What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
And how can meditation fit into your life?
Being mindful doesn’t mean sitting cross-legged and in silence!
In fact, technically speaking, that’s actually meditation anyway, which is slightly different to mindfulness.
Perhaps I should start there because it can be hard to understand the difference. I’ll come back to the cross-legged reference...
An Analogy to explain the difference between meditation and mindfulness
Sorry if sport’s not your thing... but I enjoy playing netball, so I thought it’d be fun to use a sporting analogy to explain mindfulness. Bear with me...
The earliest memories I have of playing netball are in year 5 at school (about aged 9 or 10) but before that, I obviously learned to throw and catch a ball and some of the other skills needed for ball games. I quite liked our PE teacher, and I think she liked me (which helped!) and that was the first time I remember being part of a sports team. I’ve no idea if we played other schools but I do remember that from early in secondary school, so either way, it’s been 30-ish years since I started!
For most people (apart from a select few who seem to just be good at all of it), if you want to be good at sport, you have to practice! You learn how to play the game, you practice playing the game and you also do other exercises and drills that improve elements of your game, and/or your overall fitness. Agreed? Hopefully you’re with me so far?
Once match day comes for me, I play instinctively. I certainly don’t mean I’m any kind of netball genius (I’m actually laughing at that idea) and I do read the game to an extent and try to incorporate things we’ve learned in training, but ultimately, I mean I’m in the present moment. I can rarely remember or refer to something that happened in the previous quarter once we’re on a break. Nor do I find it easy to tactically plan for the next one (probably at the frustration of my teammates!). Now I’m sure this is partly my personality, but it’s also because I’ve practiced the sport A LOT...so I don’t need to consciously think about every move I make anymore. My muscle memory kicks in and I can run, move, throw and catch with reasonable accuracy (ish).
So, to bring this analogy back to what we’re talking about, think of daily meditation as training, and living mindfully as match play – that's where you really want your skills to shine – you want your whole life to be lived mindfully, not just for the five or ten minutes a day when you sit cross-legged to meditate.
During meditation, you’re training your mind to focus and to keep returning to the present moment when it has nothing else to do. By that, I mean we tend to meditate when it’s easiest for our minds to do so, to concentrate. You might help it out by sitting somewhere quiet. Maybe you’ll listen to the same guided meditation, or music to help you. You might sit in the same chair or on the same cushion, at the same time of day. All these things tell your mind (and of course, your body) that it’s time to meditate, and there are usually minimal distractions. You’re therefore setting up the conditions to make it possible to meditate ‘successfully’ (no such thing by the way) and relatively easily. So, you're training your mind to keep refocusing on something you’ve chosen.
The more you exercise that muscle, by returning your wandering mind back to whatever your ‘home-base’ is, (listening to your breath is probably the most common), the easier it will find it. And the more you practice doing that during meditation, the easier you’ll find it when the conditions aren’t so allowing. By that, I mean when you’re living your life, with distractions, noise, other people’s demands, when your nagging to-do list is on your mind and so on. You’ll find that even during the busiest times, you can anchor yourself to be present in the moment more easily if you’ve been practicing.
“So what?” I hear you ask... Do I hear you ask that? Sometimes I think it’s quite well-known now, the benefits of being mindful, on our mental health and happiness, but I know there are still people who don’t know much about it.
The benefits of meditation and mindfulness
To put it briefly, your experience of life will be much richer and more fulfilling if you have used your senses and really FELT it. If you churn through life as if on a treadmill, leaping from one task or achievement to the next, never stopping to experience them, or appreciate them, nor thanking the people who help you reach them, you will suddenly reach the end of your life not knowing what happened.
If you can learn to be more present, you will feel the benefit. If you feel the warmth of the sun... If you notice the softness of your children’s hands, and you hear them laughing... If you appreciate the feeling of your head sinking into the pillow after a hard day’s work... you will feel the benefits. There are millions of moments that you might miss by being distracted. But if you are truly present for your life, you will be rewarded along the way with joy, gratitude and satisfaction.
How else can you meditate?
Back to the cross-leggedness of the stereotypical meditator. Of course, you can sit cross-legged, on a cushion with your eyes closed and your thumbs and first fingertips touching... in fact I do something similar to that myself sometimes, if that’s where my mood takes me. But I just want you to know there are SO many other ways of meditating and of encouraging mindfulness.
I was reminded of this over Christmas last year, when my lovely mum gave me a Rolife Book Nook as a gift. If you don’t know what a book nook is, you can see them here ... but it’s basically a miniature room that you put together from a kit. And if you love miniature things, like dolls houses etc, then you’d love them! I had chosen it, so I was excited about it coming and even more excited about having the time and space to get started on it.
There was something about the size of everything that meant it needed all my concentration. It was a bit fiddly, but not to the point of being frustrating. I needed to make sure I had found the right piece, could pop it out without it breaking, sanded it down until it was smooth to the touch and then fit it in wherever it needed to go, checking back at the instructions as I went.
I was focused... sometimes for 3 hours at a time! The whole way through, I was mindful of the disappointment that was coming when I got to the end (because of it being over), so I enjoyed every minute of it. I didn’t rush it (if anything, I did it as slowly as possible so it lasted longer!) and I certainly didn’t do anything else at the same time. That was actually meditation for me. I loved the process and it was made even better because I ended up with something beautiful at the end as well, that now sits in my lounge.
My finished Book Nook
You’re more likely to practice meditation if you can find a way to do it that you enjoy... i.e. relishing the ‘journey’ rather than just being set on the destination of being ‘better at focusing your mind’. Besides, that's the point – that there isn’t really a destination, you’re practicing being present for the ‘journey’.
So, if you don’t want to sit cross-legged, and you don’t have a Book Nook to build, how else can you do it? Here are some other activities that you could see as meditation, or at least do mindfully:
walking/being in nature
Running (try it without music)
playing sport
playing with your children or pets
cooking
eating
showering/self-care
feeding your baby
Unfortunately, it’s also possible to do most of those things mindLESSly, ie while doing something else, perhaps whilst also looking at your phone, which most of us do to some extent? (Even in the shower you could be running through your day’s tasks instead of actually experiencing the shower), so the challenge is to be present whilst you’re doing whatever you’re doing. Maybe you could start with just one thing a day more mindfully? Or even just ten minutes of one thing?
Remember the regularity is what’s key, and the practice of bringing your wandering mind back over and over, not how good you are at staying focused. So, it’s better to do 5 or 10 minutes every day, than 30 minutes once a week.
If you need a few extra ideas, please see my guide on simplifying self-care – some easy ideas of how you can incorporate little snippets of self-care into your daily life by being more mindful.
How will you start?