“Chith Ja Theek Nahi”: My Grandmother’s Wisdom and the Science of Felt Sense

My grandmother used to sit on the charpai, legs folded, murmuring softly. No medications. If anyone came close she’d say, “chith ja theek nahi.” Literally, “my inner self is not okay.” A discomfort she could feel but not place. Not pain, not strain—something in-between.

She passed away ten years ago, but those words stayed. I never asked her what she meant. Perhaps I didn’t know how. Perhaps I had felt something like it myself but never named it.

Weeks ago, while searching for books on healing and wellness, I came across Focusing by Eugene Gendlin. Step two of his six-step method is “felt sense.” The description stopped me. It sounded like my grandmother’s “chith ja theek nahi.”

Gendlin writes:

“A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time … as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.”

Reading that was like opening a door I didn’t know existed. My grandmother had spoken in the language of lived experience; Gendlin in the language of research. Both pointed to the same human capacity—to notice an inner state before it becomes words, diagnosis, or action.

It made me think about how such knowing moves across generations without books, without study. A sentence from an old woman on a charpai. A paragraph in a psychology book. The same truth, carried differently, but felt the same.