Without Words — The Secrets of Non-Verbal Communication
Without words
I would be as a bird
At least still able to sing out loud
For others to hear and claim the tune
To carry with them over and under towards the moon
— Bridie Verian
TL;DR
This piece argues that words are powerful but limited — they’re a vessel, not the whole thing. True meaning is resonance: an embodied, non-verbal kind of Hearing we access through music, the body, and attentive presence (animals, especially horses, model this). The right brain/feeling side conveys depth and emotion, while the left/verbal side gives certainty but flattens nuance. Being genuinely heard (through nervous-system attunement, not just words) heals. Silence translates what words cannot; AI can spit out words but cannot replicate lived, embodied, silent resonance. Pay attention when something strikes your inner chord.
Introduction
Words have stumped me.
It seems like they pick their moments. Finding the right ones to say to comfort, encourage or warn is hit and miss. They float off the tongue at times and the next day they’ll get stuck in my throat.
Writing is hard, I struggle with it everyday.
But there’s just something about this modality that makes the doorway a little easier to get to them. Sometimes it seems the doorway swings open on its own and I’m grabbed so tightly I feel like I’m in a movie with Patrick Swayze.
It’s a whole experience just to read words.
Reading the exact combination of words can unlock an insight that comes with such elation. Flipping the page, another set of these squiggles can bring tears and immense sorrow.
What else has such power over us?
Words are our wheels. They make this whole thing run smoothly. Words are what stick relationships together. Words give us stories, poetry, arguments, jokes, nuance, dogma, denial and permission.
Yes and no.
You are free to go.
Hang on – slow!
Words have such an incredible grip on us — What are they really and what can non-verbal languages tell us about meaningful communication?
Like my horse Molly, who doesn’t have access to this specific ability to articulate that our prefrontal cortex allows for us, but that doesn’t get in the way of our conversations.
In fact, it’s usually my brain, which is apparently so much more powerful than hers, that gets in the way.
Are the creatures of this Earth holding a secret that we can’t hear because we’re too busy shouting at each other just for the sake of hearing our own voices? Is music carrying a hidden message that we haven’t tuned ourselves to receive?
In the age of AI, will we still turn to words to help us, or is there a saviour waiting to be known beneath them?
Between Words and Music
Communication is an endless back and forth throughout our lives. It sees us through from the moment we arrive as a screaming infant to the tricky negotiations of adulthood.
It’s a mistake to think of all or even most communication as just the words we exchange with each other, but it’s perhaps understandable that we would think that. Verbal language is an extremely effective tool to get what we want.
Thank god for music interjecting with its selfless intentions. I can’t twist your arm to give me the last piece of chocolate with any tune, but I might be able to convince you of something else.
“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
MUSIC IS A LANGUAGE
All the languages of the world are just sound put into shapes. Every word, phrase and paragraph is like a note, chord or sonata. Words and music are both different forms of language that can be delivered with accuracy and artistry, or fumbled with and brutalised.
Language is a skill that we only learn in one very narrow format. It’s not common knowledge how the brain processes language but this emerging information delivers interesting insights.
BETWEEN RIGHT AND LEFT HEMISPHERE
“The left hemisphere delivers certainty; the right hemisphere delivers truth. The left hemisphere yields clarity, but at the cost of a flattened, lifeless world. The right hemisphere yields depth, but with the cost of ambiguity.”
—Dr. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
It’s the emotional quality of both music and words (intonation, harmony, timbre, prosody) that the right hemisphere deals in.
On the other side, the left hemisphere works at grabbing onto the exactness of the symbolic unit of a note or word, allowing for sequencing and structure.
Music is inherently emotive and so it is associated with right hemisphere activity, whereas words can be lifeless and cold thus belonging more to the representational and abstract left hemisphere.
Scientific descriptions zoom in and tell us exactly what each element of a thing is, whereas a story (and its musical accompaniment) evokes an understanding of the meaningful relationship between things as they sit within a grander context.
TRANSFER OF MEANING
Words and music both transfer meaning to a receiver. It’s not until a note or a word is played, read or sung and then heard that they can fulfil their potential.
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.”
— Maya Angelou
How do we know when we’ve struck upon something meaningful?
MEANING IS RESONANCE
Finding particular meaning in a group of letters or notes, so much so that you then feel emotion, tells you that something that resonated within you.
Resonance is another way of saying understanding.
Words are an imperfect tool — there’s no well known distinction between little h hearing and big H Hearing, or little u understanding and big U Understanding. When you really Hear or Understand someone, it means that what they have said has resonated deeply.
Which means that you have struck something meaningful for your life.
MEANING REQUIRES INSTRUMENTS
Meaning is ubiquitous in this universe but it needs an instrument to translate it. Like a radio wave needs a transistor to be received as an audio file. There are all sorts of unique instruments to interpret meaning, and they tend to be mutually exclusive.
For instance, I could say to you ‘G minor chord’ and it doesn’t mean anything, but if I strike those keys on the instrument of the piano you will then experience that resonance through its native receiver — the body.
The prefrontal cortex is our unique instrument for receiving and translating words but we are blessed to contain more than just one instrument. There is an entire orchestra within us.
The Way Creatures Talk
As the creatures know, communication doesn’t require an exchange of words, or even sound. In the case of horses, they hold such a massive presence through their bodies, it is its own language — the language of the body and it’s certainly not limited.
When we listen to animals through the modality they are resonating with, we can go beyond the world of words and have an incredibly rich conversation.
The most satisfying thing to me is that when you’re really tuned in with an animal, you can help them to feel at ease by showing them that you have truly Heard them.
“One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.” — Bryant H. McGill
When my horse, Molly, shows signs of distress, just simply receiving what she is telling me, first and foremost, has transformed our relationship.
She shows me all of this through tight muscles, high head carriage, her ears, eyes and even her nostrils are all reflecting her internal state. It gets so much more subtle and nuanced the more you learn, however.
She doesn’t need my words. She just needs me to be right there, recognising and resonating in the same reality as her.
Message Received
Being truly heard – or received – is potent magic. It transforms a person. It certainly transforms a horse.
Having your perspective be validated through another nervous system signals safety and security. Being heard at the deepest level is being recognised as valid, valuable & safe.
“I see things this way.”
“No way! I see that too!”
“I feel safer knowing I’m not the only one seeing this.”
THE BODY NEVER LIES
There is no such thing as a body that tells an untruth. Thoughts and words can do that. Bodies cannot.
We use our verbal language to manipulate and control in such subversive ways that mislead and hurt people, but even a predator like my dog Jackson hunting a rabbit, is always honest in her intentions.
When there’s a connection in the body, you know that you’ve struck truth. When my horse chooses to stay with me in a 10 acre field without any ropes, I feel the resonance of that truth within me.
No words or tools of manipulation have convinced her to stay. Only our resonate understanding for one another.
A thing we all crave.
SEEN AND HEARD
As a kid, I felt that anything I said was ignored.
I felt invisible. It made me withhold my words. I became so selective with who I talked to and exactly what I said. Never did I ever want to experience not being heard again.
Without words, creatures have helped me to heal this wound of invisibility.
“We’re fascinated by the words—but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― Ram Dass
It probably doesn’t look like I’m doing anything when I’m out there with my horse in the field but in truth, between us silently, we are sharing this secret:
Everything is resonance.
I come back from the field with a stronger sense of this never to be spoken truth and sit down to write and that’s where my words flow from.
The Gift of the Vessel
Articulation at a prefrontal cortex level is an astonishing gift. To have words at your disposal to create anything you want is a magnificent kind of power.
When a human really harnesses this power in a positive way, they can deliver true healing and creativity to others. Like Santa Claus throwing gifts down from his sleigh.
Poetry has been a gift for me
I have been ‘seen’ through the words of poetry and it has saved me from invisibility. The words of Rainer Maria Rilke especially, helped me to feel less alone and confused over the years.
“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Artists are pulled through that doorway to translate what they feel at a deep level into words, or music, or a painting, or a garden and then those symbols carry the resonance of their hearts across time.
The flip side to all of that is we also have the power to tear down and destroy with our words.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” — Proverbs 18:21
Far too commonly it is the silent creatures of this world that suffer because we allow our rigid, selfish, manipulative tendencies to get out of control. The horse stands on a stone plinth worldwide as an example of this over-bearing, tightly gripped, controlling mindset.
Military leaders shouting commands at their soldiers from the back of a horse just so their ego could win its ridiculous game, are painted into immortality – as well the pain and misery of their steeds.
Words are a magical, mythical, powerful vessel that can create and destroy worlds and transport meaning across the ocean of time.
…But remember that they are only the vessel.
“Alexa — describe my despair!”
Now that AI is here to say it all for us, why would we even bother with finding our own words?
AI can give us a tool to grasp, it can do the research, it can say the words and we can even resonate with some of those words — essentially supporting the left hemisphere to do the job it’s already doing.
But that living element will always be missing from it. The alive, embodied resonance that I feel next to my silent horse will never emanate from an AI driven machine.
AI spits out 100 billion words a day and it’s only increasing. We are heading into a world where we will be surrounded by false idols to put it biblically. Everyone will worship the symbol and forget the thing that it represents.
But it won’t be a problem for my horse and anyone else who shares the secret.
Conclusion
I like words. I really do. Silence can be uncomfortable, just like truth can be also. I’ve said stupid things just to stuff something into those awkward silences or to hide from the truth of a situation.
I mentioned poets earlier but I also especially admire the work of comedians. Those people have an interesting relationship to words — they play right on the edge of what you shouldn’t say and what needs to be said. They’re in the business of truth telling and laughter is their source of resonance.
For me, it has been music and horses have taught me the most about truth, exactly because of the absence of words. I believe that any great work of art comes from that place. A friend that you can sit next to in comfortable silence is a valuable thing.
Meditation is the hardest task in the world masquerading as the easiest, (how hard can it be to sit down and shut up?!) but that silence holds great gifts for everyone who has the courage to do it.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” — Nikola Tesla
Final Thought
There’s a chord that exists within us that always holds the potential for resonance — pay attention when something strikes that chord.