At the center of my work is what I call the epistemic gap.

The epistemic gap is the difference between direct, lived experience and the language-based concepts we use to describe it. No matter how accurate or sophisticated our explanations become, they cannot fully transmit experience itself—and everything we know comes to us through experience.

Everyone knows the sound of a bell, but no one can say it. Everyone knows the smell of a rose, but no one can say it. All of what we know for sure, experientially, can’t be said.

A relted problem exists: language can’t specify anything particular. Every particular chair you sit in can only be identified by its category, “chair.” Yet, a category isn’t an individual item.

Psychology knows this, implicitly. When we forget this distinction, we begin treating representations (words, thoughts) as substitutes for reality.

The result is subtle but powerful: we live increasingly inside stories, labels, and abstractions, while feeling strangely disconnected from life as it is actually lived. The epistemic gap doesn’t mean concepts are wrong—it means they have limits. Much suffering arises when those limits go unnoticed.

Mindfulness begins where language ends: with direct contact with experience itself. If you are looking, this is where you find yourself – as living experience – not as any concept you can make up.