I have the same question as Brenna.
Is it necessary for me to sub-vocalize a description of the object I am aware of?
I am able to perceive objects without necessarily naming them.
Sometimes finding an English word to fit the thought is distracting.
Again, this is only because you're untrained, because it's new, because it's something that you're probably not very good at, which is natural when you first start something.
Eventually you get better at recognizing things as they are and really there's not that many experiences that after
good many hours of doing this, you get pretty good at finding names for just about everything.
I mean, it's not like there's millions of different words that you could possibly have to use.
But we don't call it sub-vocalizing, we call it reminding yourself, which is indeed how we understand the word sati, which does literally mean to remember, in the sense of
reifying the object instead of going the next step of liking or disliking it you say to yourself you see instead of saying this is good this is bad you say this is this that's the mindfulness is actually reminding yourself like mindfulness of the buddha is to remind yourself of the buddha to remember the buddha and but you do that by saying to yourself buddho buddho bhagava bhagava arahang arahang is all the qualities of the buddha that remind you
of the Buddha, so keep you focused on the idea of the Buddha.
With mindfulness of the body, you do the same, but you remind yourself of the body and so on.
Otherwise, we don't consider it, in this tradition, to be meditation.
We consider it just sitting there, zoning out, which isn't kamatana, it isn't training, it isn't insight meditation.