An 800-word essay on the differences and connections between mindfulness and meditation

Many people confuse mindfulness with meditation. In fact, the core relationship between the two is "containing and being included" - meditation is the collective name for all attention training techniques, and mindfulness is a branch of technology under meditation that focuses on "awareness of the present moment without judgment"； Of course, some practitioners of the applied psychology school believe that mindfulness has developed an independent use separate from the meditation scene, and the two can be interrelated.

To be honest, at first I thought it was unnecessary to dig into these two definitions, until I fell into a trap three years ago when I signed up for the first online meditation camp. In the first half of the process, the teacher asked us to stare at the breath at the tip of our noses. There was no need to rush any stray thoughts that came to our minds. It was like watching the clouds passing by in the sky. When we noticed it, we gently brought our attention back to our breathing. At that time, I thought this was all meditation was about, until in the second half of the practice, the teacher asked us to close our eyes and follow the guidance to imagine ourselves stepping on the spring grass, with the wind carrying the fragrance of flowers, and we could even see the veins of the clover at our feet. I was suddenly confused: Is this completely different from the first half of the practice?

After reading a lot of industry information, I figured out that the latter belongs to "visualization meditation", which is a different branch of the same meditation category as mindfulness. It is true that most traditional mindfulness practices are carried out in the form of sitting meditation, which highly overlaps with the meditation scene in popular impressions. However, in the 1970s, Professor Kabat-Zinn extracted mindfulness from the religious context and developed it into a clinical psychological intervention technology. Today’s mindfulness has long since broken away from the limitations of sitting cross-legged: When eating, you deliberately feel the softness and hardness of rice and the sweetness of vegetables. When you walk, you pay attention to the touch of the soles of your shoes and the ground. Even when you are distracted in a meeting, you quietly draw your attention back to feel the temperature of your fingertips on the table. These behaviors without any sense of "meditation ritual" are essentially mindfulness exercises.

Regarding the boundary between the two, different circles have different opinions. Most people in traditional practice circles insist that mindfulness is a subcategory of meditation, and there is no need to talk about it separately. ； Practitioners who do clinical psychological intervention are more inclined to regard mindfulness as an independent intervention tool. After all, many patients with anxiety and depression cannot sit quietly for more than ten minutes to meditate, and fragmented mindfulness practice is much more adaptable.

Of course, regardless of the definition dispute, the core of the two is actually highly unified: both are autonomous training of attention, and essentially help us to extract ourselves from the "disruptive thoughts" that can't stop in our minds, and no longer be trapped in past regrets or future anxieties. I had been suffering from insomnia for a week because I was rushing to catch up on a project. I tried two methods: one was to do ten minutes of mindful breathing along with the audio, and the other was to do fifteen minutes of sleep meditation. The last two methods were able to relax my tense nerves, and there was no obvious difference in the effect.

Nowadays, I rarely bother to define the boundaries between the two words. After all, whether it is mindfulness or meditation, the essence is to press the pause button on the high-speed brain. If it can help you live in the present, it is a good method. There is no need to worry about the difference in names. (Full text 796 words)