On the difference between mindfulness and meditation

Meditation is a general concept covering all attention regulation training techniques. Mindfulness is only one of the hundreds of branches of meditation, and the core principle is "to perceive the present without judgment". They are the relationship between inclusion and inclusion, and completely equating is a typical cognitive misunderstanding.

For example, meditation is like the whole category of milk tea, in which Oolong milk tea, taro and bubble tea are included, while Mindfulness is the most popular and widely accepted bubble tea. You can say that bubble tea is milk tea, but you can't say that milk tea is bubble tea on the other hand. The reason is the same. Now people will confuse the two, essentially because more than 90% of the meditation products available to the public in the market focus on mindfulness exercises, and naturally it is easy to regard branches as all. I also made this mistake two years ago. When chatting with people, I always said "I am practicing mindfulness meditation". Until I went to an offline healing workshop, the teacher asked who thought mindfulness was equal to meditation in the first sentence. More than 20 people in the audience raised their hands for nearly 20 times, and they deliberately smoothed out the difference between the two.

I have compiled a comparison table at the practical level, which is the difference that ordinary practitioners can directly perceive, and there is no mysterious content:

Of course, regarding the boundary between the two, practitioners in different circles have quite different views, and there is no absolute standard answer. For example, practitioners of traditional Buddhism in the Upper Seats will think that mindfulness is an integral part of the "Eight Righteousness" and needs to be practiced in coordination with other ethical principles such as Orthodoxy and Righteousness. Now the popular "religiousization" mindfulness is actually a simplified entry application, which is not a complete mindfulness practice; Practitioners who study transcendental meditation and Kundalini meditation will think that such exercises with specific spells and postures are "orthodox meditation", while mindfulness is at best a "life skill" and not a real meditation. There is also a group of very pragmatic clinical psychologists who believe that there is no need to entangle conceptual boundaries at all, as long as the practice method can help users alleviate emotional problems, it doesn't matter what the name is.

These views are actually reasonable, but they stand in different positions. For ordinary practitioners, the most practical difference is actually the adaptability of the scene: for example, when you are going to be late for the subway in the morning, and you are so agitated that you want to swear, you suddenly stop to feel the temperature of your back being stuck, the rhythm of music in your headphones, and the touch of your feet touching the ground. You don't scold yourself for being so unlucky, nor do you predict that you will be scolded by your boss for being late. This is a fragmented mindfulness exercise. You can't say that you are squeezing the subway. After all, most people's understanding of meditation still needs to find a quiet place to sit cross-legged and close their eyes.

Oh, by the way, I really want to talk about the significance of distinction, mainly for people with emotional disorders, such as PTSD and patients with severe anxiety. If you want to rely on this kind of exercise to assist adjustment, you'd better give priority to the clinically proven mindfulness course, and don't just follow the meditation class with unknown sources to do the imaginary exercise. Some meditation techniques that need to recall negative memories may aggravate the symptoms, which is why clinical intervention will only use mindfulness, and will not casually use the techniques of other meditation schools.

In fact, for most ordinary people who just want to relieve their work pressure and have a good sleep, there is really no need to cling to the definition. What you practice with the APP, whether it is mindfulness or meditation, can make you relax and be a good practice. The only thing that needs to be reminded is that if someone sells you a "higher-level meditation course" and says that it can help you "enlighten" and "get through the chakras" and charge you thousands of dollars, you should first ask if it is mindfulness practice, but if you say that mindfulness is too low, you can basically turn around and leave-there is a high probability that IQ tax will be charged.