Know Thyself
E190 - Joe Hudson: Why The Emotions You Avoid Are Running Your Life (How To Break Free)
14 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the difference between peace and joy in emotional awakening?
Positive emotions are actually scarier for people to feel than the negative ones for more than like two seconds. You have a quote, peace is not joy. They're completely different animals. Peace comes with the head awakening. Joy comes more in the heart. Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house that her children aren't welcome.
So how do you welcome your anger and your fear and your sadness so that you can welcome love? My dad was a great father for the first 10 years, but then alcohol got him, and he was just wildly abusive verbally, and there was no way out. I could say, find out you win, and he would say, see, I told you you were weak. So love is abuse.
My needs are less important than other people's needs, and there's just something inherently wrong with me. Meditation is porn for perfectionists. It was just me trying to be perfect. I was at peace, but I realized that peace was great, but it wasn't the complete picture, and I wanted to actually be fully human. Is there anything that you pick up with me? There's a lot of things that I could say.
I could give you 20 examples. So the more I could allow my heart to break, the more my capacity to love grew. But then what happens when someone's actually across from you and loving you just as you are? We all want to be so seen.
Joe Hudson, welcome back. Hey, good to be here.
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Chapter 2: How does Joe Hudson's personal story illustrate emotional suppression?
Thanks for having me. Of course, man. It's my pleasure. I always love anytime I see you pop up on my feed or my schedule, my calendar, it's a big joy. I loved our last conversation, the ones that followed after, and I'm so excited for this one.
People have seen you online with, you know, founding the Art of Accomplishment, know that you are the executive coach for some of the world's biggest leaders, and I'm I think that becomes possible when one's able to effectively lead themself And where I want to start today is a lot of people are familiar with the conversations we've had on the waking up journey.
And we talked about a bit how on last time, it's not the same thing as growing up and the emotional work. And you have a quote, which is, peace is not joy. They're completely different animals. And I want to start there and lay the foundation on how they're two different things, complementary, but not equal. So could you elaborate on that?
I think there's a couple ways to try to describe it. The first one is I think peace comes with the head awakening, right? Which is, I would describe it as understanding like what you are essentially. Understanding, you know, what you are beyond the things that come and go, like emotions or thoughts or identities or, you know, father, son, all that stuff. Like what are you essentially?
And it also comes with this thing of being able to see through your thoughts. Like your thoughts come and go and you're just like, oh, I see how that's true, but I also see how it's not true. You don't get, your thoughts don't become personal anymore. The joy comes more in the heart awakening, which is the capacity to welcome and enjoy all of your emotional experiences.
So I have a phrase that's, joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome.
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Chapter 3: What role does meditation play in emotional bypassing?
And so how do you welcome your anger and your fear and your sadness so that you can welcome the harder things to welcome, which is like ecstasy and joy and excitement and exuberance and love. And we think that those things are really easy to feel, but they're actually, I find people have a very hard time. We'll do these retreats.
and we'll have a chance for people to really go into their anger and they'll get angry for like 40, 50 minutes just, and they, you know, maybe hadn't gotten angry for years, but they'll do it. And then we're like, okay, now we're going to do some pleasure. And everyone like five minutes later is like, okay, well, what are we doing next?
Because to actually allow that feeling of deep joy, deep pleasure, it's, The way they say it is that you don't really exist in it anymore. Like the you starts to dissipate because it gets so big, it gets so expansive that it gets scary. And so you'll see people contract into fear when a great amount of pleasure or love show up. And then what would be the gut awakening?
For me, the gut awakening is a nervous system awakening. And so that is like the most difficult one to explain because it's just so hard. The way I would say it is your capacity to hang out in like just the simple pleasure of being alive. Meaning that you're not in fight or flight very often unless something real is happening.
There's like an experience of like the sensations moving through your body are just unbelievably pleasurable. And what that's basically doing is it's telling you you're safe when you actually are safe and you're not safe when you actually aren't safe. And most of us are walking around the world feeling unsafe even though we're perfectly safe.
Oh, my God.
And they're all linked. Like I make a separation between them. They're not really separate. But, you know, as for an example, you have a thought that's like, oh, my God, I got to make sure I call my mom. That sends the gut into it. And then the emotionally is like, oh, I have to. And, you know, they're all they all relate to one another and they all affect one another. Yeah.
Yeah, I think for many of us that get into mindfulness or meditation, we primarily, and I think I did early on, like identify awakening of loosening the identification with thoughts as like that's what awakening is. Right. Come to find out later on that journey that there's still a feeling of freedom that's lacking within one's experience. Yeah.
It sounds like the gut awakening has to do with safety, nervous system regulation, the heart more with like feeling your feelings and the head more with the identification with thoughts or seeing the illusory nature of it. Is that right? And self.
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Chapter 4: How can we welcome our emotions to experience deeper connections?
I'm going to play the smallest violin, that kind of thing.
And, uh, And so they one day took pictures of me to make fun of me, and they actually put them in the photo album. And so when I was, I don't know, 21 or 22 years old, I came across that photo, and I was like, oh, that's probably why I haven't cried in like 14 years. Like that's probably it. And I need to learn how to cry.
I do not know why that gift came, but I just knew that that was something I had to do. And so I started trying to cry and I couldn't do it. Like I literally spent years trying to cry and couldn't do it. At this time, I'm meeting my wife. My wife has... My wife is responsible for a lot. She's amazing. She basically said... We need to travel in a third world country together.
We need to do a 10-day silent retreat together. And we need to do therapy together if we're going to get married. We're going to do that, and then we'll decide if marriage works. So I was like, okay, let's do it. Those are great things for most people to do. Yeah, just awesome. And to do them together was great. So... So the therapy like really started teaching me about the emotional piece.
And, but the meditation retreat, what happened was I was at a like standard, you know, Guanka Vipassana thing. And what was it like day three, the first time you sit and you move the attention to your body, my body disappeared. I was one with the universe. It was amazing. It was eight seconds. And then I spent the next 10 years trying to get that back. which was like absolute hell.
It was like a complete nightmare. Could you zoom in just a bit more on that experience? What was that really like for you, those eight seconds?
Those eight seconds? I don't know. It's out of memory now, but it was just... It was like my physical structure disappeared is how it felt physically in the body, and I could feel the universe, and I was the universe. There was a... a positive sensation ecstasy that I had never felt before. And then I was just like, what's happening? How do I keep this? And then it went away.
And then I was like, how do I get it? And so I spent 10 years making almost no money doing almost like the very minimum amount of work to be able to dedicate my entire life to finding whatever that thing was. So reading all sorts of meditation teachers and doing all sorts of things like the Hoffman process and different therapies. I just like everything that I could possibly find to do, I did.
And that was, that was a... I was like great in the fact that it taught me a tremendous amount of tools to like, now that when we do courses, I get to incorporate the understanding from all these unique tools. It was also lucky in the fact that I had a huge authority issue because my dad was who he was. I just couldn't trust authority.
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Chapter 5: What are the signs of repressed anger and how does it manifest?
So repressed anger looks like passive aggression, depression, feeling of stuck, procrastination, disappointment, guilt. Those are all forms of repressed anger. Yeah. Even sometimes sadness. A great story is my daughter... My daughter was like about nine or 10 years old. She's in the bathroom. She's crying. I go in and I'm like hanging out with her. I was like, you're crying, but you look angry.
She goes, I am. I'm like, how often when you're sad, are you angry? She's like about half the time. I was like, why i was not expecting an answer she goes because when i get angry at my sister she's bigger than me and she just bops me on the head but if i get sad she does what i want man if that isn't a perfect explanation to so many dynamics that are going on yeah subtle manipulations yeah
So all that is repressed anger. And there's so much vitality in anger. There's so much determination and ambition just all stuck in repressed anger. All these beautiful aspects of humanity.
And it's easy to demonize it too, but like that is also the way we've learned to cope to get our needs met. Correct.
Yeah, that's right. All of this is just the things that we had to do as kids to get our needs met. Yeah. Yeah, and just to be clear, because I know some people have some issues here, when I'm saying getting angry, I don't mean getting angry at somebody. Like, move your anger, but don't do it in a way that destroys things or just hurts people. Actually, all of your emotions aren't really...
They're not best to be done at. So I would recommend not doing them at people.
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Chapter 6: How does emotional suppression affect decision-making?
You can be sad at somebody. Like you can cry to get them to change what they're doing. You can be scared at somebody. I'm really worried about you. You know, you can be angry at somebody. God damn it. Why don't you? All of that is meant to control somebody else. All of that is abuse. It's all emotional abuse.
When you're speaking about that relationship dynamics, I just think of how
Chapter 7: What is the significance of vulnerability in personal growth?
when that pattern is repeated so many times, we're like in this position where we continually think there's an external circumstance that once it's fulfilled, we will be. And I just think of like... Never. Yeah. What did you say? Humility is taking your God-given place on the planet?
Yeah, exactly.
So like I think about... the natural world and what has its own God-given place, the flowers that bloom and that naturally attract the bees. Yeah. I think that we're fundamentally most attracted to wholeness and not pretense being what you actually are. Yeah. And I think that also changes the relationship dynamic.
Just to tie a bow on that is like, when you realize and you see this dynamic that's playing out of chasing and being chased, for example, and then you kind of feel your feelings and then you be in yourself, it like... that dynamic, the magnetic pulsion kind of back and forth, I feel like dissolves and then you can actually get what's meant for you in a lot of ways. Absolutely.
And we're attracted to the exact thing that can provide it. Yeah. Right? Like,
i was attracted to the exact woman who could you know fit my puzzle piece of dysfunction our dysfunctions came together like that so we could learn our lessons and i have not met a couple that's been together for more than five months where that's not the case now whether they're willing to do it or not is a huge thing and when i get asked that advice like do i commit do i not commit and it's like can you grow together if you can't then
good luck yeah then have a life of non-growth and see how that goes but yeah to me this like it changes the whole conception of like awakening and growth being like the turning away from the world right the go live in the Himalayan caves by taking space you can really observe yourself and all the stuff and
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Chapter 8: How can embracing imperfection lead to deeper connections?
What I love so much about your work and also the embodiment of actually having a wife and children where you've, I've like met one of your daughters. I can tell you have embodiment and you practice what you preach and that's evident in the children you've raised. It's really beautiful. She just agreed to do a podcast with me.
Oh, amazing. Yeah, so we just shot a podcast. So I'm really excited about it. She totally admonishes me right in the middle of the podcast too. It's awesome.
So good, so good.
But like for a lot of the men that maybe have that self-reliant tendency, okay, there's a death of self that needs to occur to realize that
growth actually likely is going to come most by turning into the world, whether it's business, whether it's relationships, but we can view all these different aspects of life as continual opportunities to deepen connection with self and other, which we were formerly under the presumption of like to move away from that stuff. I think you mentioned something in the last podcast of like,
I can live on top of a disco when you're awakened and when you're enlightened, but you don't want to. Right. Yeah. But being able to and going and meeting those different, you know, challenging at times circumstances like raising kids often will give you the experience of. Yeah.
That was one of my favorite quotes from Stephen Harrison. Show me an enlightened person. Give me an enlightened person. I'll put them in the back of the car with two yelling kids and we'll see how enlightened they are in four hours.
I've always loved that. Yeah.
I always love that saying.
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