mindfulness: words fail me!

I imagine I’m not alone in this, but in my sitting practice I have come across a powerful problem: I really don’t have the language to describe -or capture-some of my experience; quite literally, words fail me!

Let me explain: my mind settles, (okay, it approaches settling, there’s always ambient neural activity i.e. chatterboxing going on) it feels like I sink into grounding and my breathing body and the sounds in the environment bring me out of distraction and anchor me into the present moment, into presence. I rest, resting with the experience as it is, acknowledging and accepting it, just being with it what arises.

Judith Blackstone (2007) writes of “a process of gradually letting go of one’s grip on oneself and one’s environment-as if opening a clenched fist” and suggests this is an effortless experience.

Experiences arise, yet I have found that more and more I really don’t have the language to be able to describe these experiences, they seem to exits past language, somewhere or somehow on the periphery of my linguistic skills, as if there is a whole territory in me without a map.

This could analogous to the story of those explores who came across the Intuits decades ago, and discovered that Westerners had one name for snow that the indigenous population had hundreds; the story illustrates the significance perhaps of those who more closely inhabit the territory itself.

Perhaps.

Should I develop a language for these on the edge of words experiences?

I reflected on this, and suddenly realised something quite powerful about what I was doing (and I was doing something here). The desire within all of us-perhaps it is not just me? -is to understand, conceptualise, catalogue and contain our experience in word, idea, notion, data and so forth. I remember sitting in a lecture of Rod Nairn’s a few years ago, Rob said (words to the effect of) “when we conceptualise our experience, we kill it”

What to do, in my practice, when words fail me?

Perhaps it not about doing anything at all, perhaps it’s about re-relating to experience or cultivating a different attitude.

It seems habitual to reach out to experience and grasp it and in that clenching of self, hope to hold onto it, but if I simply turn towards it, stay with it with curiosity and openness and allow the felt sense of this experience to resonate through me, if I can sit with that change of attitude then words no longer fail me and the clenched fist opens some more.

Judith Blackstone The Empathic Ground Suny 2007