Wrestling with Meditation and Mindfulness — clarity at last?

The terms meditation and mindfulness are more tossed around these days than your average iceberg lettuce.

As a person that tries to practice both, and noticing some general benefits, I get confused about which practice is giving me which life benefits.

And then recently, I came across a useful distinction in news anchorman Dan Harris’s hilarious book, 10% Happier. It came through Dan’s friend, author Sam Harris, who is featured in the book:

He tells Harris, ‘you’ll get better at mindfulness as you practice meditating.’ As if the skill of mindfulness were the real prize! Intriguing, as I’d absorbed the belief from somewhere that it was the other way around.

Like a dog with a bone — or perhaps just like a journalist — the book chronicles Dan’s pursuit of practical tools he could use to help him create mind space during life’s high pressure moments. How not to be ‘pulled around by the nose’ by his ego. And presumably how to avoid a repeat of losing his shit live on national TV.

Dan ultimately finds assist in the teachings of Dr Mark Epstein and other members of a small network of psychologists spreading Buddhist principles in the US. Viewing his experience through the lens of my own, what I got was this:

Meditating is something we do before anything bad has happened. We train the mind to come back to a focus point — usually the breath. We can go a step further and label our thoughts, and start to observe their cascading ‘from behind the waterfall’. (I practice this during my daily yoga class, as I haven’t found the discipline to take to a cushion in the morning.)

Mindfulness by distinction is what happens in the moment of actually living — every moment if we choose. It gives you practical help when your teenager is being tyrannical, your girlfriend is being a jerk, or even when you are just feeling ultra bored. When we get skilled at it, mindfulness opens up the space between stimulus and response — the space that gives us a choice. It is also what helps us to see that we are not our thoughts.

So that’s the intersection a little clearer for me.

Helping us to become mind-ful is not meditation’s only value of course. Being an improver of focus, practicing it helps with creativity — and getting shit done in general.

Similarly, the mindfulness superpower helps us with more than just life’s sticky situations. It improves our ability to be present, to accept difficult emotions, and with things like easily feeling joy and gratitude.