I imagine most people who have meditated for a while are familiar with the practice of “labeling”. This is when we as meditators use words to describe what we are experiencing, saying them in a steady cadence either silently inside of our minds or out loud. Labeling is a tool that helps us to stay conscious and “in the game”, and not spaced out, when we meditate. An example of this would be in the “labeling body sensations” technique, my favorite meditation practice, where, every few seconds with a steady rhythm, we say the name of the part of the body that that we are currently focusing our attention on.
One option when performing meditative labeling is choosing between “inclusive labeling” and “exclusive labeling”.
If a person does exclusive labeling, the label set consists of only the objects of meditation, i.e. the phenomena that we are trying to pay attention to. So, for example, in the body awareness techniques, the sole labels a person would use would be the names of parts of the body, that and nothing else. If the meditator notices that they’ve gotten distracted by a phenomena that is not a body sensation – for example, by verbal or visual thoughts, external sounds, external sights, or tastes and smells – for any period of time, there simply is no label until they feel something in the body again.
With “inclusive labeling”, however, we use additional labels to directly describe our distractions. We might intend to pay attention to just our body sensations, but we can also, for example, say to ourselves “see in” when we notice that visual thinking has arisen, “hear in” when we notice verbal thinking, “hear out” when we are distracted by external sounds, and so on.
Practically, if a meditator chooses to do inclusive labeling, they are probably going to spend more time paying attention to their distractions, noticing their texture and how they behave, before bringing their attention back to the intended object of meditation. Also, inclusive labeling tends to cultivate more of a spacious and easeful sense of being OK with whatever arises, while exclusive labeling tends to create more grounded, simplified, and focused concentration. Both are natural and can be productive, and I recommend experimenting and seeing how they can best function for you.