's no observation or perspective on it, could be another way.

Yeah. Yeah. That would be extremely slow process that would also could potentially get you lost for decades. Yeah. So it's, it's really important to have that self-awareness and the experiencing of it both. The more that you can see it, not as yourself and just as like a wave coming through you, the quicker emotional fluidity happens. Um, but it— you'll stall it if you don't experience it, if, if it becomes like this something that is like so detached from you or you're so dissociated with. So it has to be embodied for the whole process to work really well and smoothly and quickly.

Yeah. And how about letting go? Like, I'm going to let go of my sadness, it's time to let go of my grief, I let— I was angry but then I just let go. What is— yeah, no, you didn't.

No, no, no. Again, you don't get a choice on, on what emotions you're feeling. So to just say let go is like, the emotional experience is the emotional experience you have. What you might let go of actually is a, as a thought pattern, like they hurt me and therefore the emotion goes away with it, right? Or they're the bad one and I'm the good one. That, that could hold an emotional experience in place for a long period of time. So there's definitely thoughts that you can let go of that you can see through, and then the emotional experience will change. That can happen. And also I would say that you can fully feel an emotion and then the thought changes. That happens all the time. I see people finally release anger and all of a sudden they can see clearly so many things, particularly around the things that they were clear about or the things that they hadn't drawn boundaries around.

Yeah.

But what you can't do is just let go of an emotion. Emotion is like breath. You're always having an experience of one. You don't get to choose what it is. So you can't let go of an emotion. You can let go of a thought that changes your emotional experience.

Right, just as much as you couldn't let go of having an experience in this moment right now that's happening. Correct.

It's happening. Yeah, you can't stop it.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay, so why cultivate emotional fluidity? What's so important about it?

Life hurts without it. There's a lot of stagnation. It's harder to get to clarity. But mostly it's—

it hurts.

It's like, like, look at any part of your life that hurts and then notice that there's emotional stagnation there. It's like really, really common that there's emotional stagnation in those areas. So that's one of the things. It creates blind spots for us. So if we are avoiding certain emotions because we don't want to feel them, like feeling like a failure or feeling not valuable or feeling sad, and then we're going to create an entire life experience. Like, I don't know how many people have come to me who are like really high-powered executives and they want to start something on their own, and they— their entire life has been based on not feeling— feeling valued, feeling like they're providing value, and then they're not sure how they're going to do that on their own. They don't know who they're going to provide value to. And so it's— it stops their entire entrepreneurial experience. So it totally changes your experience. That's another one. I think the other thing is there's identity that can be lost in an emotional experience too. And so if you can't move it, like, I don't know how many people identify as angry, or just the other day someone's like, can you help me with being a dick? And it's like, you've identified with being a dick, which means you've identified with anger because you're not actually having full fluidity on that emotional experience. So it also kind of like limits us through that kind of identification thing. I'd say the interesting thing about it is that I think it's really important to say this. What could be happening in some people's minds when I say emotional fluidity, they might think like, oh, that means that I easily get angry at anybody and start yelling at them, or I easily cry at people, or I'm like wildly out of control of my anger because like, and it's like hurting everybody around me or my, like I have temper tantrums or whatever. I hold people hostage with my emotional experience. That is not at all what I'm speaking about when I say emotional fluidity. In those cases, the emotions are very constricted. There's a lot of shame around having the emotions. There's a lot of trying to control other people with your emotions. None of that is welcoming your emotional experience. So I think that's a really important thing to say, even to the point where the other day I was talking to somebody and they were saying to me, they were saying, "Oh, how you define anger is different how the rest of the world defines anger." And I'm defining the energy once it's unresisted instead of the energy resisted. So that energy of like anger, or let's do sadness, sadness resisted, can be like, I'm not sad. It can be a form of low-level depression. It can be somebody being passive-aggressive, you know, like I'm sad, but I don't wanna feel it, so I'm gonna attack you. But that feeling of sadness unrestricted, that actually is like a joyful release almost. Like it's a sad release, but it creates this joyful release. That's how I would describe it. And so, that all comes with emotional fluidity as well, that as you allow and welcome all these emotions, your experience of them changes because they're not resisted. And so your experience of anything changes whether you're resisting it or not resisting it, right?

I feel like what you just said traces back to a kind of cultural belief system around emotions being seen as manipulative. Like, a lot of times people say when people refer to an emotion, they're referring to the behaviors of projecting that emotion at somebody.

Yeah.

Not necessarily the direct sensory visceral experience of being with that emotion and just fully enjoying it.

Correct. Right. I don't want to be angry because I don't want to do what my dad did to me by controlling me through anger. I don't want to be sad because I don't want to be weak like my mom. Because mom was actually trying to get people to take care of her through her sadness, right? Like, so absolutely, I think that the resistance that people have to the emotional experience is because they've been manipulated by it, or, and because they don't love it in themselves.

Yeah. Okay, so these are, these are a number of ways that the lack of emotional fluidity affects our lives. How about what does emotional fluidity bring to our lives? How does it open things up for us when we have it, once we've opened up to it?

Yeah, so, so fucking, so fucking many ways. Like, I can't even begin to tell you, like, the, the goodness that it brings into your life. Uh, so let's, let's, uh, let's, let's turn it into a way of thinking, like, how does it benefit your head? How does it benefit your heart? How does it benefit your body? I think are really good ways to think about it. And by head, I mean like your intellectual experience. By heart, I mean your emotional experience. And body, um, that's gonna— that's gonna capture a lot, maybe a little nervous system and a little, um, musculature, because when we resist emotions, we hold our muscles, and so it has a huge effect on our body. So, okay, so let's start with that. So if we were going go with head, for instance, it really prevents bad habits. Oftentimes bad habits are something that you do because you don't want to have a certain emotional experience. It makes decision-making a shit ton easier because oftentimes, as I've talked about so many times on this, that it's our emotional center of our brain that makes the decision. So we're using logic to try how to feel a certain way or not feel a certain way. And if you welcome emotions, you have a lot more flexibility to feel whatever way So it really helps with that decisiveness in decision-making also. That emotional fluidity does a tremendous amount for decisiveness because you're not so worried about getting it right or wrong all the time. And usually people who are indecisive are really scared to get it wrong or sometimes get it right.

Which is ultimately associated with a feeling that's right or wrong.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. The wrong feeling wrong, yeah, exactly. Reduces judgment 'cause judgment is something that we do to not feel. Increases clear-headed discrimination. So for instance, if I really want to feel successful, I'm more likely to buy into the scam like a pyramid scheme. If I really want to feel abundance, I'm more likely to buy into a pyramid scheme. If I really want to feel like a successful venture capitalist, I'm more likely to buy into, you know, some bullshit technology that somebody has raised a couple hundred million dollars on. So a lot of clear-headed stuff happens because you don't need to feel a certain way. You're not scared to feel a certain way. It speeds up learning because there's less shame. You're— what you're— you welcome the, all the ups and downs of the learning process, so it speeds that up. It stops the stagnation that people have, like going over the same thing over and over and over again because they're trying to avoid an emotional experience.

How about the heart?

The heart, um, The most important thing it does is it really increases joy and love. Joy is, as I'm sure I've said this, joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. The other way to think about this is like you're a dock and you have a place for one ship and the ship that is naturally there is joy. But if you have another one parked there and it hasn't moved, you're not gonna get to, the joy's not gonna be there. You're gonna be in a depression or whatnot. So, so it totally increases your capacity to love because there's nothing to defend against anymore. It increases your capacity to feel joy, which is a very natural state. Like, if you look at 2 or 3-year-olds when they're not experiencing a different emotion, when all the emotions have moved through, it's like joy is just the thing that's kicking around in there. More tenderness, more connection, more trust, because you're willing to feel the heartbreak of of love, right? All love comes with heartbreak. All love comes with disappointment. All love comes with being let down from time to time. And if you're willing to feel those things, you have no reason to avoid the love. And so therefore, more connection. Also less emotionally avoidant behaviors, like less things where you're feeling like shame, and therefore, oh, I feel so much shame, right? And I don't want to feel the shame, and therefore I'm going to drink, or therefore I'm going to smoke a lot of pot, or therefore I'm going to do anything like that.

And less spiraling and wallowing and kind of circling in it in a collapse.

Yeah, yeah, less depression. All those things happen. Yeah, it is amazing how quickly life changes if you feel the shit that's up for you to feel in the moment. It's just insane how quickly life changes, how much How much more joy and happiness and clarity there is.

Yeah. Just an overall vitality and aliveness of it. Like drinking, drinking from the fire hose of life. If you, if you don't have your full emotional experience, you're missing a significant chunk of your overall potential experience in life. Your kids come to you with their joy that's natural for them. And like, how much can you be with that joy and allow it to move through you as well, you know?

Yeah, my personal experience of it is it's like the difference between using your phone black and white and color. It's like a huge difference. And when anything like this cracks open widely, there's like a moment of like, holy shit, this is so different. The contrast points it out. And I remember I used to say that it felt like life had become a dream that I never thought possible coming true. That was the experience of life. It was just like, it was very vital and very very alive, very, like it just had a broad spectrum to it that it hadn't before.

Yeah.

And I could love easily even if someone didn't love me, or hated me even. It just changed a tremendous amount.

Yeah, which speaks to another component here is that your joy becomes less contingent on external circumstances, less contingent on other people's emotions being a certain way for you to feel something. You could be in deep joy with your kids being angry, right? And that shows— that changes the way that you show up in your entire life and the way that others experience you.

Yeah. And there's like a— there's certain emotions like incapacity, for instance, like to feel really incapable and to feel helpless in a situation, they do— it does certain things. Like it allows you to be far more capable, oddly, right? Like if you fully allow that feeling then you stop trying to control things you can't control and you start really focusing on the things that you can. So each emotion that you start to allow yourself to feel has its own benefit. You know, anger allows, creates some clarity. Sadness creates like a certain kind of joy and fear creates excitement, like more excitement in your system. So each one of the emotions that you start allowing has like its own little, flavor of positivity that comes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so let's talk a little bit about how it shows up in the body.

Yeah, so as I was saying about this, the, the, um, so right now if you're listening to this podcast and just like allow yourself to feel— let's just use a simple one, like allow yourself to feel scared for a moment, right? We're all living with a little bit of fear somewhere. So you, you know, you allow yourself to feel scared feel what that's like in your body, and then now stop feeling scared. No matter what you do, make sure that you do not feel scared. And I guarantee what just happened is that your muscles constricted a little bit, because you can't stop an emotional experience without a physical holding. And so if you've been holding the same thing physically for years and years and years, you're going to get chronic pain and stress. You're going to have muscular skeletal issues. It's why you've probably heard of people who have been doing like, you know, particular kinds of yoga where they start crying in the middle of the yoga class because they're like releasing a certain emotional experience that they've been holding on to for a long time. I've had experiences of people— some, some of them have been public about this— which is like they had like a certain thing happening in their throat and then they released anger and the pain in their throat just totally changed. So I've seen that kind of thing countless examples of that kind of thing in our, in our work. Yeah.

And a lot of, a lot of disease traces back to ACEs, they call them, like adverse childhood experiences. And that's, that's an example of like something that can happen in your childhood that creates an emotional constipation of sorts, a traumatic experience that doesn't get processed, and how a lot of the research has been pointing to that being a major cause of downstream disease of all sorts later in life.

Right. Yep, absolutely. And the other thing that happens is that a lot of people have issues where they dissociate, they numb, they can't even identify the emotions that they have. All of that stuff in their body starts going away. They become far more perceptive of their emotional reality. They're more in touch with it. They don't numb, they don't want to numb. That's another thing that happens in the body. And I think the last thing is it just like your capacity to feel pleasure really increases in that process. Your sex will change, your orgasms will change. All of that kind of pleasure experience also deeply changes as you allow the emotional experiences.

Yeah.

And, and what I noticed too is like if I have a room full of 100 people and I'm like, okay, we're all going to feel sadness and cry, like people will go for like 45 minutes and they'll be totally focused on it, or an hour, hour and a half even, we've seen it, or anger. And then I'm like, "Hey everybody, okay, we're going to just experience pleasure." And after like 5 minutes, half of them are dissociated. They're like, "Fuck this." They don't say, "Fuck this," but they're thinking about something else. They're like, "Ah." It's like, "Wait, you have full permission to feel pleasure and you're like, 'Ah.'" So that's another thing. And even if you're listening to this, if you've practiced feeling pleasure, it's a great way to increase emotional fluidity. As well, because as you start practicing that feeling of pleasure, other things will come up to prevent that experience from happening, and then you can process them and then go back to the pleasure.

Yeah. Yeah. Something else that we see often is also your— what you want changes a lot if on a physical level, since we're talking about the body here, the foods that you want to eat, the substances that you want to regulate yourself with or not. Or yeah, just by, by shifting your overall baseline state of how much you are comfortable being in your state as it is and how much you're trying to leave it, or how attuned you are to your body's signals and how much it's really craving chocolate or how much it's really just— I often crave chocolate— or how much it's just wanting to have some kind of experience some kind of dopamine hit.

Yeah, or avoid a different experience.

Like, noticing these things becomes easier.

Yeah, so for instance, on all the addictions, you know, coming from— for me, coming from a house that was like, it had a large amount of dysfunction, alcoholism, I obviously brought some of my own addictions in. Like, I wrestled with nicotine, marijuana in my 20s. In all of those cases, a certain emotion that I allowed released the addiction. So I like, when I really got in touch with my anger and that became really fluid, marijuana became completely uninteresting to me as an example. So it does change how you wanna regulate yourself or how you wanna eat or what you're avoiding. It doesn't, by the way, it doesn't change it all the way. So don't, this isn't like a cure-all for that stuff because there is like a physical addiction part of it. There's some other things that have to be addressed But I don't know anybody who's increased their emotional fluidity who their destructive habits haven't changed for the better. But I also haven't met anybody whose emotional fluidity really increased and all of their destructive patterns went away entirely. There's other things. So that's how I'd say it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think ultimately, this is a weird way to say it, but ultimately, What happens with emotional fluidity, like, at the end of the day, is you get in contact with your inherent goodness in a way that you weren't before. And because so much of what we consider bad, like, oh, I'm bad and I don't deserve, or I don't— I can't trust myself, or what did I do wrong, all that stuff, or I kind of deserve that behavior, that somewhat abusive behavior, all of that goes away with emotional fluidity, and you're just left with like, oh, I'm— if I can feel this, it's not if I can feel all this stuff, it's that I am inherently good, and feeling all this stuff really allows me to see that.

Yeah, yeah. Another, another piece there is that it pulls you out of identity.

Yeah.

Which I think is a different, different way of saying the same thing.

Yes, that's right, because cool.

Emotions are something that just happen.

Yeah.

You can, you can sort of predict how you're gonna feel in certain circumstances, but research shows that we're notoriously bad at predicting our future emotional responses.

Yeah.

And so if you are, the, the more that you are just with your emotional experience, the more that just opens up awe and wonder for oneself and for one's reality.

Yeah.

And just deepens your presence into it.

Yeah.

And really helps to loosen up and dissolve some of the preconceived notions or the kind of ossified identities that we often live within, and that are, that are also ways that we stop ourselves from feeling.

Yeah. I think that there's you, as you're talking about it, it like brings something in. It's like there's certain things that the identity uses to secure itself and like Comparative mind. If I compare, I can tell the difference between me and you, and therefore there's a me, and here, and this is how I define myself. Another way is known reaction. Like, if I was like, Brett, you could no longer predict your reaction to anything, who would Brett be, right? And most of our reactions that we're predicting are emotional reactions. It's not what we say, it's how we say it. It's the emotion behind what we're saying. And so that it does dissolve the identity in this really neat way. It does do that. That's beautifully put, beautifully seen.

Yeah. And I love the example of comparative mind too, because you can intellectually compare yourself or two paths you might take or a decision you might make.

Yeah.

But if you are following, if you are fully allowing an emotional experience, there's gonna be much richer data for you.

Yeah.

And it's gonna be much more present. How does this feel? How does this feel? Rather than here's the pros and cons, right? Which is a useful frame at times, but it's not the only one, right?

And even, even I thought you were going somewhere else, which I thought was really cool too, which was like, even if you compare yourself, if you're comparative mind and there's no emotional friction behind it, it's not like most people when they compare themselves, it's like they're better than me or I'm better than them. But if you let go of that feeling of being better or being worse than, then all of a sudden even comparative mind doesn't have the same kind of doesn't have the same kind of—

then it's just data collection. It's not making a new meaning to suppress yourself with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Awesome.

This is fun.

All right, thank you so much. That was a great topic. I appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah, I did too. Finally got around to this one. Thank you everybody for listening. Uh, please share this if you really like this episode. Please share it with a friend.

Uh, give us a rating or review, and, uh, if you have any questions, actually, if you, if you really like this episode, hold it for yourself and don't share it with anybody ever.

Yeah, keep it, keep it secret, keep it safe.

If you share it with somebody, it'll only hurt you. You'll only lose part of it. Okay, probably should cut that, but What the fuck?

All right, uh, we're leaving it in. All right, thanks everybody. Thank you, Joe.

Bye.