Essay on the relationship between mindfulness and meditation

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I also made a joke when I first came into contact with these two concepts. In 2019, I signed up for an online mindfulness camp. On the first day of the camp, I had an argument with the group members for half an hour. At that time, I insisted that "mindfulness is another foreign name for meditation." Others in turn told me that "meditation is a branch of mindfulness." Looking back now, both arguments are untenable.

Tracing back to the roots, the binding relationship between the two first came from the Eastern meditation context. “"Mindfulness" is the translation of the Pali word "sati" in Theravada Buddhism, which corresponds to the core essentials of the four foundations of mindfulness practice: maintain clear awareness of the body, feelings, mind, and dharmas at the moment, do not follow wandering thoughts, and do not make bad judgments about arising feelings, but Zen practice, which was translated as "meditation" at the time, was the core vehicle for training this kind of awareness - whether it was sitting cross-legged in zazen or walking at a slow pace, they were essentially formal meditation practices, with the goal of cultivating a stable and sustained state of mindfulness. In the context of traditional practice, the two are almost strongly bound. Without meditation as a starting point, it is almost impossible to obtain stable mindfulness.

Interestingly, when Dr. Kabat-Zinn launched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the 1970s, he deliberately separated mindfulness completely from the religious context and gave it a completely secular definition: "conscious and non-judgmental awareness of the present moment." This completely broadened the boundaries of mindfulness. You don’t need to sit cross-legged and meditate, or observe precepts. Even when you eat a raisin, you can slowly feel the touch of the folds of the peel melting on the tip of your tongue, and the process of the sweetness spreading from the tip of your tongue to the entire mouth. This is mindfulness practice. ； Even when you are having an argument with someone and your face is red, you suddenly notice that your chest is tight and your anger is rising, and you are willing to stop and take a breath before speaking. This is also the effect of righteous thoughts. At this time, many people realized: Oh, it turns out that mindfulness does not need to be limited to meditation scenes.

Of course, controversy has always existed, and practitioners of different schools have widely varying views on the degree of binding between the two. Last year I went to Fujian to participate in a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat. The master who oversees the practice is a Theravada practitioner who has been practicing for more than thirty years. He particularly disdains the "daily mindfulness" promoted on the market. During the meditation instructions, he directly said: "I can't sit still for half an hour, and I can't even notice my wandering thoughts running for ten miles. How can I practice mindfulness while eating and walking?" That is all self-deception. Without the foundation of concentration through formal meditation, your little awareness will be blown away by the wind. ” But on the other hand, a psychological counselor I know who does trauma intervention has the exact opposite view. She has many clients with PTSD who cannot close their eyes for formal meditation. They will have flashbacks to traumatic scenes as soon as they sit down, can't breathe or even faint. For these people, mindfulness training cannot touch formal meditation at all. It starts with small daily actions such as "touch the cold water cup in your hand for 30 seconds and feel the cold touch" and "feel the strength of the five toes gripping the ground while standing". It can also help them stabilize their emotions and reduce the frequency of flashbacks by half. The practices on both sides have their own support. No one is right or wrong, it’s just that the applicable people and scenarios are different.

In 2022, the "Journal of Clinical Psychiatry" published a meta-analysis covering 12,000 subjects, and the results just confirmed this difference: For ordinary people who only have a lot of daily internal consumption and mild anxiety, there is no statistical difference in the reduction in anxiety levels after three months if they only do daily mindfulness exercises (such as not checking their mobile phones while eating, and deliberately feeling a few breaths when walking) and 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation every day.； But for people who are moderately depressed or diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, mindfulness training combined with formal meditation is about 37% more effective than pure daily practice. Oh, by the way, I would like to correct a common misunderstanding here: not all meditation is related to mindfulness. For example, Transcendental Meditation is about chanting specific mantras to achieve inner peace, and other meditation is about active visualization, such as imagining yourself lying on the beach and basking in the sun. The goal of these exercises is not to cultivate "non-judgmental present awareness". Naturally, it has nothing to do with mindfulness. Many people think that "meditation is mindfulness", but they are actually misled by popular science in the market.

I have been practicing intermittently for almost five years. The first three years were really hard. I had to meditate for 30 minutes every day. If I missed a minute, I would feel that today's practice was in vain. Later, I changed my job on the Internet and often worked overtime until eleven or twelve o'clock. When I got home, I fell asleep and had no energy to sit at all. At the beginning, I was anxious and felt that I was regressing. Later, I gradually stopped thinking about it. Now when I buy a meat bun in the morning, I will stand on the roadside and chew it slowly, tasting the fresh green onions and the oily aroma of the fatty meat inside, instead of checking the unread messages in the work group while nibbling on the bun. ； When squeezing into the subway, holding on to the cold handrails, I would occasionally feel the coolness and rough texture of the metal instead of thinking about what I would talk about in the meeting later. ； Last week, when I was meeting with a client about my needs, the client scolded me for ten minutes. When I finished speaking, I suddenly felt my chest tightening, and the anger had rushed to my throat. I paused for two seconds, took a sip of water, and did not say the sentence "Whoever you want to do it with." Thinking about it afterwards, this was actually the effect of righteousness, even though I didn't meditate at all that day.

To be honest, struggling with the relationship between mindfulness and meditation is mostly something only newbies do. If you practice it for a long time, you will find that whether it is formal meditation of sitting cross-legged for forty minutes or daily mindfulness of putting down your phone and chewing a few more mouthfuls while eating, it essentially helps you get out of the autopilot state of "thinking about the bad things in the past and the troubles in the future" and live more in the present moment. As for which method you choose, there is no standard answer. The one that suits you is the best.