How mindfulness works the same as meditation

In fact, for the vast majority of ordinary practitioners, it is too simple to want the practices of mindfulness and meditation to be completely consistent - just grasp the common core of "anchoring the present moment without judgment", and there is no need to be framed by the difference in the definitions of the two terms.

When I first came into contact with the two, I was confused by the sayings on the Internet. One said that meditation is about letting go and not thinking about anything, and the other said that mindfulness is about living with awareness. Until last year, I participated in an offline physical and mental healing camp. The teacher who led the training was a psychology practitioner with 20 years of mindfulness teaching experience. She led a 15-minute sitting exercise. Half of the people said that this was introductory breathing meditation, and the other half said that this was basic mindfulness training. When the two sides started arguing, the teacher laughed.

Of course, there are indeed many experienced practitioners who feel that the two cannot be confused. For example, those who follow the traditional path of meditation will feel that the ultimate goal of meditation is to stop thoughts, which is completely different from the logic of mindfulness of "allowing thoughts to flow but not following them." There are also clinical consultants who will emphasize that mindfulness has a standardized eight-week course system of MBCT (Mindfulness Cognitive Therapy), and it is not the same thing as sitting and relaxing meditation. These opinions are correct, and they are all professional definitions corresponding to specific scenarios.

But for most ordinary people who just want to relieve anxiety and improve sleep, you don’t need to worry about these differences at all. Let’s just say that I practice it for 10 minutes every morning when I wake up and lean on the bedside. Sometimes my attention is anchored on the breath touch at the tip of my nose, and sometimes I slowly scan the tightness in my body. When my mind wanders, I don’t scold myself for not paying attention. I just gently pull back to the anchor point. Sometimes I call it morning meditation, and sometimes I call it mindfulness awakening. After practicing, I feel the same clear-headed feeling. Even when you are standing in the subway while commuting, you focus on the touch of the contact between your feet and the soles of the shoes, and the soles of the soles and the ground. If you hear the station announcements around you and the to-do items that pop up in your mind, just let them go without running away. You can call it dynamic meditation or a daily mindfulness practice.

To put it bluntly, the relationship between the two is like an iced Americano and black coffee. If you insist on following the standards of professional competitions, then the iced Americano does have fixed powder-to-water ratio, temperature, and extraction requirements. It is different from ordinary cold-brewed black coffee. But on a daily basis, if you just want to drink coffee to refresh yourself, you use cold water to make a drink and throw in two cubes of ice. You are right to call it an iced Americano, and no one can say you are wrong to call it a cold-brewed black coffee.

Anyway, the old people around me who have been practicing for three to five years basically don’t struggle with this term. They will find it as comfortable as possible. The core is grasped correctly. What they practice is essentially the same thing. There are so many either/or boundaries.