Joe Hudson: commitment

Transcript context

…I did a meditation retreat, a 10-day silent meditation retreat, which I know is a big part of your practice and something that led to the work you do now. A term that's coming up for me is non-judgmental awareness. Basically, experiencing the thing you're feeling and just letting it go, not attaching to it, not judging it. Is that along the lines of stuff you'd recommend? Yeah, it's definitely a huge part of it. There's a couple of things that I noticed get in the way, or the translation gets in the way there. One is it's like, think about emotions as like kids in your house. If a kid came into your house and you're like, "I will be non-judgmentally aware of you. " You're probably going to get a very different response from the kid than if you're like, "Oh, I'm so excited to see you. I welcome you in my house." The emotions feel different if you're like, "I am non-judgmentally aware of this emotion," or, "Oh, cool. Oh cool, I'm sad. This is fantastic." If you have that welcoming invitation. One of the quotes that I'm most famous for is joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. A very joyful life is a life where all the other emotions are deeply welcomed, not accepted, not non-judgmentally aware of. I think those are really great steps, don't get me wrong. If you can be in non-judgmental awareness of an emotion, fantastic. The other thing that's a little bit different about what you said is that emotions do need to be felt. If you stop feeling an emotion, you have to constrict your muscles. I can watch somebody come in, come up for one of my coaching rapid coaching sessions. By the crease in their eyebrow, I can know that there's repressed anger. By the hunch in their shoulders, I can tell you about the critical parent that they had. The body takes on a shape that's based on the emotions that you've been taught to hold. You don't just by sitting there, well, it's not entirely true, if you just sit there and feel them in that way without the full expression, they will move eventually, but it might take a couple of decades. You can actually just move them. You can actually make the sound, move your body. All mammals do it. Like mammals releasing fear, they all shake. It's part of how we exist. That's also a really big part of emotional fluidity. It's not just being still and feeling them, it's letting the muscles move, making the sounds. For someone that wants to get better at the skill of feeling emotions, being more in touch with emotions, helping their emotions be more fluid. I know this is a lifelong practice and not something you would just hear on a podcast, okay, I've installed this. Is there anything tactically you can recommend to a listener of just like, here's something you could do this week that'll help you, along these lines?…

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