How to Take Control of Your Emotions - Joe Hudson - #1045

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Joe Hudson, welcome to the show.

**Joe Hudson** (0:02)
Thanks, Chris. Good to see you, man.

**Chris Williamson** (0:04)
Feels different to speak to you now.

**Joe Hudson** (0:07)
Yeah, I bet.

**Chris Williamson** (0:08)
It feels different.
The audience will know that I spent a long week with you at your intensive retreat. Yeah. So yeah, to now sit down back in my domain after having spent a week desperately trying to survive in your fields. It feels somewhat different.

**Joe Hudson** (0:31)
Yeah. It was great to have you there.

**Chris Williamson** (0:35)
It was a very strange, very meaningful experience, especially given that it's completely sober. There's a lot of talk of how important it is to, how popular it is at least to do the psychedelic trip down to Costa Rica or the Ayahuasca DMT thing. You can get pretty far without having to add anything in except for a morning coffee if you've got the right container and practices.

**Joe Hudson** (1:03)
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen the data on the work, but we change negative self-talk by standard deviation across all the participants and the neuroses drops by a little less than a standard deviation. So yeah, cool stuff can happen.

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
Who's doing the study?

**Joe Hudson** (1:21)
There's a researcher who worked at Harvard, she no longer does. Then we had somebody at Columbia who's doing it, and we just now have another person doing another research project on us.

**Chris Williamson** (1:32)
It doesn't surprise me.

**Joe Hudson** (1:33)
Quantum Physics from Oxford. There's a new person who's at least talking to us about it. We haven't figured out what we're doing yet.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
One of the questions that came up after we spent a week together was, is it hard to live in the real world with an open heart?

**Joe Hudson** (1:50)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (1:51)
That was one of the first questions that I thought of.

**Joe Hudson** (1:53)
It's hard not to, is my experience. I don't know anything that feels better with a closed heart.
We have this thing that our brain does that tells us that, oh, I'm going to get hurt or I'm going to get in trouble, or I'm going to get taken advantage of if I close my heart, or if I don't close my heart, if I don't protect myself. But there's not a tremendous amount of evidence for that. Gandhi didn't get taken advantage of, or Martin Luther King didn't get taken advantage of. A really open-hearted mother doesn't particularly get taken advantage of. Some might, some might not, but they're not really correlated. And so, my experience is that if you close your heart down, it hurts. It's just painful. And we talk about it a lot in our society, is like, if you don't forgive, then you're punishing yourself. That would be like the typical way to say it. But my experience is just, anytime that my heart starts closing down, it hurts.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Why do we do it?

**Joe Hudson** (3:04)
We're scared of love. I mean, that's one of the things that I think you must have noticed in the, in Groundbreakers is that on some level, you could say almost everybody there was, had been entrained in love in some way that was not useful and so now they're scared of it. So like love came with guilt and therefore, love isn't safe or love came with getting smothered or love came with criticism or love obligation. And therefore, love is scary, not for what it, but at the same time, we definitely want love. We're born wanting love, like little kids are like, give me attention, give me love. That's what they want. And so we have this desire for it, but then when we get it, it comes with this something that's toxic or not good or, and then we're, oh shoot, we're scared of love. And so, and to some degree, that's all of it. It's like, like I can see almost all humans kind of doing this with love.
The most pronounced one is jealousy. You know, like if I'm in a relationship and a person with me is, and I'm jealous. On one level, I'm like, I want you, I want you, I want you. And on one level, I'm like, I'm going to criticize you and make you feel wrong and bad, and I'm pushing you away. And this is what I see almost everybody's doing with love in their life, with themselves as well. I mean, even in loving themselves, they're doing that.

**Chris Williamson** (4:29)
So we have that pattern. I think, is it hard to live in the real world with an open heart?