The Language of Your Inner World
Crimson. Pink. Navy. Sky.
Crimson. Pink. Navy. Sky. For many English speakers, the first two of these are different colours. The other two feel like variations of one colour.
We say navy blue and sky blue. Light blue, dark blue. Both live under the wide umbrella of “blue.” Even though the difference between deep crimson and pale pink might be as substantial as the difference between navy and sky, if English is your first language, pink stands distinctly apart from red.
Try saying “light red.”
It feels unnatural, doesn’t it? Because in English, we say pink. (Did your brain glitch?)
In Russian, there are distinct commonly used terms for siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). Research shows that having a distinct (single) word name changes how quickly and accurately people perceive colour boundaries.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.” (The limits of my language mean the limits of my world).
Our vocabulary doesn’t just describe our world. It conditions the way we perceive.
The Internal Monochrome
We have a rich vocabulary for colour: cerulean, scarlet, saffron, chartreuse. For our inner reality, the felt sense, we often make do with crude categories.
Philosophers call this qualia: the subjective, first-person texture of experience. The sting of cold air in your nostrils. The bitter edge of dark chocolate. The weight of a forgotten memory rising. It’s the what it is like of being you.
We have no common language for the precise “beingness” of our inner world, the felt sense of being alive in this moment, embodied.
Fine or not fine. Stressed or calm. Happy or sad. Rough sketches for complex terrain.
Without nuanced vocabulary for our inner life, we move through half-blind. We feel, but we can’t locate or name what we feel. And if we can’t name it, it’s hard to navigate, let alone transform it.
We’re living in high definition but describing it in black and white.
Learning a New Language
For me, looking inward was like learning a new language. I was literate in the world outside but illiterate within. When I began to inquire into my inner terrain, I... ther may have been pearl clutching. “Ma’am…This is how you living?”
My internal landscape was…a lot. Big and noisy some parts, precipitous and swampy in others. I only had what felt like primary colours and vocabulary too blunt to express the nuanced qualia of my experience.
It felt as frustrating as trying to talk to someone with whom I didn’t share a common language.
It took time. Patience. More kindness than I was used to giving myself. Techniques and strategies of various sorts. Taking time to be with what was. Developing my interoception - my ability to sense what’s happening inside through meditation and breathwork. Using the Wheel of Emotions, learning Gendling’s Focusing Technique.
In breathwork, I began to attend. Not to fix or change anything, to turn toward and but make note of. Where is it? What’s its texture? What is that?
Sometimes it was a humming wire in my chest. Sometimes a heavy stone in my gut.
I was a cartographer, noting features and making maps of sensation. I discovered I could change the terrain itself. A hum asked for long, smooth exhales. A stone needed diaphragmatic lift and support.
The Art of Describing Your Inner Experience
True alivefullness began when I started describing the qualia of my inner life, the specific, sensory truths in there.
The quiet that arrives after a good cry?
The pulse of peaceful anticipation before a big day?
The open ache that follows awe?
This was the heart of my interoceptive development, my ability to sense what’s happening inside. The more I described these subtle qualia, the more distinctly I could recognise them. The more I could feel and be with them, the more alive and me I felt.
To live with alivefullness is to become fluent in the qualia of your own being, to tell yourself your truth in the mother tongue of your inner world.
Something You Can Do Right Now
Here’s a practice to expand your internal vocabulary:
Name Three Layers
Next time you notice a feeling, pause and name three layers:
The basic emotion (anxious, excited, tired)
The physical sensation (tight chest, buzzing hands, heavy shoulders)
The specific quality (like a held breath, like static electricity, like waterlogged fabric)
That third layer, the metaphor, the texture, is where you stop saying “I’m stressed” and start saying “I feel like I’m holding my breath even though I’m breathing.”
That specificity changes everything. Because now you know what to do. You don’t need to fix stress. You need to exhale fully and let your breath move.
Try it. Notice what shifts when you move from cartoon categories to high-definition description.
Attending to Your Inner World
Alivefullness, the art and science of embodied thriving, is, in part, a practice of attention. The word attend comes from the French attendre, which means to wait, to give one’s attention.
Your inner world is as richly textured as your outer one. You need the vocabulary to describe it.
Start an exhale. Become a cartographer of your own experience. Map the feelings that have lived, until now, in the blur.
When we attend and name the previously unnamed shades of us, we aren’t just describing our lives. We’re enriching them.
Sometimes friendship is saying “I’ll wait with you.” Befriending yourself might be the act of turning toward your inner world and patiently attending to the subtle language of sensation. Not rushing it. Not fixing it. Attending.
We move from simply being alive to living with alivefullness.
If this resonates...
This kind of attention, learning to see and name your inner world in high definition, is at the heart of the Alivefulness framework. It’s a practice, a gradual expansion of your internal vocabulary, not something you master overnight.
If you’re curious about developing this capacity, the Awaken Community offers weekly breathwork practices and resources for exploring your inner terrain. Space and practices for attending to yourself. No pressure.
Or simply bookmark this practice. Try it when you remember. Notice what becomes visible when you learn to name what you feel.
If you’re Ready to add breath to your life now, I work one-on-one with high performers and leaders who want to harness Strategic Breathwork™ to move from tension to Alivefullness™, from survival to sovereignty.
If this calls to you, let’s talk.
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A Rostant creates Strategic Breathwork™ and the Alivefulness™ framework. She studies and teaches what it means to breathe - which is to say, what it means to be alive.