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\u201cWhat does anxiety<\/em> feel like?\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ll ask the question in groups beginning to study Ayurveda. The first round of answers rolls out:<\/p>\n Worried. Concerned. Apprehensive. Uneasy. Fearful. Agitated. Nervous. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n They\u2019re all great words. But, I\u2019ll suggest, as psychological synonyms, they might not get us any closer to what anxiety really feels<\/em> like.<\/p>\n What does \u201cworried\u201d feel like, after all? How does it feel similar to or different from \u201canxiety\u201d?<\/p>\n So I refine the question, inspired by somatic psychotherapy. \u201cWhat does anxiety feel like in the body<\/em>?\u201d I ask students to journal their answers instead of calling them out. After a few minutes, I ask for the new list.<\/p>\n Tight. Pulsing. Racing. Paralyzed. Cold. Hot. Shivering. Nauseous. Clammy. Dry. Rigid. Fidgety. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now we\u2019re getting somewhere. I have students journal the words instead of verbalizing them so that the discrepancies in their call-outs don\u2019t intermingle or make them think that their anxiety should feel “cold” because that\u2019s what their seemingly more-self-assured neighbour is saying about their<\/em> anxiety. Journaling is a leveling device in group classes.<\/p>\n I tell them that every single answer is absolutely right. I also say:\u00a0The more you\u00a0can feel the answer in your\u00a0body, the more right it is<\/em>.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing. In our clinically-influenced vernacular, \u201canxiety\u201d is a label applied by laypeople onto subjectively interpreted internal states \u2013 interoceptive states. But it\u2019s an over-generalized term that we use so often it\u2019s lost most of its explicit connection to the sensations that make it up. We talk, more or less openly, about our anxiety, and where we think it might come from. But we don’t talk about how it actually feels.<\/p>\n “Anxiety” as a term has become abstract, and when we are asked to describe its sensuality, our default is to reach for a substitute abstraction.<\/p>\n Abstraction can disguise not only the root feelings involved, but the fact that no two instances\u00a0of anxiety are going to feel the same. In neuropsychiatry, the anxieties of different patients may involve common factors of disregulated transmitters that more or less regulate in response\u00a0to certain standard medications. But that doesn\u2019t mean that anxiety is a standard experience. The person diagnosed with anxiety is holding a collection of feeling states that provoke conscious thoughts which feed back into and often amplify feeling states. Only they can know what those feeling states are. But a culture nursed by biomedicine offers few tools to really explore and name them.<\/p>\n We might say that Ayurvedic self-inquiry begins with the capacity to notice and then, just as importantly, describe those feeling states.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because if you\u2019re clear on what you\u2019re feeling, you have implicitly become clear about what you need. This happens through the suggestive nature of language itself.<\/p>\n The French scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 \u2013 1913) stormed\u00a0the field of modern European linguistics with several complex insights. While his models are now\u00a0challenged by more recent developments, his core legacy remains pervasive: language is dialectic. This means that neither \u201canxiety\u201d nor \u201ctight\u201d have any essential meaning on their own, but rather gain meaning in contrast with other words, like \u201cdepression\u201d, or \u201cloose\u201d. This suggests that on a cognitive level, each word you imagine or speak emerges from the mists of contrast. Each word you imagine or speak leaves its shadow behind.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the shadow of \u201crigid\u201d, we might find \u201cfluid\u201d. In the shadow of \u201cdry\u201d, we might find \u201coiled\u201d. If we find \u201cfluid\u201d and \u201coiled\u201d, we\u2019ve gathered the key ingredients of broth and stew.<\/p>\n De Saussure\u2019s ideas were undoubtedly inspired by his life-long study and teaching of Sanskrit. He may well\u00a0have been familiar with the\u00a0Charaka Samhita, <\/em>Ayurveda’s root text. In it, the\u00a0properties of food, herbs, weather and everything else in the sensual universe is\u00a0described with blend of\u00a0qualia presented in binary form:\u00a0hot\/cold, wet\/dry, heavy\/light, gross\/subtle,\u00a0dense\/flowing, static\/mobile, sharp\/dull, soft\/hard, smooth\/rough,\u00a0cloudy\/clear.<\/p>\n Yoghurt is cold, wet, heavy, gross, dense, static, dull, soft, smooth and cloudy. So is melancholy.<\/p>\n In both natural sciences and\u00a0wisdom literature, Sanskritic meaning is not definitional but relational, where every word carries the resonance of its root-family, and in which etymologies resonate through turn of phrase. Sanskrit is an overtly self-referential language, which may explain why it\u2019s been so efficient for self-inquiry.<\/p>\n De Saussure\u2019s epiphany is that all<\/em> language is self-referential. Using one word implies another. This Sanskritic approach, which has informed language theory through to the work of Jacques Derrida and beyond, allows us in part to see language not as a representation<\/em> of sensual experience, but a process that parallels<\/em> sensual experience.<\/p>\n I would argue that engaging and refining that language process \u2013 becoming a poet of yourself \u2013 does two things.<\/p>\n Like a word, each feeling you have gains meaning through the memory or the imagination of its contrasting feeling. That memory or imagination stimulates a desire. The body can naturally move towards its medicine, if the poet is in charge.<\/p>\n If poetry engages the sensuality of life through the sensuality of language, our \u201canxiety\u201d need no longer be abstract. It can be broken down to the facts on the ground, the facts we began with and wanted to change, or at least endure a little better: the facts of feelings. Tight. Pulsing. Racing. Paralyzed. Cold. Hot. Shivering. Nauseous. Clammy. Dry. Rigid. Fidgety. <\/em><\/p>\n But there\u2019s a catch.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n My research into yoga injuries<\/a>, for example, shows that practitioners will often become painfully aware of severe joint injuries long after they have happened, given the poor innervation of cartilage. In other cases, people confuse \u201cpain\u201d for \u201cprogress\u201d. They\u2019re not stupid or masochists: not even physiotherapists and pain researchers are entirely clear on the nature, mechanisms and necessity of pain. Psychologists, however, are very attuned to the fact that pain means different things to different people, and can be used, justified, or rationalized for specific purposes.<\/p>\n From personal experience, I know that the sensation of muscular cramping in my left calf was something that intuitively wanted a rub. Tight, thick sensations were asking for loosening and thinning. But the oil massage I applied to the area might\u00a0have killed me, because I was suffering from a deep vein thrombosis<\/a>.<\/p>\n So becoming a poet of yourself can produce some sloppy\u00a0verse. You can feel something and then think you feel something all while the thing that is producing the feeling is actually doing something completely different.<\/p>\n Also, poetry won\u2019t save the day on its own. If you\u2019ve felt and named the cold, dry, and mobile sensations of the thing you used to call \u201canxiety\u201d and felt the intuitive drive towards all things warm, moist, and grounded, you\u2019re practicing good Ayurveda and your approach will definitely help. But warm oil massage, root vegetable stew, earth-toned clothes and boiled milk tonics are unlikely to be enough to resolve a chronic anxiety disorder.<\/p>\n In Ayurveda, a chronic disorder is one that has penetrated most if not all of the\u00a0seven layers of tissue (dhatu<\/em>), and five layers (kosha<\/em>) of experience. Oil and milk and stew will seep into many of those layers, but leave others untouched. Multiple approaches may\u00a0be necessary, including talk therapy and in many cases\u00a0medication.<\/p>\n But unless we\u2019re talking about responses to sudden trauma, chronic conditions don\u2019t usually arise out of thin air. Becoming the poet of yourself might be\u00a0about taking care\u00a0of the little stuff that leads to the big stuff. Had\u00a0I been a better poet, I might have better described to myself the sensations of dehydration and blood-pressure fluctuations that, combined with a lot of air travel, led ominously\u00a0to that DVT. In the Ayurvedic model, subtle feeling states, when\u00a0unchecked, can gather regularity and momentum to actually reorient and predispose the tissues to feeling more of them, and expressing pathology.<\/p>\n I’d suggest that the poet\u2019s gaze upon these sensations can allow\u00a0them to be named and responded to, up to a point. But what would that point be? Perhaps where sensation transforms into\u00a0pain so intense it cannot be described.\u00a0As Elaine Scarry puts it in The Body in Pain<\/a><\/em>:\u00a0“To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language.” (Kindle loc. 141)<\/p>\nAyurveda\u00a0asks you to become the poet of yourself.<\/em><\/h3>\n
Ayurvedic self-inquiry begins with uttering words that describe your subjective experience. But its therapy begins with excavating the shadows of those words.<\/em><\/h3>\n
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Poetry, like internal sensation, is irreducibly subjective. And, like all humans, or perhaps even more than most, a\u00a0poet\u2019s capacity for self-deception is the stuff of legend. In certain circumstances, intuitively responding to the poetry of bodily feelings can lead us dangerously astray.<\/h3>\n