The Hummingbird and the Label:  What Lives Between Thought and Experience

In a recent short, I shared a photo of a hummingbird. Layered over the image was a single word: “hummingbird.” The label sitting directly on top of the living thing.

That image captured something worth pausing on.

John Wheeler writes about this in Awakening to the Natural State, and the simplicity of it becomes clear once it is truly considered. He describes the mind as a labeling machine. Something happens, awareness takes it in instantly, and a fraction of a second later, the mind supplies a word. “Hummingbird.” From that point forward, the relationship is with the word, not the living thing itself.

Anyone who has been close to a hummingbird knows this. There is often something exquisite in that nearness, a kind of “ah” that arises before any word does. The word “hummingbird” describes none of that. It names the bird. It says nothing about what it was actually like to be near it.

That distinction is the whole point.

Wheeler describes the label as a conceptual representation, not the experience itself. The word “warmth,” or “sadness,” or even “awareness,” is mental noise layered over something direct and raw. Awareness already experienced the hummingbird. The mind simply translated it into a word afterward. (Chapter 14, Awakening to the Natural State.)

This is why the “in-between” questions Emerson raises are worth sitting with: What is between the label and the experience? What is between figuring this out and not figuring this out? In that space, when the mind has no answer to produce, it quiets. What remains is simply this, prior to any word placed on it.

I see this same distinction play out in sessions, in both Awakeness Hypnotherapy and Clinical Hypnotherapy work. People often arrive overwhelmed by their mind’s stories, by repetitive thoughts, by what some describe as mental replay. They describe feeling overwhelmed, carrying negative beliefs, insomnia, stress, or anxiety, something in the body that feels like too much.

Through direct questioning, something gets recognized, not figured out. What is recognized is simply being here, present, without the mental noise. In the same way a hand reaches for a door to hold it open for someone else before a thought has even formed, this recognition is already known, prior to the mind naming it.

I know this in a personal way. Growing up, I saw depression up close before I understood anything about it. My mother experienced serious mental health issues, and my own mind formed thoughts and beliefs long before I understood it was the mind forming and labeling the experiences, and not in a positive way. One of those beliefs was that I needed to help everyone else to feel good. IF everyone  I cared about was happy then I could be. The back side of that belief was that my attention rarely returned to myself, and over time that pattern led to real anxiety and overwhelm. 

This work has taken shape around direct questioning, the kind that allows people to recognize, on their own, what is already present, outside of any thought or concept. Through this process, people can learn they are not depression itself. What they are experiencing is engagement with the mind’s stories. Once that engagement falls away, a clarity remains, and something like an unfolding occurs, releasing the thoughts and suffering the mind had been carrying.

This is the same distinction Wheeler and Emerson are both pointing toward. The label was never the thing. And the belief was never the person carrying it.

The hummingbird was never the label. The mind has no words accurate enough for what is actually experienced, and neither are the beliefs and thoughts that describe “yourself”.

Lindi E. Gallagher | Awakeness Hypnotherapy | Clincial Hypnotherapist sonomahypnotherapy.com