Introduction to Pre-Verbal Awareness
Today’s topic is something probably you might have not heard much about. It’s called pre-verbal awareness, and this is more of a term which is used in science, but it’s not a very popular term. I will go through how I came across or discovered this pre-verbal awareness and what it means to contact it and understand it.
My Journey with Anxiety and Meditation
So as you know, I was having anxiety for years—chronic, sustained anxiety. It was diagnosed as GAD, generalized anxiety disorder. And then over the years, I meditated a lot—a lot of mindfulness and non-duality meditations.
During one of these meditations, I was just sitting and observing the sensation and whatever was arising in me. I was looking at it and saying, “You know, this is fear. I can see the fear arising. I can see the anxiety arising. I feel horrible. I want it to go away. I just don’t like it. My life is useless. How will I overcome it?” You know, all those words coming one after another.
Then I started paying attention to the sensation itself. Of course, the sensation is unpleasant. Those who’ve felt it know this can apply to any sensation. So this sensation of fear and anxiety generally happens in the heart. For some, it’s the stomach or the throat, and it’s very visceral. Whenever I had the sensation, it came with the words “anxiety” and “fear.” There was no separation of the sensation from the word.
Separating Sensation from Words
But that day, because I was very attentive and I had been doing it for a long time, I was able to see the sensation itself, feeling it without words. What that means is, imagine a world where there was no language—language was not invented, like a prehistoric being. So 20,000 years back or 50,000 years back, there was no language, right? Right now, if there was no language and I had this fear or anxiety arise in me, there would be no word or no way to express it to myself.
Most of the time, whenever the sensations arose, I had a self-talk, and the self-talk used to spiral. So the self-talk would start with the sensation, naming it, calling it an emotion, and labeling it as fear, anxiety, or whatever. And then the next step is—you know, the word itself contains the entire past. It contains a 30-year history of having that anxiety, that stress, that frustration, and shame. So the moment the word comes in, all the associations come in and it starts spiraling down.
So that day I did something different. I said, “I am not going to describe this feeling to myself. I’ll forget all the words. I’m going to separate the word from the sensation.” One day it was difficult. The moment a sensation comes in, the words automatically come in. It’s like you see a dog and the word “dog” kind of comes in. Sometimes it comes as an image, and most of the time it will also come with a verbal language cue.
I’m not stopping the thought of the sensation, you have to understand this. What I was doing was trying to separate the sensation from the word. So I said, “I’m not going to use this word. I will not describe it to myself. I don’t care what the feeling is. I will feel the feeling, the sensation, completely as if I’m a prehistoric person with no language.” And I was like, “Rajiv, in that case, what will you do?” You have no option but to feel it totally.
The Breakthrough and Interoception
When I started, it took me three or four days finally to do that and completely detach the sensation from the word. Something strange happened. The sensation arises for a few seconds—you know, the heart pounding, the throat tightening, or the stomach going in. Since I have no label for it, I cannot say it’s fear or anxiety. I feel it is unpleasant, but there’s no story, and then the sensation subsides.
At that moment, I could clearly see that the whole conceptual framework around that sensation was derived from language itself. Without language, I don’t know that it is anxiety, but the moment I label it, the whole history comes along with it. That was kind of a revelation for me. That’s where I started researching a lot about noetic experiences and interoception. Noetic experiences mean the felt, core contact with your inner sensation without any kind of definition or interpretation.
What the whole exercise taught me was that sensations do not tell you anything. For example, I’ll give you a simple example: your heart races, right? Your heart will race when you exercise. Your heart will race when, say, you’re going to meet your loved ones—you’re falling in love and you’re just waiting for your loved one to come, and of course your heart will race. And then your heart will race in anxiety, right? The mechanism is the same. The sensation is exactly or almost identical. But then why are the emotions different? Because the emotions are context-dependent, and this is what interoception means.
The Four Dimensions of Sensation
Surprisingly, when you start doing this, when you start going into your noetic or felt raw sensations, you will see there are only four dimensions to this. It is very surprising; when I felt it, I was like, “That’s all there is.”
The two main categories are pleasant and unpleasant. A heart palpitation of anxiety is unpleasant, that’s all it is. And then there are pleasant sensations, like eating a chocolate, which we all want. So the brain wants the pleasant sensations and wants to run away from the unpleasant. This is one axis. The other axis is energy and depletion. So you might feel very energetic, or you might feel very depleted. These are called core affects, and these are generally the broader categories of sensations that you feel in the body. The rest is the interpretation of those sensations.
Interoception is a word which means, “How do I make sense of these internal sensations which arise in me?” There are so many signals which come through your body—heart, lungs, gut, skin—and then the brain combines them with context and past experience and predicts. That’s how it can infer what is happening to the body. This makes your heart racing, as an example, an active interpretation rather than an internal state. The word does not label a feeling; the word actually helps produce it. It is a very strange phenomenon once you start.
We’ll go through an exercise where you can feel it, and if you do it for two or three days, you will actually start resonating with what I’m talking about right now. You’ll see the internal states are very simple and very unidimensional, and they don’t have a story or a word for them. It’s your interpretation that creates the entire story behind it.
How Language Triggers Suffering
I’ll give you another example. Say you get a phone call, and on the caller ID is someone’s name you dread—like you don’t want to pick up their call. In that moment, there is a raw experience, a sensation. I don’t want to call it an emotion right now; I’m deliberately using the word “sensation” because if you pay attention, you will see either your throat tightening, your stomach tightening, or your heart skipping a beat. That’s the first sensation. So the words on the screen or the phone call triggers a sensation.
As the sensation comes in, you’ll see the word, the feeling, and the narrative start: “Oh God, I hate this. I don’t want to take the call.” And then the further narrative: “How will I go? I’m a useless person. I’ve never done this, you know?” So the downstream language and conceptual thought process gets kicked off.
But what if you stop at the sensation itself? Again: no language, no way to express it to myself or others. Then what? I’m just left with it totally. To do that, of course, you will require a certain amount of courage. This only becomes a problem with unpleasant emotions and sensations which get stuck in a pattern and cause a lot of suffering. For pleasant emotions and sensations, it’s fine. Like when I’m eating a fruit, generally the story and narrative are very happy and joyous. It only becomes a problem when the narrative and word refer to things which we do not like, called suffering.
So we are, in a way, unpacking that entire suffering cycle, but being more surgical here. You see that call, and you stop when the sensation arises. You don’t name it. You be it. You be it totally. What does it feel like without a name, without language, without any self-talk, and without any narrative? You’ll have to develop that capacity, as I said, because it’s a negative emotion. With time, when you get that capacity, you will completely see that the emotion and sensations are completely different, and the narrative is completely overblown. It has no proportional relationship to the sensation, because what is the sensation? Just a racing heart. You’ve experienced that whenever you exercise.
Guided Exercise: Identifying the Words
To understand this very practically and experientially, we’ll do a small exercise right now, and I’ll guide you through it. If you do not understand something, just do what comes naturally to you. This is a very simple exercise. This is similar to what I did for three or four days to decouple sensations from words and emotions, which could then take me to the pre-verbal stage.
If you remember what we were talking about, the talk is about pre-verbal awareness. So we’re coming to a place which has no language at all to interfere with perception. Here is the simple exercise to see if we can do it right now.
Take a deep breath and just loosen yourself up. As I said, we will have to work with something difficult for this to work. So we’ll try and recall something which invokes anxiety or fear in you—an image, a person, or a thought. It just takes a thought to create those sensations. Think about something which creates anxiety and fear, and then notice what happens. What words come in? What narrative comes in? What judgments come in?
Maybe you tell yourself, “I don’t want this. I don’t want to feel this,” or whatever—any kind of words, language, and associative stories. Pay attention to it. So let’s do it again. Again, we’ll recall something which invokes fear or anxiety, and I’ll give you a minute to see the old patterns coming up: the words, the stories, and the judgments.
When fear comes in, you know what will happen: “Oh God, oh God, how will I cope? What will I do next?” These are also words which come up along with the sensation or right after the sensation. You know, the sensation comes in, and within a fraction of a second, you’ll see this language flowing, which is a kind of self-talk.
Sometimes, for me, primarily the words which came up were, “I’m really anxious. I don’t want this. I’m fearful.” Those were the words which came to me with the sensation. For everyone, there will be different words, but there will be a narrative which starts once the sensation triggers, and self-talk starts on its own. What I realized in my case is my anxiety is triggered, say, by a particular thing, a person, or a situation. I think of that situation and, of course, immediately there’s a sensation. First is the sensation; you’ll feel it viscerally somewhere in your body.
Guided Exercise: Stripping Away Language
Now we’ll go to the second part of this exercise, which is even more important. Again, I will invoke the uncomfortable feelings, because that’s the only way to work through them, understand them, and then resolve them. Please bring up something that makes you fearful, creates anxiety, or invokes that distress.
Now imagine you have lost the capacity of language. Is it possible for the sensation to arise? The sensation will arise and scream, “This is fear! This is fear! This is anxiety! This is fear! This is horrible!” What I want you to do is feel it, be with it, but don’t use any words, okay? It will be very difficult. The mind will creep in with the definition, with the label, or a narrative because they’re very intertwined. But we are trying to see the gap.
We’ll invoke the emotion and then see if we can just be with it without any words. No words, no self-talk. If you fail, then you again invoke the trigger and try to just be with the sensation—sorry, not the emotion, the trigger—and then just try to be with the sensation completely. You have lost the capacity for words. You cannot explain it to yourself. There’s no need to explain the sensation. I want you to be with it, feel it, and be it. That’s it.
So let me start now. I’ll give you two minutes to do it, and you can do it repeatedly as many times as you want. There’s nothing to fear; it’s just a mental construct. It will not kill you.
The Revelation of Pure Sensation
All right, great. I know it’s difficult to invoke all these distressing feelings, but great job on doing it. Now, if you’ve done it properly—and it might take a few times—you will discover something very startling: the sensation does not tell you what it is. The sensation has two axes: it is either pleasant or unpleasant. The only thing that you feel in the sensation is, “Is it pleasant, or is it not?” So, of course, a heart palpitation is not pleasant. But if you stay with the sensation, does the sensation say it’s anxiety or fear? Does it pass any judgment on your self-worth? Absolutely not.
This is the discovery which startled me when I started just being and seeing the arising—that it had no stories to tell, absolutely no words to tell me. It was just there. The words and the stories were the narration which I created, and they became so entwined with the sensation that they became a part of it.
Maybe many of you would have felt part of what I’m trying to explain, and for some, it might take a day or two. It’s not very difficult to disentangle this. For me, as I said, it took me three to four days, and then I was easily able to just be with a sensation without any kind of words. You’ll see it will reduce the power of the conceptual framework that each of these sensations has created in us.
This will also create a capacity in you to be with that unpleasantness. Unpleasantness is what the body feels when you interocept, when you feel your sensations inwardly. The body has a natural mechanism of saying, “This is pleasant” and “This is unpleasant.” It will try to run away from the unpleasant sensation, but it need not create the narratives and stories around it, which are completely based on language and nothing else.
You drop the words and the language, and what remains is the pure sensation. Were you able to detach a bit or see that the sensations do not tell any story at all? That’s the power of this whole thing. It can resolve narratives, pain, and suffering we’ve been carrying for a long time pretty fast.