What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?

To put it clearly in one sentence, mindfulness is a subdivision and core concept of mind cultivation under the general category of meditation. The two are included and included. Nowadays, people often confuse it. It is simply because mindfulness meditation has become popular in the past ten years because it adapts to the stress reduction needs of contemporary people. Many people simply refer to it as "meditation".

In the first half year of my introduction to this type of practice, I thought that all meditations involved focusing on my breathing. If I got distracted, I would blame myself for not being focused enough. It wasn’t until I tried Nigandha meditation with a senior who studied traditional yoga. During the whole process, I was guided to visualize the colors corresponding to the seven energy centers of the body. When I did it, I felt relaxed, but it was not at all the logic of mindfulness that I was familiar with. Only then did I slowly clarify the boundary between the two. To put it bluntly, it is actually like sugar-free pure tea in the category of milk tea. The former (meditation) includes all categories from fruity milk tea with whole sugar and taro balls to rock tea without sugar. Mindfulness is like sugar-free oolong tea among them. Because it is low-burden and adapts to health needs, many people go to the store and just say "I want a cup of milk tea" and order this by default. Gradually, some people mistakenly think that milk tea is equal to sugar-free oolong tea.

If you are not sure which type of exercise you are doing, just find out the core logic: the core requirement of mindfulness is always to "be aware of the present moment without judgment." Even if you are walking, drinking coffee, or even having an unimportant meeting, as long as you focus on the touch of the ground, the temperature and bitterness of the coffee, and the touch of your fingertips on the table, don't blame yourself when distracting thoughts arise, just pull them back gently. This is all mindfulness practice, and you don't even need to sit down with your eyes closed. But meditation is different. Most meditation exercises require you to complete them in a relatively quiet scene and follow a specific guidance process. The goals are also different. Some are to visualize specific images, some are to achieve a state of brain emptiness, and some are to awaken specific emotions of peace or joy. These are completely different from the logic of mindfulness that "does not preset goals, only be aware of the present moment."

Of course, when I ran offline practice salons before, I also encountered many completely different views. Some teachers who practice traditional practice feel that the secularized mindfulness now popular on the market has long been transformed and lost its original core, and should not be included in the category of meditation. After all, meditation in the traditional context itself is bound to practice, with clear stages and practice goals. It is not the same thing as the "counting breaths" used today to reduce stress for office workers.； Some friends who work in clinical psychology feel that mindfulness has now developed an independent application system. Since Kabat-Zinn launched mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy MBSR in 1979, and now mindfulness-based cognitive therapy MBCT, which is widely used in depression and anxiety intervention, has long been separated from the religious attributes of traditional meditation. They are two parallel systems, and there is no need to force them together.

In fact, for ordinary practitioners, you really don’t need to worry too much about whether the definition is accurate. If you want to practice a method that can be used anytime and anywhere to help you escape from the irritability of work for a few seconds, the fragmented mindfulness practice is easy enough.； If you want to find a way to immerse yourself in relaxation and help you get out of bad moods, it’s no problem to choose a guided meditation that feels comfortable to you. After all, these tools are just to make your life more comfortable, and there is no need to quarrel over the boundaries of nouns.