Narrating my experience to myself is so helpful.
Describing what I’m feeling inside, or what I’m noticing in the world around me.
Putting words to my experience.
Finding language for my thoughts and emotions.
Something counterintuitive that I’ve learned: taking the time to verbalize what we understand conceptually opens us to new experiences that we can learn from nonconceptually.
It’s like writing short term memory to a file, so we clear our RAM.
Or it’s like digesting what we’ve already eaten, so we can learn even more.
I understand the merits of nonconceptual experience. I understand why those who have access to it prize it so much, even to the point of valuing it over conceptual reality.
And yet, paradoxically, conceptual thinking can serve as a bridge to direct experience, an escape hatch from the recursive tunnels of the mind.