Dave Kashen explains that blocking difficult emotions like anger or sadness also blocks joy. Emotions flow through the same channel, so resistance creates pain, not the feelings themselves.
There's two more points I wanna make here. One is there's this idea that like all of your emotions flow through the same pipe. So if you're gonna block one, you're gonna block all in some way. Another way I heard it is like joy is the matriarch of all the feelings. And if you're not letting her children in, she ain't coming. So most of us wanna feel joy. If you're not willing to feel anger or sadness or fear,, you're, you're gonna block the flow of like your natural joy. I actually think joy is sort of what's left over when you just allow everything else to move through. Um, and then the second point, and I think this is actually really, really important and most people don't understand this. And Andrea, and we even talked about recently, like, well, well, shame, that's painful. You know? Oh, you know, sadness, that's painful. I actually think it's important to recognize that emotion— no emotions are painful or bad. It's, it's actually the resistance to the emotion that feels painful. So like an emotion plus resistance is a fundamentally different experience than the emotion without resistance.
