What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation

The most common consensus in the industry is that meditation is a category that includes dozens of different consciousness training methods, while mindfulness is one of the most popular branches of meditation. It can also be separated from the formal meditation scene and exist independently as a daily awareness practice. This is the core difference between the two.

When I first came into contact with this type of practice, I couldn't tell the difference at all. I took all the meditation classes and mindfulness classes in the same class. Until I participated in an offline mindfulness-based stress reduction workshop. The teacher didn't ask us to cross our legs, close our eyes and regulate our breathing at the beginning. He first gave everyone a raisin and asked us to slowly touch its surface for 5 minutes. Fold it, smell its aroma, put it in your mouth without chewing it, and feel the touch of it slowly softening in the saliva. You are not allowed to play with your mobile phone or talk during the whole process. That was when I realized for the first time that I don’t need to sit for half an hour or force myself to empty my mind to do related exercises.

If you look through the meditation materials of different systems, you will find that the goal of many traditional meditations is actually to "stop thoughts", either to guide you to completely clear your mind, or to enter a specific state of consciousness through chanting mantras, visualization, etc. Many senior practitioners even pursue long-term trance. These are actually quite far from the core logic of mindfulness. Ever since mindfulness was improved and introduced into the mainstream medical field by Joe Kabat-Zinn, it has never required practitioners to "not have thoughts." It just means that when you notice that your thoughts are drifting to the past or the future, you don't need to scold yourself for not paying attention, just gently bring your attention back to the present, and you don't pursue any special extraordinary experience.

Of course, not everyone agrees with this division. Many practitioners who are deeply involved in the field of traditional meditation feel that mindfulness is essentially a modernized and improved version of Theravada Vipassana meditation. It is not a concept that is parallel to meditation. Nowadays, the two are deliberately separated in the market. This is more due to the needs of commercial promotion, and the original meditation with a high threshold is packaged into a "light mindfulness practice" that everyone can do. This statement also has many audiences. After all, the roots of the two are indeed deeply connected.

In fact, to give an inappropriate analogy, the relationship between the two is a bit like "cooking" and "making fat-reducing meals": cooking is a very broad concept, including frying, frying, and cooking Chinese and Western food. Fat-reducing meals themselves are a type of cooking. But even if you don't open the fire, just choosing a meal with less oil and less salt when choosing a meal at a convenience store can be regarded as complying with the requirements of a fat-reducing diet. You don't necessarily have to put on an apron to open the fire.

For ordinary practitioners like us who just want to use this kind of practice to relieve daily anxiety, there is actually no need to worry about the definition difference between the two. It doesn’t matter if you are willing to take 10 minutes to sit down and do formal mindfulness meditation, feel the touch of the wind on your face when commuting, or taste every bite of food when eating. As long as it can take you away from the chaotic thoughts and take a breath, it doesn’t matter what the name is.