The difference between mindfulness and meditation

To put it simply, any operation you can do in your daily life to perceive the present moment without judgment is basically a mindfulness practice. Most of the meditation requires you to find a special time and a fixed posture to complete. Mindfulness was originally a mainstream genre under meditation. Now it has become popular and has many independent usage scenarios.

I often confused the two with each other in the first six months when I first came into contact with mental exercises. Until one day, someone snatched my seat during the morning rush hour. I was standing in the swaying subway holding the handrail, and suddenly remembered the method of reading before. Instead of secretly scolding the other person in my mind, I drew my attention back to my hand, which was so clenched that the knuckles turned white. , feeling the thin sweat on my palms and the soreness of my shoulders and neck. In just a few dozen seconds, the fire stuck in my chest floated away by itself. Only then did I realize that I had completed a solid mindfulness practice without sitting down, closing my eyes, or spending more than ten minutes to calm down.

There are actually different opinions on the boundary between the two. Most traditional Vipassana practitioners believe that mindfulness itself is the core link of meditation, and there is no "mindfulness without meditation" at all. All scattered awareness is essentially an extension of meditation practice. However, contemporary positive psychology researchers are more inclined to define mindfulness as an independent attention regulation method that does not need to be attached to the form of meditation. For ordinary practitioners, there is no need to struggle with this definition. It is easy to use.

If you are serious about meditating, whether it is the most basic focused breathing, or subdivided types such as loving-kindness meditation or chanting meditation, most of them have to set aside at least a 10-minute window in advance, find a space where no one will disturb you, and stretch your back while sitting. Keep your eyes straight, close your eyes, or focus on the ground half a meter in front of you. Even if it is a walking meditation, you have to find a deserted trail in advance and deliberately slow down to feel the touch of the soles of your feet. In essence, it is a special training to isolate yourself from daily chores.

To give a vivid analogy, meditation is like taking time to go to a swimming pool to practice swimming. You have to change clothes, find a venue, and swim for as long as you want. It trains your overall cardiopulmonary and muscle endurance.； Mindfulness is more like deliberately adjusting your breathing rhythm when walking, and stretching and shrugging your shoulders from time to time when sitting at your desk. It does not require a special place or time, just integrate awareness into every small action in the moment.

Of course, the two are not completely separated. The most popular "mindfulness meditation" on the market now is actually a combination of the two. The breathing awareness exercise that you sit down and spend 15 minutes doing is not only a kind of meditation, but also a concentrated mindfulness training. It is equivalent to taking time to practice the scattered awareness movements in order to consolidate the effect. When many novices first start practicing, they always think that they have to sit for half an hour to be "useful". In fact, this is not the case. If you can stop and notice for 30 seconds when you encounter emotional fluctuations, it will be much more useful than sitting for half an hour with your mind wandering all over the place.