To Feel or Not To Feel

That is the question.

After class the other day, I found myself in one of those conversations that seem to unfold naturally on the mats—where exhaustion meets insight, and suddenly you’re seeing life through the lens of jiu-jitsu. My students and I were reflecting on something that’s been on my mind: how can we actually use our emotions to get better at this art we love?

“Use the emotions. Don’t let them use you,” I heard myself say. Then another thought followed: “Follow the emotions—they’re our guides.”

On the surface, those ideas might sound like opposites. How do you harness emotion without becoming its hostage? How do you follow a feeling without losing control? But the more I sit with it, the more I realize—this paradox sits at the very heart of jiu-jitsu, where instinct, pressure, and perception constantly collide.

Because jiu-jitsu, at its core, is mind, heart, and guts.

The key is realizing that you are not your emotions. They’re not your identity. Feelings aren’t facts. We live between emotion and motion—which means we always have a choice in how we respond. When anger rises, you aren’t an angry person. You’re a person experiencing anger. When fear shows up, it doesn’t make you fearful. It means you’re feeling fear. That subtle shift creates space—and in that space lies your power to choose.

The Choice

Every time we step on the mat, we’re faced with countless micro-decisions. But perhaps the most important choice we face isn’t about technique or strategy—it’s about how we relate to what we’re feeling in any given moment. When pressure mounts, when our game plan crumbles, when we’re getting crushed by someone we thought we could handle, the physical struggle gives way to an emotional crossroads. We arrive at a proverbial fork in the road:

Frustration or fascination?

This single choice determines everything that follows.

Most people think of emotions in simple terms—happy, sad, mad, afraid. But jiu-jitsu reveals deeper emotional terrain: peace, joy, love, patience—and their opposites. These powerful states affect us in training far more than we often realize. Emotional content isn’t optional; it’s essential. It can empower a practitioner to move with presence and intuition—or shut them down entirely. The same fuel that elevates your game can just as easily burn it to the ground.

But here’s what makes it even more complex: somewhere along the way, we were taught to simplify and suppress our emotions—because they might reveal too much of us. And that suppression is driven by a deeper force: fear. We’re afraid of our own feelings, not because they’re bad, but because they threaten to expose who we really are, what we’re afraid of, what we’ve been through. So we try to keep them contained. We shut them down, numb them out, or shrink them into categories we think we can control.

But in doing so, we cut ourselves off from one of our most powerful sources of creative energy—our intuition and instinct. The very emotions we try to hide are often the ones that would’ve helped us the most.

This emotional suppression creates a paradox. In trying to avoid vulnerability, we actually become more vulnerable. We default to safety—stalling, clinging to patterns, avoiding risk—and in doing so, we become predictable, reactive, and limited. The fear of being seen controls us more than the original emotion ever could. We end up trading real, authentic power for the illusion of control.

Frustration isn’t just a reaction—it’s a retreat. It pulls us inward, away from presence and into the shadows of our own mind. We spiral into loops about what should’ve happened, why we failed, or what this moment says about us. That mental noise unravels our clarity. It’s where fear, doubt, and resistance live rent-free.

In that state, the grappler becomes increasingly desperate. Their jiu-jitsu gets smaller, more rigid, less creative. They stop flowing and start forcing. Not because they’re being exposed—but because they’ve given in to a base nature. Instead of moving through the emotion, they get stuck inside it, suppressing the lighter, freer spirit that wants to emerge.

Fascination, on the other hand, is the way out of our heads and into the present moment—into the physical world where we can actually do something. It reconnects us to the body, to breath, to sensation.

Emotion runs deep—but its impact depends entirely on how you engage with it. Ignore it, and it can reduce you to a trousered ape, flailing and forcing, trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. But if you meet it with curiosity and courage, it becomes something else entirely: a gateway to timing, feel, and true sensibility.

When we choose fascination, we choose to engage with reality as it is, not as we wish it were. We choose to learn from pressure rather than be crushed by it. More than anything, fascination frees us from the fear of emotional exposure—because we’ve come to understand: revelation isn’t weakness. It’s the pathway to power.

The Feeling Art

Jiu-jitsu is, at its core, a feeling-based martial art. Unlike striking styles, where you can maintain distance and rely on visual cues, grappling demands constant physical connection. Every moment on the mat is rich with tactile information—the shifting weight of your opponent, the tension in their grips, the subtle cues that signal their next move before they make it. In jiu-jitsu, your body doesn’t just respond—it listens.

But here’s the challenge: “feel” can’t be taught in the traditional sense. It has to be awakened. And because every person’s resonance—how present, aware, and sensitive they are in a given moment—varies so dramatically, no two people develop that feel in the same way or at the same pace. This is why, in any given room, belt rank alone can’t explain what’s happening. Some people are simply more attuned to the energy in front of them, and that attunement becomes their superpower.

And once that attunement develops, something remarkable happens: your emotions stop being background noise—and start becoming part of your awareness toolkit.

This constant connection means our emotions have a direct line to useful information. When we feel frustration, fear, or excitement, we can learn to trace those emotions to something real in the external world. The alarm that goes off when someone’s about to pass your guard? That’s not just anxiety—it’s your body picking up on something your conscious mind hasn’t registered yet. That surge of energy when a submission starts to open up? That’s not just adrenaline—it’s your nervous system syncing with opportunity.

The better we get at noticing these signals, the more precisely we can act on them.

Emotions as Energy Source

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: your emotions are your energy source. They’re not obstacles to overcome or distractions to ignore—they’re fuel. But like any powerful energy, how we direct it determines whether our jiu-jitsu becomes precise and responsive—or chaotic and exposed.

When we choose fascination over frustration, we’re choosing to transform emotional energy into intuitive power. Instead of resisting what we’re feeling, we’re learning to feel our way through problems. We’re developing something I call emotional jiu-jitsu—the ability to blend with our internal experience the same way we blend with an opponent’s energy.

Following the Emotions

“Follow the emotions” doesn’t mean getting swept away by them—it means letting them guide your awareness. Emotions, when noticed without judgment, act like a compass. They don’t just point to problems; they remind us of our resources. They bring us back to what we have—our breath, our instincts, our body, our training.

When you feel pressure, instead of tensing up, you can learn to feel where it’s coming from and redirect it. When fear arises, instead of freezing, you can listen for what your body is trying to tell you about the situation and respond with clarity instead of panic.

This is why jiu-jitsu is such a profound teacher beyond the mat. The same emotional intelligence that helps you stay calm under side control can help you stay steady in an argument, in a job interview, or during a personal setback. The same ability to find fascination in getting your guard passed can help you find unexpected opportunity when life doesn’t go your way.

When we follow our emotions with intention, we don’t become ruled by them—we become resourced by them.

The Practice

So how do we actually train ourselves to choose fascination over frustration?

It starts with awareness—but then it requires curiosity. In class the other day, I walked my students through a simple mental exercise. I asked them: “How does it feel to be trapped in someone’s lasso guard?”

I had been watching them deal with that position during rolling, and it was obvious they didn’t enjoy it—especially when it was tight. Their responses were familiar: It hurts. It sucks. I hate being there. It feels impossible to escape. All valid emotional reactions—but vague, and mentally driven.

That last one—“it feels impossible to escape”—reveals everything. It’s the moment emotion is no longer just a reaction, but a belief. And once we believe we’re stuck, we stop looking for ways to move.

So I asked them to go deeper: What exactly makes it frustrating? What specifically doesn’t feel good? What makes it impossible?

That shift in questioning moved them from the story in their head to the sensations in their body. Is it the grip on the sleeve that seems impossible to break? The foot hooked in your elbow crease? The low back pain from broken posture? The torque in your shoulder? The lack of forward pressure?

Now we had specific problems to solve—not emotionally, but physically. The emotion itself became a diagnostic tool, guiding us to what needed to change.

This is the practice: learning to interrogate discomfort until it gives up its details. Instead of letting emotion spiral into suffering, we let it point us toward solutions. That’s the difference between being used by your emotions—and using them to get better.

The Way Forward

Use the emotions—don’t let them use you. Follow them, but choose your relationship to them. This isn’t about becoming emotionless or suppressing what you feel. It’s about developing the emotional flexibility to transform whatever arises into clarity, creativity, and power.

In jiu-jitsu, as in life, the goal isn’t to avoid feeling. It’s to feel more skillfully, more consciously, and more courageously. When we do that, emotions stop being something that happens to us—and start becoming something we can work with, learn from, and grow through.

The mat is calling. Time to feel our way through it.