Meditation v Mindfulness — What’s the Difference?

What is meditation? What is mindfulness? For many people, these words are now part of daily life, yet how many of us have stopped to think about what they really mean? 

What is meditation?

To meditate is to focus the mind on one thing - to have a single point of focus, ‘one-pointed’. What makes it meditation is that it’s a discipline, a practice, something we do regularly, preferably daily. Being a practice, it could be any number of types of activities, so long as the mind is focussed in the present moment and only on that activity. That’s the practice, which is also the end result. In other words, what we call ‘meditation’ is actually the practice that may lead to attaining true meditation — the meditative state. The state of meditation can’t be induced, rather we can only prepare the body and mind and allow such a state to arise naturally when the body and mind are sufficiently still and unified.  

We could practice meditation by playing a musical instrument, or writing a journal, or studying — anything that absorbs the mind fully in the activity to the exclusion of all else. So, we don’t necessarily have to meditate by sitting in stillness and silence. There are, however, great benefits to traditional seated meditation practices that are very difficult to reproduce through externalising practices such as playing an instrument, writing or studying. These practices improve concentration but are not efficient for developing self-realisation. With seated meditation practices, the physical stillness enables the mind to become increasingly aware of itself and its own, true nature. At its zenith, our true nature is fully revealed as Absolute Reality or God (there are many secular and non-secular names for this one thing), and we are said to have attained self-realisation, self-actualisation, enlightenment, samadhi or nirvana.

What is mindfulness?

So how is meditation different from mindfulness? Mindfulness can be thought of as a type of meditation. But mindfulness is where we continually bring our attention to something we’re doing in our daily life. It’s not a formal practice, but rather a reminder throughout the day to bring ourselves back to the present moment. Mindfulness first came to the West from the Buddhist tradition as a practice of focussing the attention on the breath — to remember, ‘I am breathing. I’m just taking a breath. That’s all I’m doing.’ But mindfulness could be any number of other things that we bring our attention to. The breath is useful because it’s constantly flowing in and out — constantly changing and creating sensations that we can use to anchor our busy mind. But it could also involve bringing our attention to sensations in other parts of the body, such as the soles of the feet. We could practice mindful walking — noticing the changing pressures and stretching sensations in our feet as we walk from one room to the next. Or mindful eating — being aware of the tastes and textures and warmth of our meal or cup of tea. Sensations are extremely useful for the practice of mindfulness because they provide a direct experience of our reality that we can use to constantly bring our awareness back to ourselves in the present moment. 

Is it useful to practice both meditation and mindfulness?

The benefits of mindfulness and meditation are greater when both are integrated into our daily life —when there’s a disciplined daily meditation practice and a daily mindfulness practice. Each supports the other and we’re increasingly able to stay in the present moment whether we’re meditating or being mindful, or neither. Eventually, meditation and mindfulness begin to merge and our mind can be still and calm regardless of what’s going on around us. We’re in the present moment more and more of the time. In other words, we train our brain to have the habit of present-moment awareness as our predominant unconscious state. This slowly becomes our way of living — our new normal, our baseline, our ‘state of being’. We could go even further and say that this state of living in the present moment is our natural state, our birthright as a human being. It is already within us. So, to attain it, all we need to do is to clear away the layers of conditioning and mental habits that cloud our inner vision and our inner wisdom (more on that soon). 

What’s so important about present-moment awareness? 

Imagine that you have a completely empty mind except for the thoughts you choose to have. As you progress through your day, you can address each challenge or task exactly as it needs to be tackled. You have the time and patience to listen to your partner’s work issue and to genuinely care and say the right thing that helps to ease the situation. You can pay full attention while your child speaks to you and can respond with love as you pause in making the family meal. You don’t get stuck wondering why you said that thing but wished you hadn’t, or why you didn’t do that thing even though you can see (with hindsight) that it was the most obvious and best thing to do. You don’t get fatigued by the demands of the day because you’re not getting tense or stressed by the events that occur, or your thoughts about them, or the memories they may trigger. Your thoughts, if any, are positive and compassionate and easily dismissed. Best of all, you always know exactly the right action to take, so you are never in doubt and never fear making a mistake. You can trust your mind to bring to your attention exactly the thoughts and memories that are most appropriate for you to act on in the present moment. 

And since the present moment is all that we have — all that we will ever have — the more we can live in the moment, the more content, accepting, loving, compassionate, happier and freer we feel.            

Sound good? Brilliant. There’s only one problem. It takes strong discipline and a dedication to traditional seated meditation to weed our minds sufficiently to attain constant present-moment awareness. Even when we feel present with our conscious mind, there is still the subconscious mind that influences what we think and how we feel. That is what the analogy of peeling the layers of the onion refers to; we uncover and bring to light a past trauma only to realise that there’s more beneath that and still more beneath that. 

Now for the good news. We don’t need to realise a state of constant present-moment awareness to live happy and fulfilling lives. Absolute constant awareness is the realm of saints, monks and highly disciplined yogis, and near enough is good enough for the needs of householders with jobs and families. After all, householders need to live in the world as humans with the full range of human emotions and needs and desires. So, near-constant present-moment awareness — the lower levels of samadhi — is perfectly sufficient for a happy and well-lived life with freedom from noisy thoughts, upsetting emotions, and pyscological or bodily pain.  

Fortunately, all meditation practices and daily mindfulness practices are beneficial and move us in the right direction. Through cumulative practice, we come ever closer to a sustained calmness and stillness of mind regardless of what’s going on around us. Increasingly, we can make conscious choices about our actions and how our lives unfold, rather than unconscious reactions to whatever happens to us.