A vocabulary for the inner life

On the words we don't have for what is happening inside us,

and why having them matters.

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It's 3am. You wake up with a feeling. You are not sure what it is. Is it anxiousness? Are you scared? Is it just that your bedroom is too hot? The mind, always at the ready to provide an explanation, gets to work immediately. It offers narratives that fit the limited data it has. Maybe it was that conversation yesterday. Maybe it's the thing at work. Maybe it's something old, something deeper, surfacing in the dark for reasons unknown. Twenty minutes later the mind has built an entire story and convinced you it is legitimate. But the feeling itself, the thing that woke you up in the first place, is far in the background now and can no longer be accessed through all the descriptions and narratives. We've inadvertently handed control to the Mind and it is happy to be back at the wheel.

This happens to almost all of us, almost all of the time. Not just at three in the morning. In the middle of a meeting. Halfway through a sentence to someone we love. In a quiet moment that should have been unremarkable. Something stirs inside us, and before we have fully felt and experienced it, the mind has already explained it. Often poorly. Sometimes inaccurately. Almost always too quickly.

There is a reason for this. We know that our minds are a very useful tool. Because it can be so powerful, most of us have developed the habit of relying on it almost exclusively. Unfortunately, this means that many of the other aspects of our internal world have gone underdeveloped and ignored. Most of us, somewhere along the way, were given an enormous vocabulary for the world out there. We learned the names of objects, the names of countries, the words for weather and machines and history and politics. We were not, for the most part, given a vocabulary for what is happening "in here". And without words for these different aspects of ourselves we have a hard time differentiating one from the other. They can all get conflated and lumped into a chaotic jumble of data which causes us to revert back to the mind, our most developed tool, for the sense making we think it can provide.

The cost is subtle, but it accumulates. We confuse thought with attention. We confuse a sensation in the body with an emotion. We confuse the narrative about a feeling with the feeling itself. We say "I feel anxious about everything" when what is actually happening is that there is simultaneously a sensation in the chest, a story running in the background, an old judgment about ourselves, and a low-grade fatigue, all at once. It all shows up as a single bundle, with no internal distinctions. The reality is that each of them is a distinct stream of data that may or may not be related to the others. They all demand attention. They all require a different response. But without the language to separate them, we can't attend to them. We lump it all together and we just feel anxious about everything.

A vocabulary, in this context, is not a dry taxonomy. We are not trying to build a tidy academic system for sorting inner experience into bins. We are trying to do something much simpler. We are trying to understand ourselves clearly. The words are not the goal. The words are a tool. With a word for felt sense that is different from the word for thought and different from the word for sensation, you can begin to distinguish these things in your own experience as they happen. Without the words, the distinctions are still real. But they are invisible to you. And what is invisible to you is hard to work with.

The intent here is to develop a clear vocabulary that can help you get closer to direct experience, not further from it. The word felt sense is useful only if it helps you actually feel the felt sense. The word thought is useful only if it helps you notice a thought as a thought, instead of being inside it without seeing it. The point is not to live in the language. The point is to use the language briefly, in passing, so that you can return your attention to what is actually here.

Vocabulary confusion is often what slows people down. Someone arrives wanting to look at something that has been heavy for them for a long time. They begin to describe it. The description tangles. Inside one sentence is a thought, an emotion, a body signal, an old judgment, and a story about another person. Each of those wants something different. Until they can be teased apart, the heaviness stays heavy. With a working vocabulary, the tangle starts to come undone. The words do not solve anything by themselves. They make the work doable.

Starting next Monday, this blog will work through the most foundational of these terms one at a time. Attention. Awareness. Thought. Sensation. Felt sense. Emotion. Each one will get a full piece. Each piece will build on the one before it. The intent is to leave you with a working set of distinctions you can carry into your own life. Not a curriculum to study. A small set of tools you can pick up when you need them.

You can read these pieces in order or read only the one you need when the question arises. They will live on the website indefinitely. Coming back to a piece a second or third time is often when it actually lands.

A small practice for this week. The next time you notice a feeling, before you go to the mental story about what caused it, see if you can describe the feeling itself in a single sentence. What is it doing? Where is it located? Is it in the body? In the mind? Is it still, or moving? Is it small or large? Is it familiar or unfamiliar? You may find that the act of trying to describe the feeling, before the mind reaches for the explanation, begins to change what the feeling is. That, in itself, is the work.

The ability to see what is actually happening inside your own experience is one of the most generous things you can offer the people you live with. It is also a real practice. The words help. We will start with the most fundamental one next week.