It's something like what burrows is saying. I don't know if I'm implementing it as intended, but I first heard of "labeling" when reading The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It seemed silly/trivial at first, but I later started just trying to categorize my thoughts. I found that there were actually surprisingly few buckets that my idle thoughts fell into.

I'd say that when I'm meditating, 90% of my out-of-the-blue thoughts fall into categories like:

- A: seeking out little acquisitions (life/work hacks, low hanging fruit, new tech skills I could tackle today to improve my life) - B: chores I need to do and social debts - C: money, and whether I have enough - D: what will the future be like? - E: food, sex, safety - F: "this is nice, I'm not thinking of much"

I don't feel like these are good or bad thoughts, since they all have their time and place. But I do expect/hope that as the session progresses, more and more time is spent in state F.

I think one benefit of these labels is that instead of trying to re-articulate what you're thinking every time, you just drop it into buckets A-F (or whatever your personal buckets are). Making that task lightweight keeps me from overanalyzing the thought, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying my thought landscape.

OP might be referring to value neutral labels like “thinking”, “feeling”, “vibration”, “buzzing”, etc.