Understanding Yoga & Mindfulness
While yoga, mindfulness, and meditation are at times used in a casually interchangeable way, or as umbrella terms for contemplative practices, they are distinct from each other even as they bump up against, overlap, or support each other.
Mindfulness
One definition of mindfulness that I like comes from Amy Saltzman: “Mindfulness is paying attention to your life, here and now, with kindness and curiosity.” While mindfulness is often talked about in connection with emotional regulation, it’s a misunderstanding to think of it as learning to control your emotions. Rather, mindfulness explores living with all emotions and thoughts, and developing a more compassionate relationship with them. It’s about present-moment awareness and the lens that you choose to examine the present moment with. This lens is sometimes called “nonjudgmental awareness.”
Yoga
Yoga is a set of practices and philosophies that in many ways has the same goal of mindfulness—but with more specificity and usually more of a defined method of practice. Yoga can be a type of mindfulness practice, but only when that is intentional—when the practices are undertaken with a commitment to kindness and curiosity about our experience. This is the real intention of yoga, but it is also possible to do yoga practices with an attitude of achievement, competition, self-loathing, and so on, and some people do yoga practices without being very mindful (although many wouldn’t call that yoga but rather “yoga-like” exercises). But yoga, unlike mindfulness, gives significant weight to our capacity to use our body, breath, and mind to change our state or our experience.
Meditation
Meditation is a term that describes focused attention. In some, the intention is to be aware of the present moment, but in others we place our awareness on an external object or a visualization of some sort. In others, the intention is to cultivate a particular quality, such as compassion or generosity. Another way of using the word “meditate” is in place of the words “to study”; the word “meditation” comes from a root that means “to think” or “ponder” or “contemplate.” What we are usually describing in meditation is the self-study of our own minds. Mindfulness meditation is one type of meditation, but there are many others.
Credit: Little Flower Yoga