Yugen

Yugen is a subjective emotional experience in which a person glimpses something of their place in the immensity of a larger reality that is vast beyond words, whether that reality is in the wider cosmos, the depth of time, or something within themselves.

Yugen is beyond effort. It is beyond problems to be solved. It beyond human ideals and human values of perfection. Yugen arises from a scale of reality within which these human concerns are miniscule. The irony of this is that yugen is a human experience.

This episode features stories from Alyssa Kearney, Audrey Holocher, and Josie Gibson.

Full Transcript

Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity. This is a podcast about emotion told from the perspective of people who feel emotion. It’s possible to study emotion scientifically, but only up to a point. It’s possible to do experiments about outward expressions of emotions, or about physiological phenomena associated with emotional arousal. Such studies are only indirect, however. They research factors associated with emotion, but they don’t measure emotion itself.

Science is incapable of engaging in a standardized, quantitative, objective investigation of the feeling of emotion itself. I don’t say this in order to insult science, but rather to recognize its limits. Humans aren’t just a collection of behaviors and physiological flutterings. From the platform of our physical bodies arises our consciousness. How that happens and what it means are mysterious, and may always be so. Nonetheless, it happens. We feel things, subjectively, and the best way we have to study that part of emotion is to ask people to describe it as best they can. 

Audrey Holocher

Audrey Holocher knows more than a bit about how language crosses the boundary between solitary subjective experience and shared cultural understanding. Here’s what she had to say to me about it.

I think I'm going to have to go back to that internal feeling, that you're not sure if anybody else feels the same way. If you categorize these into it, if you had to put these into standard emotions, anger, fear, sadness, whatever those top line categories are, people will experience them differently. So, I think that emotion is that just for me, that internal feeling. I know this is the definition from hypnotherapy training I've had, they try to define it as emotion is just thought traveling through the body. It’s a feeling.

I've been angry before. You know, I think I can understand that feeling, but at the end of the day, isn't it really just an intimate personal experience, you know that you may share some dimensions with other people, I think, but how you feel something and how I feel something, I don't know. I can never say for you what anger feels like that for you.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast straight through, you met Audrey in the very first episode, the one about friluftsliv. Audrey has spent decades researching people’s emotional experiences. She’s a Certified Narrative Consultant and a Neuro Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner. As a certified Medical Support Clinical Hypnotherapist, she specializes in stress reduction, relaxation, and natural pain management.

With all that training, Audrey still recognizes the personal quality of emotion, the way that it comes from the inside as an experience that no one else can define for us.

Sometimes, it’s difficult for us to understand even our own emotions. There are some feelings that are so powerful, or so subtle, they’re on the edge of our ability to comprehend.

Such is the case with the emotion of yugen. Yugen is an emotional concept that originated in China, and moved into Japanese culture through art criticism and Zen philosophy.

Here’s what Audrey has to say about yugen.

I was actually a little bit concerned about how I was going to be able to be articulate with you today, because a lot of it is the feeling just there's a connection to nature and it's a feeling, and I don't know how to describe it, but it is that profound awareness of the cosmos. I will hear words and will hear messages at times, I'm not trying. I don't always have to be out in nature to hear it, but I just feel like having that connection, even when I'm inside, it's just like an opening of a channel and helps to connect me to that that feeling of something larger. I don't I don't have a traditional, raised Catholic, but don't feel connected with organized religion at all. I feel it in nature. That's where I feel it.

So that awareness of the cosmos, especially as I'm getting older, and getting into, you know, the latter half of life, I definitely feel the physical changes and emotional changes of getting older, a lot of things have kind of come together, a calmness. I have no desire to go back to your younger years. I like the calmness and just awareness and perception of myself and the world, my place in the world, and that feeling of connected to something larger, that less individualistic feeling, more unified feeling despite everything that's going on in the world. But that's where that feels yugen, that feeling of being aware of the cosmos, that's different than just my own sense of, oh, I'm feeling, you know, a little overworked or stressed out about something. So, I'm going to go in the woods and take care of that for myself. It's not like that. It just it feels like it's time to connect. Not it's not a me feeling. It's a connect feeling. I think that's where yugen kind of gets to that a little bit better.

Audrey’s difficulty in articulating the emotion of yugen in words shows just how close she is to the feeling. The feeling of something that is too profound to be condensed into language is a part of how yugen has been traditionally described.

You may remember how Audrey previously described the emotion of friluftsliv, the feeling of rightness that comes from being in a natural setting. There’s some overlap between friluftsliv and yugen, in part because nature and the cosmos are similar concepts. Nature provides some of the contexts in which yugen can be realized, because nature is immense and inhuman in its scale. However, as Audrey points out here, yugen is something more than just the feeling of going out into the woods to achieve relief from the stress of civilized life.

Yugen is a larger concept even than that of being out in nature, because it extends to the entire cosmos, not just one’s place amidst life on this planet. Yugen is sometimes described as the feeling of awareness of a transcendent layer of reality that is always there, but rarely noticed, because its presence is dim. Yugen is massive in its scale, but something that rests beyond our perception most of the time, precisely because of that immense scale.

Yugen is not a theistic concept. Yugen is not a being, but it is an awareness of the place of one’s own being in the scale of the cosmos, a sudden remembering of one’s tiny role within it all. For Audrey, there’s a peace that comes with this realization.

Well, that sense of just feeling very congruent with those concentric circles, like the self, the community, the wider self, the world and the cosmos, just kind of feeling like all of that lines up is just like a calm peacefulness. A lot of what it isn't is sometimes helpful for me. It is not that that's striving or there's something to be solved. That kind of feeling is not there. That feeling that things are calm and at peace, not perfect. Things aren't perfect or even ideal, perhaps, but just being okay with the un-okayness of things.

Audrey’s feeling of yugen is peaceful not in the sense of resolving human conflict, but in the sense of existing outside of human conflict. She feels a calm that accompanies yugen because of what yugen is not. Yugen is beyond effort. It is beyond problems to be solved. It beyond human ideals and human values of perfection. Yugen arises from a scale of reality within which these human concerns are miniscule.

The irony of this is that yugen is a human experience. That reflects a strange quality of emotion. Emotion is an internal, personal experience, a small thing felt at an individual level in the moment. Nonetheless, emotion relates to aspects of external reality that are much bigger than the individual perspective.

Alyssa Kearney

Alyssa Kearney is a professional who specializes in connecting individual emotional experiences to the operations of big business. She works to guide corporate clients through strategic considerations that arise out of empathy.

I am a director of client services at Brandtrust, and the shorthand for how I describe what we do is how do we bring some humanity to business? How do we think about not just describing the human experience, but helping businesses empathize with who they're really trying to serve? My goal is also to help businesses understand that they are actually human themselves, and so not only just in service of those on the outside of their business, but on the inside of their business. How do we create a better, more human experience for everyone involved and break down that kind of old school barrier of it's just business because it's not that. It's all actually human.

If it seems strange to you that businesses might be led to empathize with people, you’re catching on to what makes Alyssa’s work at Brandtrust so important. The incongruity of business and emotion is a manifestation of significant social friction. Conventional models of business culture don’t work with emotion effectively. As a consequence of that, businesses typically miss out on a lot of opportunities to satisfy human needs, and people tend to regard businesses as organizations that can’t be trusted.

I think there was just an old notion that business was somehow different than relationships and it should be devoid of feeling, it should be devoid of anything beyond the transactional and largely within our capitalist society too, looking at our employees in terms of their productivity and their ability to generate a product or kind of generate an outcome in order to service those transactional goals. The sort of dehumanizing nature of all of that, to not really look at people as their whole selves or to even believe that there is a like work self and not work self, and that we can somehow compartmentalize the whole human experience of it all as it relates to our jobs, as it relates to how we make buying decisions or the things that we engage in. And so, bringing that kind of whole picture together to understand how of both identities are actually interwoven with one another as opposed to separate functions of an individual.  

How it was positioned ten years ago versus now feels really different in that, ten years ago, we were kind of this radical idea or notion, or we spent a lot of time trying to convince people that was actually going on and that there was value in understanding the emotions of an experience and we still do run up against it. Sometimes you have to spend a lot of time saying this social scientist or this behavioral economist or, you know, trying to reference academia quite a bit to sort of prove our value, but now it feels much less like a radical notion and more of a sure, I believe that this exists. Help me understand what the story is, but then also help me understand what to do with it. And I think that actually has been a really exciting challenge, which, you know, the shadow side of can be like, am I just helping people sell more junk food? Hopefully not. Hopefully we get to do more meaningful things than that and connect to meaningful pieces of people's identity. But on the positive side, on the appreciative side of we aren't spending all of our time convincing people that this matters, but we are getting to have a more engaging role in saying this is how we can all do better together.

Alyssa is used to doing strategic thinking with huge corporate clients, connecting individual human emotion to a larger, systematic perspective. Yet, when it comes to her own life, she has experienced moments of unexpected encounters with vast spaces, both in human civilization and in nature.

I was doing some reflection on what maybe has been standing out to me, which is probably why we started where we did in terms of communication, even just with my family, but one of the things that I don't know the emotion for, but I'm curious if you do or if there is one, but I realize that I've been really struck by the idea of vastness and getting to go back to Chicago for the first time in almost two years and being struck by the vastness of the city, the size of the buildings, the size of the city, but then also how that relates to like when I go to the desert and that is impactful to me or this past weekend, as I told you, I was on a trip with my sister in Santa Cruz, Monterey area and we had a house on the water that was kind of on a cliff and the horizon being more vast than even my view, my vantage point of it here in San Diego, and then seeing whales and marveling at their size. So, I don't know what that emotion is, but for some reason, the largeness or the scale of things have really been standing out to me.

I think what perhaps connects the two of them is they are places are representative of places that have been home to me, I suppose. Growing up in Chicago, that's easy to name that as home, but then also spending most of my adolescence and young adult years vacationing to San Diego and the feeling that I would get once I was toes in the sand in front of the ocean of feeling like home. So perhaps that's how they connect to one another, and I wonder if the size of them, the sort of vastness I was describing is particularly standing out to me at this point in a kind of how we were talking about in a world that's so connected but disconnected and feeling small and like being told to stay in one place and kind of the pile of the world's problems feeling personal and inescapable, to then be reminded of the sort of smallness of my place in it, but also the bigger picture that does exist, and so perhaps what that vastness is awakening in me is a bit of a level set or a mindset shift or the word I'm looking for is escaping me, but like almost a reality check of these things feel so big and difficult, but there is a whole big world out there that has more to it than maybe some of the things that feel like they weigh you down in the day to day versus looking at the bigger picture of life.

As Alyssa considers her emotional reaction to settings of vastness, she shifts her gaze from the city of Chicago to the deserts of the American Southwest, to the Pacific Ocean as seen from somewhere other than her current home in San Diego. Listening to her, I was reminded of the lyrics of the 1972 song ‘A Horse With No Name’:

The ocean is a desert with its life underground
and a perfect disguise above.
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground…

What does that mean? The song, as I interpret it, is a remarkable parallel with Alyssa’s own experiences of yugen. It’s about the human reaction to the immensity through which they move. The singer, like Alyssa, feels an upwelling of connection, and at the same time, a kind of insignificance, in the vastness of oceans, of deserts, and of cities. Somehow, these remarkably different spaces trigger a common experience of yugen.

Alyssa described to me this feeling in terms of a marveling at the physical dimensions of Chicago when she returned to the city after two years away during the pandemic.

The large scale of the city, however, is nothing compared to the vastness of the ocean.

It was my sister and I, and we were on the deck of the Airbnb rental, and looking out at the water, we had been kind of observing different spouts. You could see that there were whales swimming around, and so we were kind of like zeroing in on them and watching them through the binoculars and then the sun was starting to set, so we were like, okay, we've got to watch the whales, and the sunset over the water. It was like a kind of a dreamy set up and we actually moved from the lower deck to the upper deck. There was a cypress tree that ultimately looked like holding that house on from falling off the cliff, but we wanted to be able to see above it, and so we went to the upper deck to watch the sunset and so I guess there was kind of like a busyness to it, but the sunset is such a, for me now, is like a trigger to stop and observe and kind of soak in. So, we were up, I've been on the second deck at that point then, the whales started, one by one, breaching out into the sunset after they had eaten in the bay so that felt both like an incredibly unique and special moment, but watching these giant animals jump into this vast horizon with the sun and space setting was a trigger for all of that vastness as well.

As you were asking the question, the word that popped into my head was like a release, like a deep exhale, like a maybe connecting back to a letting go of things that were bottled up or stressing or living within me that at that point, it just feels like a relief, an exhale.

The release that Alyssa feels watching the whales spout amid the vastness of the ocean provokes a dreamy experience, a trigger to stop the busyness in the moment and just observe the immensity before her.

This sense of being captured in such moments doesn’t depend upon natural settings or literally vast spaces, however. Alyssa describes feeling something similar as she practices yoga.

Perhaps a smaller version of a it that often kind of relies on a visualization of the bigger pieces of it, too is in my yoga practice, when we're talking about kind of the individual experience and the community at large, but then also kind of our place in the world. Perhaps that's a more day to day inner experience of something that I feel in those bigger experiences.

Yes, there's the physical aspect of the yoga practice, but then often, not often, in almost every one of their classes, there's a lot of, it's not just the physical, but it's the breathwork and then it's the meditation, and then there's kind of like a through line of, you know, you feel these things in your physical body in this practice, and how do we connect that to life more generally, so like an example of being in perhaps an uncomfortable physical position, but then saying, how do we use this practice on our mats to then in uncomfortable situations in day to day life decide how we're going to respond to it or how we're going to, can we can we sit in the discomfort? Can we even appreciate the discomfort as opposed to just like in your head thinking, I want to get out of this, I want to get out of this. So, I guess it's that through line between in the moment how you're feeling to the broader conception of how you act and live your life.  

Maybe that connection is the release of it, in those bigger experiences, there's a release of tension or discomfort or unhappiness, and getting to just like living in the moment of happiness of the loveliness and perhaps the yoga does that on a smaller scale as well, that those are moments of getting to maybe disconnect from more troubling things and to identify a more peaceful place.

Alyssa’s insight gained through yoga is that the same kind of feeling she gains through the bigger experiences of yugen are also available to her in smaller practices of focus, even when the practice is physically uncomfortable. Yugen can be found in any moment, although experiences of vastness are more reliable triggers.

Josie Gibson

I also heard about the idea of yugen as a feeling that can be triggered through the purposeful cultivation of mindful practices as I was speaking with Josie Gibson, the founder of the Catalyst Network. Josie describes the feeling of yugen as something that can be catalyzed, often through physical journeys into unknown territory.

I dropped into the world as a global citizen and worked my way out of a little country town in South Australia. My first port of call was, at seventeen, northern Japan, and from there I just kept traveling, seeing the world, worked in journalism for nearly twenty years, including in Texas, got bored with that, had a range of jobs. I suppose I've worked in a lot of industries in all sectors, built communities, built networks, and for the last eleven years I've been trying to work out what that all means and make a living out of it.

I thought, I'll bring people together for a conversation. I remember it was March 2013, and I sent a note to people saying, let's have a conversation about leading in complexity. I just pulled the title out of the air and I had twenty people coming to Sydney from all over the place, from all over the country for a two-hour conversation. I thought, well, this is really interesting. I had vowed I would never run another membership group or community ever, but I was presented with these really interesting, truly unique individuals, and what struck me was, if they can do this alone, like they all had demonstrable track records wherever they worked. Imagine if you brought people like that together to look at some of the stuff that we grapple with, and that was where we ended up. It's an ongoing experiment. I collect people and they find to me and it's a sort of ramshackle experiment that over the years people have offered to help me fix. But I think it's working just fine because it's what the world needs right now.

A catalyst is a substance capable of triggering a self-sustaining reaction at an expansive scale. Josie experiences the connections she builds with other people as a means through which to pierce through the barriers of ordinary perception.

One of the characteristics of people who are drawn to the Catalyst Network is, it's not just big thinking, because that implies that it's a rational exercise. It actually is a sense of calling in the biggest sense of that word, a sense of expansiveness, and that definition of yugen, the feeling, indescribable in words, of a profound awareness of the cosmos, really to me describes the essence of what it means to be a catalyst and be an instrument in something bigger than us. That is being tapped into the multiple dimensions, not just rational business practices, but it's a bit like the Russian dolls. It's one encapsulates the other, then another encapsulates the other, and being able to kind of pierce through that, to sense the cosmos and know that we are part of something bigger and we can make a difference, but we are insignificant and small, but actually we are big. So, it's that paradox. We're big and powerful because we are that.

It's the paradox of I am fully me, you're fully you, we are individual, but we part of a collective, and I think what we've experienced in the pandemic is how disconnected we've become from that reality. It's hard to grasp.

Josie finds another social doorway into yugen through the society of bees, achieving a transcendent moment through her focused attention on a smaller scale. Although yugen is emotionally vast, it can also be achieved in small spaces. The power in yugen is a matter of contrast, finding majesty in the juxtaposition of the small and the large.

We are fortunate in Melbourne, that we live close to a sizable river. There are creeks. There are parks. There is sort of wild bush, a train stop away that we can go and get lost in, but I do it in my garden. I grow plants. So, it's not a question of scale. I find, I mean, it was my birthday this week and my husband got me a bee hotel because I've been concerned about frogs and bees for many years. I sat out there yesterday in the sunshine waiting for a bee to find the new bee hotel. I was so excited, and it's the same sort of mystery and majesty, but on a tiny scale. I was lost for, I didn't have a very productive day, I must say.

Josie has sought yugen through travel, looking for a glimpse of the feeling in foreign landscapes that make her feel suspended in air.

I've always been called to nature, from when I was a baby digging in the earth. I'm quite comfortable there, and look, I've lived in urban environments for much of my adult life, but I always have to go back out into nature. I was raised in a land of deserts and a very dry, the driest state in the driest continent in the world, where big skies, lots of sand, sandstone, red dirt, you know, you just sort of come face to face with prehistory. So, there's something quite humbling about that. You know, wherever I've gone and I've traveled across Japan and places like that, the land speaks to you at times. Sometimes it doesn't, but there have been times when I was traveling through Japan and you just get that glimpse, and it might have been a place where they decided to locate a particular shrine for the mountain spirit or something. You meld into the landscape and try and understand what it is that they heard and why there? What is it about that kind of confluence of physical, emotional, spiritual factors? There are places like that everywhere. Sometimes they're obvious. Quite often they're hidden. That's always fascinated me to go to those places.

I went backpacking, as all Australians do, as a rite of passage when I was in my early 20s, and I spent a month in Greece, and I went to the monastery town of Meteora, which is these incredible sandstone rock pinnacles there, about six hundred meters tall, and there are these monasteries clinging to the top and you have to kind of go up. You go right across the plains of outside, I think it's near Thessaloniki or that part of Greece, and you seem to go and go, and then you just see these pinnacles and you go up on this winding road and you get to the top. The monks used to kind of drop stuff down by ropes, and it was just like a time capsule. What stayed with me from that that visit was the sense of expansiveness, the sense of being a speck in the whole universe. It was like you could see forever. You get up to the top of these pinnacles, you walk out the front of one of the buildings that date back many hundreds of years, but you can just see and feel, it was more the feeling of expansiveness and connection into something bigger. I was a brash twenty something, so I didn't really know what that was. I just knew that it was like it was a stillness that was almost palpable, but there was also something else that you could almost touch. Meteora, by the way, I looked it up. It's Greek for suspended in the air, and that was literally how it felt.

Yugen is often described as an emotional reaction to vast spaces, but Josie also experiences the feeling in response to sudden realizations of the vastness of time.

I was living in Texas working on a newspaper. I went across country with a friend to see the Grand Canyon on the way to LA, and we were really pushing it because we had a limited time, and as you probably know, you just drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and it's flat. I come from Australia, that's okay, but night was coming, and I was getting a bit concerned that what were we going to do? We arrived at the park and got out of the car and the sun was sort of starting to sink, and it was like a miraculous vision, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, just the immensity of it. But again, and maybe it's because I come from Australia, which is a very old continent geologically, I could just feel the age. It was like a coming home, even though I'd never been there. The colors were spectacular, and of course, the next day I walked down and I just didn't want to leave. It was just magical.

The magical sense of depth in time that Josie could see in the layer upon layer of geology at the edge of the Grand Canyon was also present for her in the weathered granite on a trail in Tasmania where the immensity of time seems to stretch not only into the past, but into the future as well, making the scale of her life seem practically nonexistent in comparison.

This year in Tasmania, the southern state that's disconnected from Australia in a lot of ways, not just geologically, we went to Wineglass Bay, which is a spectacular national park, and you take this winding trek up through the granite boulders and the native scrub and you just walk and walk and it's quite beautiful. You get to the top and you just have this incredible vista of this magnificent bay. I was just standing there. You just, again, you felt like the landscape was talking to you, that it was just immense, we were nothing that had always existed and always would exist, we would come and go. This probably sounds very strange, but it was almost a mystical experience. Then as I was walking back down the trail, there were just like these big chunks of granite that was very weathered, and I put my hand against one and it felt like it was moving, like it was breathing. I thought, well, I'll take that. I think it's a magical landscape. And I went back down, and I told my husband and he said, oh yeah, right, that was his reaction, but there was a level of magic and majesty and awe rolled into one around this, and I think they're sort of components of yugen, I suppose if I were to break it down.

There’s a paradox within the emotion of yugen. The feeling simultaneously provokes a shutdown of ordinary consciousness and enables an awakening of something else. It’s a powerful powerlessness, a vast sense of smallness, a moment of timelessness.

Does that make sense to you? If you’ve felt yugen, it will. If you haven’t felt yugen, it might seem like nonsense.

Whether yugen makes sense or not is kind of beside the point. Yugen is a subjective emotional experience in which a person glimpses something of their place in the immensity of a larger reality that is vast beyond words, whether that reality is in the wider cosmos, the depth of time, or something within themselves.

The power of yugen is never captured in our verbal descriptions of it because it is not a logical experience. It can’t be confined to any syntax.

No more talk about yugen. Yugen is.

Yugen is.

Next week, from the expansive of yugen, we will hear about a much more concrete and focused sort of emotion: The feeling of being unmasked.

Until then, thanks for listening in.