What is the relationship between mindfulness and meditation?

At present, in public perception, mindfulness is generally classified as a core branch of meditation, and it is also the most widely spread type of meditation practice in contemporary times. However, there is no absolutely unified standard answer for the boundary between the two. Practitioners and researchers with different backgrounds have their own definitions.

When I first came into contact with this type of practice, I made a joke, thinking that meditation was equivalent to sitting with my eyes closed and breathing mindfully. It wasn’t until I attended an offline camp for physical and mental healing that I saw experienced students doing Tibetan compassion meditation. They had to silently recite guides and visualize images throughout the process, which was completely different from the body scans I usually practiced. Only then did I realize that meditation is actually a large category that covers thousands of practice methods. To use an easy-to-understand metaphor, meditation is like the entire category of "indoor sports", which includes weightlifting, yoga, trampoline, and spinning. The mindfulness we often refer to now was actually refined from traditional Theravada meditation by Professor Kabat-Zinn in the United States in the 1970s. All religious attributes were removed, and it was originally used for patients with chronic diseases. Pain intervention has been gradually popularized to the public because of its good results and low threshold. It is like jogging without equipment, which has been the most popular sport in recent years. There are almost no practice taboos. Most people who come into contact with meditation for the first time practice mindfulness-based guidance such as mindful breathing and body scanning. Over time, they will naturally use the two words interchangeably.

However, not everyone agrees with this definition. I know many practitioners with traditional meditation experience who feel that mindfulness should not be classified as a subordinate branch of meditation - after all, you can practice mindfulness without sitting cross-legged or closing your eyes. I used to have a friend who was an Internet operator. He didn't even have 5 minutes to sit down while working on projects every day. I taught him to practice drinking water mindfully every time he received water: hold the cup to feel the temperature of the ceramic, pay attention to the coolness and touch when the water flows through the throat, and swallow it slowly before walking away. At this time, he was not practicing meditation in the conventional sense, but it was completely in line with the core definition of mindfulness: "being aware of the present moment without judgment." Such practitioners would feel that mindfulness is more like a state that can be embedded in life, and meditation is just one way to exercise this state.

There is also a group of scholars who do scientific research on meditation, who regard mindfulness as the core goal that all meditation practices ultimately reach. Whether you practice meditation, compassion meditation, or transcendental meditation, in the end, you must achieve stable present awareness that is not led by distracting thoughts, that is, a state of mindfulness. From this perspective, mindfulness has become the direction of meditation, not a branch.

In fact, for ordinary practitioners, there is no need to fiddle with the definition of the two. Whether it is following the guide to do mindfulness meditation for 10 minutes, or chewing slowly to feel the taste of food while eating, as long as it can help you to take a breather from the KPIs and unread messages in your mind, the purpose of practice has been achieved.