Have you ever been in a situation where you get asked how you feel but don't really have the words to describe it? Another feeling of this is when you are having a panic attack and you just lock up and don't know what to do.
It feels like your head is full of all these alerts and notifications that are all going off at the same time without a single off button in sight. It's hard to tell what notification is for which app or which feature within each app since every single app is dinging and it has its own unique sound.
This is where I started to learn about labelling.
Labelling is a tool you can use to help yourself understand things by simply assigning it a characteristic that is familiar for you. What this does is it helps you to identify that particular thing or feeling in the future so you can methodically deal with it.
I learned this when I forced myself to give meditation a try.
I say forced because it was. My original assumption about meditation is that you sit and concentrate on one particular thing and nothing else. It didn't make sense to me before I tried it because I didn't understand how it worked. Like how can you just sit and stare at a white wall for 10min and be happy with yourself after it? This led me to put it off for a very very long time simply because I couldn't get my head around the merit behind it. So I had to force myself to watch a guided meditation course. It was uncomfortable, but worth it.
What I came to understand is that meditation is like clay. You can shape the clay however you want, then when you bake it, you will get something out of it. Whether that thing is useful or not is down to you and your circumstances. So if you want to get something out of meditation, you have to make it your own.
The first video I watched was of some guy just guiding me on how to breathe. Sounds dumb as hell but it worked! If you do it yourself, you'll realize that breathing can be more than automatic, it can be intentional. You can visualize it.
The next thing this guy got me to do was to sit and feel my emotions, and to visualize them as shapes or objects. To be honest, this gave me a really freaky feeling. It was like reaching out to a newly discovered alien race, observing their looks and patterns, and trying to understand their movements or behaviour. Some emotions were very spiky, like my hot-cold feelings for a guy I recently met, this one looked like a star shape. Another feeling was going to work, a square shape, it's clearly defined and hard to roll if you tried to push it.
Another way to put it was like untangling some wires only to find that half of them aren't even connected. Figuring out the problem is a lot more simpler than it seemed.
This, I think, was the first time I've ever truly attempted to get more connected to myself. It felt as if for all this time, I was ignoring my needs and cries for help that my body was trying to tell me (through my emotions) and instead just ignoring it and chugging ahead with what I thought was rational in my life. I'm sure you've had times when you were a kid where other people just wouldn't get it for some reason. Like they couldn't understand how you felt, and no matter what you tried, it still didn't get the message across. How did this feel? Frustrating right? And I'm sure if you were a kid, you just wanted to scream and start running around just to get some attention, right? Now think about how your mind and body would feel in the same situation. Sometimes the most soothing thing is to be able to sit and listen, and foster that relationship.
It's how I think a lot of genuine connections are made between people, it's about spending the effort to sit down and try to put someone else's needs, values and feelings into a way that you can understand. And labelling things is just one tool that might help you to do that.