What is the relationship between mindfulness and meditation?

Simply put, mindfulness in the current public context is one of the most popular types of meditation practice today.； However, in the practice circle and some academic research fields, the origins and boundaries of the two do not completely overlap, and there is even a lot of controversy.

Many people’s first contact with meditation begins with the “breathing mindfulness exercises” in various health apps. The instructions ask you to focus on the breath touch at the tip of your nose, and gently pull it back when your mind wanders, without judging yourself for wandering. This is the most typical mindfulness meditation, and it is also the core content of more than 90% of introductory meditation courses on the market. It is no wonder that people often mix the two words, saying “I do mindfulness” and “I practice meditation”, which most of the time refer to the same thing.

But if you ask friends who have a background in Theravada Buddhism, you will most likely get a different answer. I have participated in a ten-day Vipassana meditation camp before. On the first day of the camp, the teacher specifically corrected me: Mindfulness was originally the word "sati" in Pali and is one of the core branches of the Eightfold Path. It is originally an awareness requirement that runs through walking, standing, sitting, and lying in the entire practice system. It is not only counted when sitting with eyes closed, nor does it exist to relax and reduce stress. ； But what people often call "meditation" is actually a very general foreign translation. It puts all kinds of concentration exercises and meditation practices in the Western context into this basket, but instead narrows the original connotation of mindfulness.

Researchers in psychology and clinical fields have another theory. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), which is now widely used, is a technology that Dr. Kabat-Zinn stripped off religious attributes from the Buddhist meditation system in the 1970s and integrated it into the framework of modern clinical psychology. In this context, mindfulness is a set of meditation practice methods with standardized operating procedures, and the affiliation is very clear. Of course, some cultural studies scholars have always been controversial. They feel that classifying mindfulness as a subcategory of meditation is essentially a simplification and appropriation of the traditional Eastern practice system by Western culture. This discussion has not yet reached a unified conclusion.

It’s actually a bit like the classification of tea. If you compare meditation to the entire “tea” category, the most popular mindfulness meditation now is the new fruit tea that has exploded in recent years. Many people are exposed to it for the first time when drinking tea, and they even mistakenly think that tea is sweet and fruity. However, if you really need to delve deeper into the traditional tea ceremony, there are completely different categories such as green tea, black tea, oolong tea, etc. Some people even think that the new fruit tea is not “orthodox tea” at all. In the end, there is no standard answer.

For ordinary practitioners who just want to adjust their state and relieve daily anxiety, there is actually no need to get entangled in these differences in definitions. When you are overwhelmed by the eight-version plan at work, spend 3 minutes closing your eyes and counting 10 breaths. ； When walking, don't stare at your phone and think about next week's KPIs. Feel the touch of your feet on the ground and the temperature of the wind blowing by your ears. Whether you call this mindfulness practice or short meditation, it can help you get away from the messy thoughts and grasp more of the reality of the moment. That's enough.