Something happens in my chest. There is a tightening, a little pressure, a sensation I don’t like. Within seconds, I have identified the problem: It is anxiety. Or perhaps frustration. Maybe it’s envy, which would explain why it arrived just as I was reading about somebody else’s six-figure book deal.
Lately, I’ve noticed how quickly I try to explain a sensation to myself. Something happens, and before I’ve had much chance to feel it, I’m telling myself what it is, why it’s there, and what I should do about it.
Then last week, a Ukrainian word made me wonder what might happen if I waited a little longer before giving a sensation a name.
A Word for the Uncomfortable Middle
On my podcast, Fifty Words for Snow, my cohost Emily John Garcés and I explore words that don’t have easy English equivalents. This week our guest Alexandra Shunrun introduced us to nezruchno, a Ukrainian word that describes something uncomfortable, inconvenient, or awkward.
Alex explained that a meeting time could be nezruchno if it didn’t fit your schedule. A pair of shoes could be nezruchno if they pinched your feet. You might feel nezruchno asking someone for a favor or admitting that you’d forgotten their name. You could also feel nezruchno if you failed to do something you’d promised someone.
If I failed to keep a promise, I would probably say I felt guilty. But Alex described a more complicated experience: feeling empathy for the person you let down, feeling stress about an upcoming confrontation, and perhaps also feeling uncomfortable with yourself for being a person who let someone down. The feelings might overlap, and it might be hard to sort out exactly what you were experiencing.
My co-host Emily wondered whether we sometimes reach for the word “guilt” because it seems close to the feeling, even when we don’t necessarily feel we’ve done anything wrong. Maybe a friend asks for a favor and I feel a little twist in my stomach, so I say yes, because I think the twist is guilt. Later, I realize I didn’t have time to do the favor, and what I felt might have actually been reluctance. Or I wanted to help but was worried I’d disappoint her. Or maybe all of those things were true.
I liked that nezruchno could leave room for the tangle. I can recognize that I’m uncomfortable and feel the physical components of it without immediately deciding what category of emotion to put it in. In English, I can say I feel uneasy, unsettled, awkward, or simply uncomfortable. But nezruchno brought my attention to how much can be happening inside that “ugh” before I’ve settled on an explanation.
Start Close In
In my Buddhist group, we’ve talked about paying attention to how feelings show up in the body before we get conceptual about them. Recently, I’ve been giving it a real try. When I notice a knot in my stomach or tightness in my jaw, I pause before deciding I’m angry or anxious. I ask myself: What does this sensation actually feel like? Is it pressure? Heat? Does it stay in one place or move around? Does it have edges? And if I notice that I don’t want to feel it, I get curious about that, too. What does not wanting feel like in my body?
My teacher, Sylvia, describes what she calls the apprehending mind, “the mind that closes down around something and then grasps it, solidifies it, then embellishes it into a storyline.” The trouble, she says, is that we then respond to what we’ve made up: We create the world, we react to our creation as if it were solid, and our thoughts proliferate.
I recognize this process. My chest tightens while I’m reading about someone else’s book deal. I call it envy. Then I think about my most recent book, which is out on submission. Then I begin to wonder why I haven’t heard from the publishers. Within minutes, I’m imagining that no one will ever want the book and I will be forced to condemn the manuscript to the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk, the designated purgatory for all of my dead projects. By the time I’m thinking about the fate of my book and the dead project drawer, I’ve traveled a long way from the original sensation of tightness in my chest.
Recently I’ve been trying to short-circuit the process. As I do, I’m discovering how impatient I am, how I want to immediately label any discomfort I encounter, find its cause, and then get rid of it. I start to wonder about all the times my body was trying to communicate something and I interrupted, attempting to manage it with a diagnosis.
Sylvia is clear that the practice isn’t to treat conceptualization as the enemy: “Our thoughts are not bad. They are just part of a natural process.” The mind, she says, is just doing what it does. So instead of forcing the thoughts away, we notice them and gently interrupt their momentum. “We don’t hit it over the head and say, ‘Stop,’” she says. Instead, we say, “Just a minute.”
Sometimes I think of the opening of David Whyte’s poem “Start Close In”:
Start close in/don’t take the second step or the third/start with the first thing/close in…
For me that first thing is the physical sensations that appear before a storyline develops.
I don’t mean that we should never name our feelings. Knowing that I’m angry can help me recognize that a boundary has been crossed. Knowing that I’m sad can help me ask for comfort. And sometimes a physical symptom calls for a doctor, not an extended session of somatic experiencing. But I’ve noticed that a name can feel so definitive and solid that I check out once I’ve landed on it. I call something anxiety and straightaway move on to manipulating it, without noticing the subtleties of the feeling, its changing nature, or whether there might be something else mixed in.
Sylvia talks about inviting the mind to come home to the body, where there’s a different sort of wisdom, a sort of warm nourishing psychic hearth, a place where language holds no sway.
Staying with Nezruchno
After talking for a bit on our podcast episode, Alex began second-guessing how she would use the word nezruchno in her own language. The more closely we examined it, the harder it became to pin down. I found that impressive: Even the person who brought us the word, a native speaker who had used it all her life, was willing to sit with a little uncertainty about it.
I still like an explanation. If my chest tightens, I will probably continue to interview the usual suspects. But now, once in a while, I can say: Something feels nezruchno. Let me see what happens next.
