Mindfulness vs. Meditation: What is the Difference?
What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
Is there a difference?
Likely, the answer to this question depends on who you ask, on how they practice, on the populations they teach.
But there are, in fact, differences between mindfulness and meditation.
The terms “mindfulness” and “meditation” are often used interchangeably, however, while the two share properties, they are not the same.
Mindfulness is the process of being aware of the thoughts and actions of yourself, others, and your surroundings including self-love and acceptance, building positive relationships, gratitude, encouragement, empathy, bullying, time management, positive affirmations, releasing feelings, and working through feelings such as anger, stress, anxiety, and sadness.
Mindfulness requires a conscious thought process that, with practice, becomes subconscious.
Meditation, on the other hand, is not the process of thinking. Although an intentional thought process may be used in the beginning stages of achieving a meditative state, meditation is a conscious process of achieving inner peace and higher levels of self-awareness by noticing sensations in your body and your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences.
Reaching a meditative state can be a long, difficult process. For most people, it IS a difficult process, one that is easy to give up on.
But don’t give up.
I promise, it’s worth it!
Meditation is such an amazing feeling and experience.
Achieving a meditative state is also a process in which the experience is different at varying levels of perception. For example, in perceiving the body, you may notice pain, pressure, touch, numbness, or tingling. But, when perceiving thoughts, you become aware of the stream of thoughts you are having, why you are having these thoughts, and the different types of thinking.
The major difference between mindfulness and meditation is that mindfulness is a cognitive process and meditation is a biological process.
In mindfulness, conscious thoughts are used to evaluate and recognize feelings, thoughts, sensations in your body, of those around you, and of your surroundings.
In meditation, thoughts decrease and the body and mind become quieter. The energy that was previously used to think is released and and used to energize the brain. An energized brain is happy, attentive, and active with clear and enhanced perception.
In fact, research has shown that those who practice meditation have higher amounts of grey matter in their brains than those who do not meditate. Grey matter in the brain contains neuronal cell bodies that serve to process information. Grey matter is found in areas of the brain responsible for decision-making, intention, speech, emotions, memory, seeing and hearing, compassion, and self-control.
Mindfulness & Meditation for Children
The practices of mindfulness and meditation are especially important for children. Because of the varying stages of development in childhood and adolescence, children often experience higher feelings of peer pressure, lack of self-esteem, and overwhelmed with school and extracurricular activities, for examples.
It is important that we teach our children how to be aware of how they are feeling, why they are feeling this way, and how to handle these emotions effectively and appropriately.
This is not to say that adults do not feel these emotions, or that their emotional processes are less important than those of children.
However, because children are still growing and developing, their brains are biologically unable to process emotions and how to handle them (decision-making).
An adult brain, fully developed, can.
This is why you see young children often frustrated over what adults think are “trivial” things.
For example, in class when a student is frustrated over a math problem and throws their pencil across the room. The teacher sees this as a problem- because the student threw something across the room. But the pencil flying across the room isn’t the entire problem, only the surface of the problem.
I’m not justifying this behaviour, throwing things across the room is unacceptable and dangerous. However, when a child is frustrated, their brains are unable to process how they are feeling and turn it into appropriate decision-making for how to manage those feelings. So a pencil is thrown across the room because the student doesn’t know what else to do.
And, if we do not teach our children how to mange their emotions from a young age, they will grow into adults who cannot handle life and the world around them.
This is why teaching mindfulness and meditation to our children is so important. Mindfulness and meditation will provide our children with the tools and skills they need to appropriately, safely, and effectively mange their emotions and thought processes.
By bringing their attention inward children, and adults, will learn how to identify how they are feeling, why they are feeling that way, and how to mange and change how they are feeling.
By bringing the attention inward, we teach children and adults compassion, empathy, gratitude, persistence and concentration, how to work through feelings of sadness, anxiety, and stress, and self-love and acceptance.
Megan