What is the relationship between mindfulness and meditation?

If we put it in the most popular terms, mindfulness in the current public context is one of the most well-known branches of meditation. But if we dig deeper, there is actually no completely unified definition in both the practice circle and the academic circle. Many people even think that the two are not inclusive at all.

When I first started practicing meditation two years ago, I was confused. I thought that meditation required wearing plain clothes and sitting cross-legged in a quiet room with yoga mats. Mindfulness was the requirement of “not thinking randomly” during meditation. It wasn’t until I attended a ten-day Vipassana experience camp that my teacher corrected my perception. In the context of traditional practice, mindfulness is an integral part of the Eightfold Path of original Buddhism. It is a state of mind of "being aware of the present moment without judgment." Meditation refers more to specific deliberate practices to enter this state, such as sitting meditation and walking meditation. At this time, you can even say that meditation is one of the methods of practicing mindfulness, rather than that mindfulness is subordinate to meditation.

But now in secular applications, everyone has slowly blurred the boundaries. If you search for meditation courses now, nine out of ten of them are mindfulness-oriented, such as breath awareness and body scanning. These meditation exercises were originally used to train mindfulness abilities, but they have gradually been directly named "mindfulness meditation". Many times, people even say "I am practicing mindfulness" and "I am practicing meditation", which point to the exact same thing. Even in the current mainstream mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy (MBSR), the core practice module is meditation of different durations. Therefore, many psychological studies will directly refer to this type of intervention as mindfulness meditation, further blurring the boundaries between the two.

It’s not difficult to figure out the difference between the two. I have a very concrete experience: I had a two-hour cross-department synchronization meeting to catch up with the project. I was impatient and couldn’t walk away, so I quietly noticed the tightness and stiffness in the back of my neck. I watched the irritability come and go. Another example is when commuting and squeezing into the subway, I deliberately feel the rough touch of my hand holding the handrail, the sound of the station announcement in my ears, and the sound of people chatting around me. As soon as my attention comes to the project to be submitted today, I gently pull it back. At this time, I am not meditating, but I am actually practicing mindfulness.

To give a loose analogy, the relationship between the two is actually a bit like "Chinese cooking" and "stir-frying": the first thing most people learn when they first come into contact with Chinese cooking is stir-frying, and many home-cooked dishes are also stir-fried. Over time, many people default to stir-fry when it comes to Chinese cooking. But if you really want to dig deeper, Chinese cooking also has a lot of steaming, boiling, and stewing techniques, and stir-frying is just one of them.； On the other hand, if you usually mix a cold dish at home and don’t stir-fry it, the seasonings and ingredients you use are also the logic of Chinese cooking. Just like you don’t do formal meditation exercises, daily awareness is also a part of mindfulness.

In fact, for ordinary practitioners, there is really no need to worry too much about the definition of the two. If you want to find a fixed way to polish your awareness, it is certainly a good thing to find a quiet place to sit for 10 minutes and do breathing meditation. When you walk, you deliberately feel the touch of your footsteps, and when you eat, you taste the taste of every mouthful of food. It is also a very cost-effective mindfulness practice. On the contrary, you are entangled in the right and wrong concepts, and are afraid that you will practice "unauthentic", which violates the original intention of "non-judgment".