It is my experience that English language gets in the way of meditation practice. What is already a very subtle exercise is made more difficult by the inability to accurately convey the desire or insight.
“effort”, “focus”, “awareness”, “attention”, “will”, “mind”, “concentration”
These words can be misleading, or understood differently, from what is trying to be communicated when discussing the nature of the mind.
I believe Thomas Nagel should have been taken more seriously when in “What Is It Like to be a Bat?” he urged the scientific community to begin work on constructing a vocabulary which could at least crudely describe qualitative phenomena.