What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation

The simplest logic of distinction is that meditation is an umbrella category that covers hundreds of different practice methods, while mindfulness is the most secular and widely used branch of this category. Of course, this statement is also controversial in different circles. Many traditional practitioners feel that mindfulness is just a state that needs to be maintained during meditation, and is not an independent practice method at all.

I couldn’t tell the difference when I first started practicing. I saved money and signed up for an offline meditation camp. On the first day, the teacher taught formless meditation. He asked me to empty my mind as much as possible throughout the process and suppress any thoughts I had. I sat there for 40 minutes and my mind was filled with thoughts about what to eat at night. The more I stressed, the more irritable I became. In the end, I almost walked out on the spot. Later, when I started learning mindfulness, I discovered that it was a completely different approach: you don’t have to press your thoughts at all. Whether it’s your to-do list or the half-packed box of strawberries that you didn’t finish at noon, as long as you can realize “Oh, my mind is wandering now” and gently bring your attention back to the anchor point of the moment, even if you do it ten or eight times a minute, it is still an effective practice.

If you are usually exposed to meditation content on the Internet, you will most likely think that the two are the same thing. After all, the content with the highest traffic now is basically mindfulness meditation related content. Who makes the threshold too low? You don’t have to find a special quiet room, sit cross-legged, or even have a boring meeting at work. You can quietly focus on the touch of your feet and the ground, and pull back when you notice your mind wandering. Three to five minutes is considered a practice. To use an inappropriate analogy, meditation is like the entire category of sports and fitness, including running, weightlifting, yoga, and Tai Chi, while mindfulness is more like the equipment-free home fitness that has become popular in recent years. It does not require complicated equipment and can be practiced in fragmented time. It is highly adaptable, but you can't say that squats are equal to all fitness, right? In the category of meditation, there are many categories such as singing meditation, visualization meditation, and Sufi rotation meditation. These are all meditations, but they have nothing to do with the logic of mindfulness practice.

When talking about this, friends who have been exposed to traditional spiritual practice will definitely refute, saying that mindfulness is originally the "mindfulness" in the Eightfold Path, and is the basis of all meditation practice - whether you practice samatha or vipassanā, if you don't have the state of mindfulness of "being aware of the present moment and not running around with thoughts", sitting for an afternoon will either be daydreaming or falling asleep, which is not considered effective meditation at all. This is actually true. Mindfulness is now sold as a separate category in the market. It is actually the result of the secular transformation carried out by Professor Kabat-Zinn of Massachusetts Medical School in the 1970s. At that time, he separated mindfulness from the Buddhist system of the four foundations of mindfulness, removed all religious attributes, and specifically used it for clinical stress intervention. In order to make it easier for ordinary people to understand, it was separated into an independent practice method.

A friend who works in Internet operations asked me about practice methods. He said that he had been practicing meditation with a blogger for almost a month, but he became even more anxious. When I asked, I found out that she was practicing traditional meditation that requires "completely clearing the brain." Later, I asked her to switch to mindfulness practice. She didn’t have to force herself to clear her mind. She allowed her thoughts to come and go and just be a bystander. Within three weeks, she said that she suddenly encountered a change in demand at work. In the past, her first reaction was to get angry, but now she can immediately detect “Oh, I’m a little angry now” and won’t get stuck with her emotions. Essentially, she didn’t understand the difference between the two and stepped on the adaptability pit.

In fact, you don’t need to dig into such details in daily life. If you want to relax and reduce stress, just find a place that is comfortable for you to practice. If you really want to dig deeper into the difference, it is nothing more than a matter of category and context.