Gabby The core difference between the two is actually a different category - meditation is the collective name for all consciousness control practice methods, which is equivalent to a big basket containing dozens of different techniques. Mindfulness is the most widely used specific practice technique in this basket after being dereligious in recent decades.
However, in the actual practice circle, few people would care about this definitional affiliation. Most of the time, when people refer to "meditation", it actually refers to traditional concentration meditation by default, which is quite different from the logic of mindfulness practice. I couldn’t tell the difference when I first came into practice. The first time I took an offline mindfulness-based stress reduction class, the teacher made an analogy and I understood it instantly: Ordinary focused meditation is like practicing archery. The target is your breath, a mantra, or the candle in front of you. If your attention wanders, it is equivalent to the arrow being deflected. You have to quickly adjust your posture and bring your attention back to the target. The core is to train "the stability of concentration." Mindfulness is more like sitting on a park bench and watching passers-by. No matter if they are students in school uniforms, quarreling couples, or balloon vendors, you don’t have to stop them or follow them. You just sit there quietly and know, “Oh, what happened just now?” The core is to train “awareness without judgment.”
Let’s talk about a very common situation. Many people practice meditation for the first time but become more and more anxious the more they practice. This is because they are looking in the wrong direction: If you are always internally consumed because you are always obsessed with work mistakes and thinking about useless things, and when you force yourself to practice focused meditation, you will instead scold yourself because you can’t control your mind wandering, “Why can’t you do this well?”, which in turn aggravates the internal conflict.； But switching to mindfulness practice does not have this problem. It inherently allows you to wander, and even guides you to observe, "Oh, I am thinking about the plan I messed up last week again, and I am a little upset now." There is no need to judge, just seeing it is enough. Several friends around me who suffer from insomnia, after using mindfulness guidance, they finally stopped being "forced to sleep" and became more energetic. They fell asleep after lying down for more than 20 minutes.
Of course, there are different voices in the academic world. Many scholars doing cognitive neuroscience research feel that there is no need to separate the two. After all, judging from brain imaging results, both practices activate the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for regulating attention, and both reduce the activity of the amygdala, which is responsible for emotional stress. It’s just that the paths and goals of practice are different. Some senior enthusiasts who have been practicing for more than ten years will even say that in the end, the two are connected. If you have enough concentration, you will naturally develop awareness, and if your awareness is stable, your concentration will not be bad.
If you are a novice and want to give it a try, there is no need to dwell on the concepts first. Just find two 10-minute guides and try them once. Just practice whichever one you feel comfortable and comfortable with after practicing.
