Somatic Access: Getting Out of the Head and Into the Body
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
For people who can talk fluently about their feelings but not feel them, Hudson teaches a physical route in rather than a conceptual one. The core mechanism: emotions move muscles, so withholding an emotion requires constricting muscles in a specific way. Two of the most common blocks are raising the chin and clamping the jaw. Reverse the posture and feeling gets stronger. When no emotion is available at all, you stop hunting for the emotion and instead feel the sensation of hunting and failing, which is itself a locatable body state. From there the practice reduces to keeping roughly ten percent of your awareness in your body at all times, which Hudson calls the most powerful practice available and the reason most other work becomes unnecessary.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Catch the moment you go intellectual
When asked a real question, notice whether what follows is a rapid stream of thoughts or an actual body sensation. Ali described his own process as 'zero somatic, 100% intellectual' — a cascade of options and quick calculations. Naming which mode you're in is the entry point.
Pro tip Fluency is not feeling. Being able to answer fast is often the symptom, not the evidence.
- 2
Run the chin test
Hold whatever you're trying to feel, then lift your chin slightly and notice your access to sensation. Then lower your chin and notice again. Ali reported the feeling was clearly stronger with the chin down. Hudson notes this is one of the two main ways humans shut emotion off — and that on replay you can watch the chin rise the moment feeling is avoided.
Pro tip Watch your own recorded video. The chin lift is visible from the outside even when it's invisible from the inside.
- 3
Unclamp the jaw
The second common block is holding the jaw tight. Deliberately release it while staying with whatever you're exploring. Hudson lists these two — chin up and clenched jaw — as the standard mechanical means people use to not feel.
- 4
When nothing comes, feel the not-coming
If you push for a feeling and get nothing, stop chasing the emotion. Instead find the sensation of looking for a feeling and failing to reach it. Ali located it immediately: a constriction around his belly button. That constriction is real somatic data and gives you something to work with when the target emotion is unavailable.
Pro tip Describe location and quality precisely — above or below the navel, squeezing or expanding.
Watch out Straining to manufacture a feeling ('feel something, damn it') reinforces the intellectual mode you're trying to leave.
- 5
Read the thought pattern when the body is silent
Hudson's own way in was indirect: he noticed he was thinking in binary, black-or-white terms, and inferred from that he was in fear — long before he could feel fear somatically. Use recurring thought signatures as a proxy indicator until direct sensation comes online.
Pro tip Keep a short list of your own tells: binary thinking, rushing, over-planning, going quiet.
- 6
Hold ten percent of attention in the body, permanently
The maintenance practice is simply keeping some of your awareness on physical sensation — feet on the floor, hands on the table — while you go about ordinary activities, including conversations and work. Hudson claims that if you sustain this, everything else takes care of itself and no formal session is needed.
Watch out Most people can't sustain it, because change arrives faster than they can tolerate and they leave the body again.
In the wild
Unable to conjure any feeling around his money fear, Ali was asked to hold whatever was there and lift his chin, then lower it. He reported the feeling was noticeably stronger with the chin lowered. Hudson then pointed out the pattern from earlier in the session: when Ali was reaching for a genuine answer his chin had gone down, and when he was intellectualising the money question his chin had gone up — the same tell visible in on-screen portrayals of narcissism, which Hudson defines loosely as an inability to feel one's emotions.
→ A one-second postural adjustment measurably changed his access to sensation and gave him a repeatable self-check.
Ali described sitting with his brother and being asked if he was okay. He said yes. His brother pointed out he had tears in his eyes and looked about to cry. Ali was genuinely surprised — he could see his eyes screwing up, but reported no felt difference from ten seconds earlier. His response was to try to reverse-engineer intellectually what must have triggered him, rather than to locate any sensation.
→ Illustrates Hudson's split: the body was clearly producing the emotion, while awareness of it was absent.
Common mistakes
Straining to produce the emotion on command
Ali's internal monologue while trying was 'come on, imagine the feeling, feel something, damn it.' That effort is itself an intellectual operation and keeps you out of the body. The move is to drop the target and feel the frustration of not reaching it, which is available immediately.
Treating breath and emotion as separate things
Ali doubted his sense of expansion because he'd taken a breath in, as though the breath disqualified the reading. Hudson's correction: anxiety stops the breath, love affects the breath, joy affects the breath. The muscular and respiratory change is not a confound — it is the emotion showing up.
Only doing it in a dedicated session
Hudson explicitly rules out getting off the call to sit in a yoga posture and do breathwork. The practice is designed to run inside whatever you're already doing — filming, writing, meeting the team — otherwise it becomes another scheduled task competing with work.
From the transcript
“one of the two ways we stop emotions in our body is raise our chin”
“Find the sensation of you looking for a feeling and not being able to get it.”
“If you just keep 10% of your awareness in your body as much as possible, everything else will take care of itself.”
From the episode
The Emotions Expert: Why Avoiding Your Feelings Is Dangerous