Lent 2026: day 13 – mindfulness and meditation

Are meditation and mindfulness the same? Both are spiritual practices engaged in by many secular people – indeed, by atheists even. And yet both verge on the metaphysical in terms of how they engage consciousness

Though often associated with each other, they are different. In today's post, I present how I see the difference between meditating and being mindful.

Let's start with definitions: mindfulness is easy; it means the state of being full of mind. Being alert, heedful, attentive; being aware of consequences; being in the flow, latching on to intuition, having presence of mind. Paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Mindfulness is being aware of being aware ('metacognition'); it is the cognitive skill of sustaining that metacognitive awareness towards the contents of one's own mind and bodily sensations in the present moment. This involves monitoring and regulating one's attention. Mindful awareness can be focused on internal phenomena such as thoughts and emotions, as well as external phenomena, such as speech or movement. 

Meditation requires more explanation, so before the definitions, the etymology. The word comes from the Latin meditatus (to meditate, to think over, consider), from the Proto-Indo-European med- (to measure, limit, consider, advise). Meditation is defined as "A devotional exercise of contemplation, or achieving an altered state of consciousness, such as vacancy of mind, through relaxed or focused mental activity of a non-substance-induced nature". 

The two are different, and which you are more likely to practice boils down, I think, a great deal to personality. Meditation requires more discipline; allocating time for it – at the expense of any other activity – is tough. People on the ADHD spectrum find it harder to meditate; staying focused is difficult. But mindfulness requires the occasional nudge to get back on track.

I have prompted Google Gemini and ChatGPT to come up with illustrations that highlight the difference between the two. First Gemini (to whom I'd say: "Don't pick the flowers! Let them live and bring joy to others!)

And then ChatGPT (to whom I'd say: "Don't waste money on takeaway coffee!").

Interesting how both AIs have gone for the same visual comparisons.

I see mindfulness as being consciousness at the interface with matter. Will I catch that train? Yes, if I don't lose track of the time. Will I catch flu when in town tomorrow? No, not if I'm aware of people around me coughing and sneezing and keep a healthy distance from them. Will I have a car crash? No, not if I drive with total situational awareness for the entire duration of my drive. 

Mindfulness should be taught to children before they hit adolescence, when normal thinking gets switched off by hormonal rush. My mother taught me the saying quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem as a child; it was only in middle age that I really got the importance of this piece of wisdom. Essentially, it says, whatever you do, do it mindfully. 

Mindfulness – whether it's when stepping off a bus or knowing that you have switched off the iron before leaving home – should be ever-present at our interface between the material world and consciousness. In a way, the point of the cross where the spiritual crosses the material.

Meditation – on the other hand, is purposefully cutting the inner world of consciousness and the mind off from the noisy, distracting material world. Meditation is about calming oneself into a trance and entering the Flow from within an altered state.

I try to be mindful of the need to be mindful (metamindfulness) as often as I can!

Lent 2025: day 13
You, your consciousness and Time

Lent 2024: day 13 
Aesthetics, metaphysics and ethics

Lent 2023, day 13
High Church and Low: Religious Styles and Personality

Lent 2022: day 13
Comfort and Luxury, Consciousness and Ego

Lent 2021: day 13
Comfort and Luxury – knowing when to stop

Lent 2020: Day 13
Holy buildings and the sense of the mystical

From automatic action to mindful control

This is a familiar notion in terms of acquiring any new skill. As an example, I'll take learning to drive a car.

You start from the position of unconscious incompetence. You don't even know what it is that you don't know. As it begins to dawn on you just how much you need to understand – movements you must coordinate, mental checklists to master, traffic signs, and the rules of the road you must remember – you move to conscious incompetence. 

Now you are beginning to be aware of how much there is to learn, you start putting the theory into practice. In time, you move towards conscious competence. You're aware of depressing the clutch each time before shifting gear; you're aware of all the actions needed to negotiate a roundabout – brakes, shift down, mirror, indicate; looking left and right. 

Your first driving lessons are stressful. The brain is fatigued; fear overcomes you as you realise that you're in control of a tonne or more of steel, glass and rubber, moving with deadly kinetic potential at thirty metres per second. 

But with time, with practice, the process of driving a car becomes easier and easier. Now you have acquired unconscious competence. You no longer have to think about what you're doing – you just do it. Everything falls into place. You take your test, and you pass it. Sometimes it takes several attempts; no matter – you have become a driver. And you're not unique in this. 

Billions of other human beings have acquired this skill too. It has become automatic. We've all experienced that moment when, lost in your own train of thoughts, you suddenly realise you have covered many miles without having any conscious awareness of the actual road, landmarks passed, especially if it's a well-known route. 

So – my point is this. Is unconscious competence enough? 

It's in this state of mind that most road accidents occur. Bear this in mind – 3,700 people died in road accidents around the world yesterday. Half of them will have been pedestrians or cyclists. Nearly all accidents, fatal or those resulting in injury, will have happened with the participants in a state of unawareness.

Setting off for a walk, or a drive, or a motorbike ride, or a train journey, I utter a small prayer for my safe return, coupled to an expression of conscious gratitude for having got through another day, for my health, for my luck. 

And here's the thing. Is the very act of being aware of the need to consciously look out for myself physical mindfulness – sharpening my observation, my forethought and anticipation, taking care – or is there a metaphysical element involved as well? A guardian angel looking out for me? The same spiritual entity that provides me with intuition, that aligns my flow with that of the Cosmos?

Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem. 

Meditation means consciously disassociating the mind from matter. Mindfulness is engaging with the physical realm in a state of high awareness. 

This time last year:
Keep on keeping on

This time two years ago:
Time and Consciousness

This time three years ago:
Altered states - higher planes

This time eight years ago:
Warsaw-Radom line modernisation - Czachówek

This time 14 years ago:
Climbing Mogielica

Inspiration

Many years ago, I had a dream in which I invented a ZemBord™, a wooden hemisphere upon which I could sit cross-legged, and rock gently in all 360 degrees while meditating. [The name is exactly as it was spelt and styled in my dream - Zem, not zen, Bord, not board, and the trademark symbol.] To my delight, my friend Richard B built me one! Sadly, it had one big drawback - its weight would indent any wooden floor, and it will not move on a carpet. It can only function on a smooth, hard, surface. And so it sat for a long while, unused, in my parents' garage. Now, it finds itself in Jakubowizna, in daily use, on a hard, smooth floor. Is it the only one in the world, I wonder?

I use it for back-extension exercise - lying down on it, my navel exactly over the spindle hole in the centre, I adopt a neutral position, hands clasped behind my head, legs extended. I then arch my back, lifting my legs so my thighs are no longer in contact with the wood - they curve upward and around, like a scorpion's sting. This has the effect of shifting my centre of gravity forward. Slowly; I start to rock forward, until the tip of my nose touches the floor. I hold this position for the count of five, before returning my legs to the straight position, rocking backwards as I do to the neutral position. I repeat this eight times - catch my breath - and do a second set of eight back extensions. I have to do this bare-chested; if I wear a shirt, I slide off! Recommended to me by Paul W. as a complementary antidote to doing plank exercises, I see online that these can be done on a large, inflatable ball. However, the ZemBord™ is clearly superior for this.

It is also a meditation aid, a place to sit and think, or just let the stream of consciousness go. And so it was last night, after waking up from a dream (phew!) and then not being able to return to sleep, that I sat on the ZemBord™ in the darkened front room. Suddenly - a flash of inspiration. Out of nowhere. Two entirely unrelated things linked! The triangular containers from Castello Danablu cheese (a dietary staple for me), and the moss that I had been cutting out from between the patio tiles at the weekend. And below, dear reader, is the result. Note the different colours of moss - the brighter green are from the patio to the east of the house, that get the least sunlight; the more scorched ones are from the southern patio, exposed to most hours of direct sunshine.

I was happy with the result - this is what I had been inspired to do while rocking on the ZemBord™. Now - I can see a whole world of interior decorating open up to indoor moss... I need to learn how to care for them... The six can be broken into two semicircles of three containers. To something - like this (below). Between them stands the Laibstein (from the German - Laib, loaf, and Stein - stone). A beautifully symmetrical and weighty ornament, found in a local field.

Returning to the subject of the ZemBord™, yesterday I watched a YouTube interview with Bruce R. Fenton (@GeologicalSETI on Twitter), about the mystery of tektites - in particular the ones found in the Australasian strewnfield, the result of an event that occurred about 788,000 years ago. Molten glass flying through the Earth's upper atmosphere cooled to form 'buttons' that look like the one below.

We know that they're not volcanic in origin (the strewnfield covers an area far vaster than any terrestrial volcano could ever reach, maybe about 20% of the earth's surface); they're not from lunar volcanoes (wrong mineral content); and if they were from an asteroid impact of this scale, there would have been a mass-extinction event - one didn't happen 788,000 years ago. Indeed, something else happened at that exact time - a series of rapid mutations in human genes which sharply increased the gulf between Homo sapiens and other primates. Bruce Fenton believes the two are connected.

The ZemBord™ is like a flat-topped button tektite; a dream that inspired me many years ago - synchronicities are everywhere, if you are open to them.

This time eight years ago:
Food shopping and dietary update

This time nine years ago:
Photos from the Radom Air Show, part 1

This time ten years ago:
Offloading PKP's risk at W-wa Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Time to be stuffing yourself with fresh fruit

This time 13 years ago:
First notes of autumn in the air

This time 15 years ago:
Large spider catches fly

Focus - Zen in the Art of Meditation - Lent 2022: Day 18

I have written on numerous occasions about the importance of focus, and how important focus is in life - both the everyday and the spiritual. Outside of monasteries, meditative practice in a state of focus is all but unknown in Western tradition.

Zen Buddhism places great importance upon focus, exclusion of external sources of mental stimuli - extraneous thoughts that tend to distract. From Wikipedia: "The term Zen is derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the Middle Chinese word 禪 (chán), an abbreviation of 禪那 (chánnà), which is a Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word ध्यान dhyāna ("meditation"). Zen emphasises rigorous self-restraint, meditation-practice, insight into the nature of mind, ("perceiving the true nature") and nature of things (without arrogance or egotism), and the personal expression of this insight in daily life".

Spiritual practice can take many forms, to a great extent we are shaped by our cultural history. Globalisation has opened us to religious traditions from all over the world - from animistic shamanism to the great religious of the East. Until the early 20th century, few Westerners other than academics or travellers had any contact with religions other than Christianity and Judaism. 

As my brother pointed out to me many years ago, the American experience of the Far East in the aftermath of the Pacific War fed into the 'flower-power' revolution of the late 1960s, as notions borrowed from Zen Buddhism made their way into campuses. The cult philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was written by Robert Pirsig, who served with the US Army in Korea in 1946-48 before returning to the University of Minnesota is a good example. The English-born writer Alan Watts was another significant populariser of Zen at that time.

Zen monasteries would inculcate focus on student monks with physical brutality - any monk whom the teacher suspected of having a wandering mind could count on being struck across the back with a bamboo rod. Sitting in meditation for hours at a time required high degrees of self-discipline. Such an education - the mental equivalent of intense physical training required to become a professional athlete - would bear fruit in maturity.

Focus on the little things. Can I make my morning coffee without spilling any ground coffee between the tin and the espresso machine? As I fill and level the container? Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem, as me ol' mum used to say. Whatever you do, big or small -  do it prudently and focus on the outcome.

That's the physical aspect of focus. Zen in the Art of Archery - bow, string, arrow, target and archer must become as one. But how about mental, internal focus, not concentrated on muscle movement and hand-eye coordination?

In a meditative state, one can be truly aware of the subjective conscious experience, detached from the vacuous noise made by the Ego. 

Too many of use suffer from 'butterfly mind' - the tendency to quickly lose interest in one activity or thought process before moving onto another, quite unrelated one. This is a trait associated with being a generalist, rather than specialist - Newton, Darwin or Einstein could not have achieved what they did with minds that would frequently wander off at a tangent.

Training the mind to focus is important. Setting yourself goals and deadlines is helpful. My Lenten goal to post new content to this blog each day has worked well. But Lent encompasses one-eighth of the year - keeping it going all year round isn't easy.

This time last year:
I'm better than you. No, I am!

This time two years ago:
Refutation (I)

This time six years ago:
Before Spin by Keith McDowall

This time seven years ago:
Mill town Łódź 

This time eight years ago:
Today, a tipping point in European history

This time nine years ago:
Church and state

This time ten years ago:
Scrub fire in Jeziorki

This time 11 years ago:
Airbus A380 visits Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Lenten recipe no. 7

This time 13 years ago:
Poland's economy - upturn in sight?

This time 14 years ago:
Six weeks into Lent

Focusing on the spiritual is not easy! Lent 2022: Day 16

The human mind has a tendency to stray, to wander off track, to meander. Trains of thought rumble on through your mind, often reaching seemingly random sets of points and diverting onto different lines, calling at different stations. There are trains of thought and then there is the stream of consciousness - the default when the mind is not processing thought, when the mind is freewheeling, like during the moments during which you are falling asleep - or meditating.

Meditation - indeed prayer - requires a degree of focus that is difficult to attain. Whatever you try to exclude from thought has a habit of sneaking back in. Distractions bombard you. Our online life in particular is now plagued by continual attempts to derail our train of thought - to divert onto some other website, to look at this, to buy something, to consider this idea or that.

Clearing the mind requires a great - and conscious - effort. 

During this Lent, as for the past few, I have set myself a goal of writing a new post each day. Discipline is called for! If only I could be consistently productive throughout the whole year... And focus - will I be able to get to the end of this post without leaving my laptop to do something else - make myself a tea, answer an email? 

I stumble for a minute, I'm lost for a word - my initial reaction is to stand up and go and do something else. But no - I must focus!

Just as the human battle with procrastination is constant and life-long (especially when there's no external deadline), the battle with distraction is hard to win. Your mind will give in to the temptations of instant gratification; loss of focus as another idea pops into your head [what's that plane flying over now? Might be something military, rare - switch on ADS-B Exchange] ...

Meditation requires time consciously set aside. Walking is a good time to meditate, but again there are too many distractions. From overhead planes to barking dogs, speeding cars, progress on the S7, litter - what I'd like to do to the dirty bastard who dumped an old fridge on ulica Nawłocka... emptying my mind is easier in the countryside than in Jeziorki.

At night of late my mind is distracted by the war. I find myself praying for the safety of innocent people, at risk of death, under bombardment because of one lunatic whom God seems unwilling to incapacitate. But then, where was God in Auschwitz - and off goes my mind again, wandering, rather than focusing.

I know I'm getting it right when I feel God's love within - that inner hug, and eyes welling up with tears. This requires a specific state of mind; calm, relaxed, accepting. Even at night, lying in bed, it's difficult. In normal times, I have a tendency to just drop off to sleep. Now, with the anxiety and stress, my mind is racing. I think how awful it must be sleeping in a shelter every night in Kharkiv or Mariupol, how stressful... I can't get back to sleep. So I do the breathing exercise - breathing in... count to seven heartbeats as I fill my lungs - then hold it for seven - then release slowly for seven, and - the hardest bit - keeping lungs empty for the count of seven before slowly refilling them. Repeat seven times, thinking about nothing but the breathing and the count - works every time - but not now.

Daytime meditation works best for me on the działka, in summer, when there's little or no office work; wide awake, consciously aware - but not letting any train of thought depart from the station. Now, I must admit it's not easy. It's particularly difficult at a time of anxiety. Hence the need for comfort in life, to remove sources of discomfort. Would that it were so simple in this case...

This time last year:
The ups and downs of life

This time two years ago:
Seeking a religious symbol with meaning

This time three years ago:
New views

This time four years ago:
Humanity in a Creative Universe: a summary

This time nine years ago:
Always let your conscience be your guide

This time ten years ago:
Lenten recipe with prawns 

This time 13 years ago:
Polish economy - recession thwarted

Qualia meditations

Coffee should be taken once a day, first thing in the morning. Yesterday, I fancied a cup around two pm. A small cup, one heaped tablespoon of ground coffee. Now, as is pointed out by anticoffee activist Michael Pollan, coffee has a half-life of six hours, which means a quarter life of 12 hours (ie it still retains a quarter of its potency 12 hours after ingestion). So, it's two am, and though I had no problems falling asleep three hours earlier, I couldn't return to sleep after waking for a wee.

No matter! Time to meditate!

But how?

A fresh insight came to me on my walk yesterday that the essence of qualia - a subjective experience, depends on having something objective, something material to have the qualia of! We might not agree as to the taste sensation of coriander or aniseed or chilli pepper, but we can all agree that such things physically exist, even though we all experience them differently.

Now, the essence of classic nonduality meditation is emptying the mind of objective thoughts (about what's on my to-do list, my worries etc), switching off the train of thought, and focusing down on the subjective innermost essence of me-ness - namely consciousness. Arriving at such a perfect state brings about a state of unity - your consciousness is on a par with every other conscious being in the Universe. And this, according to panpsychics, is every single subatomic particle.

So - here I am lying awake at half past two in the morning when I have another insight: Imagine brushing the tip of your nose with a feather. A wing feather or downy feather? You can indeed imagine both. Widthwise or lengthwise? Again, imagine both. This is the essence of qualia memory - capturing the experience for recall at a future time. 

Here's another experience of qualia to meditate upon; more usual this time. Imagine washing your hands. Run the tap, pick up the bar of soap, rub your hands together  under the flow of the warm water, feel your hands becoming slippery as the dirt starts to lift away; you rinse the soap off, dry your hands on a warm, fluffy towel, sensing the inner pleasure of knowing you have clean hands.

I take this further. I imagine washing my hands in the cloakroom of my primary school, Oaklands Road, Hanwell, London W7, the early 1960s. The specific smell of the small, cream-coloured institutional bars of soap. The slim metal chain connecting the rubber plug to the washbasin. The hairline crackles in the smooth ceramic. The gurgle of the water disappearing down the plughole. The machine that dispenses the long roll of cloth hand-drying towel... you pull a length down with a clunk, dry your hands, the next boy goes up to it... clunk. The clanging of a hand-bell, rung by Miss. Playtime is over! Back to the classrooms...

A short example of qualia meditation. I have conjured up a qualia memory, something objective, yet experienced subjectively by me, 55 years ago. 

Back to last night. I am on the point of falling asleep, when I remember a dream or dreams of a levitating hoop, and using it to travel between Ealing Broadway and Pitshanger Lane. Imagine a hoop, the sort you'd have in school PE classes, or a hula-hoop. Imagine it floating horizontally about a metre above the ground. You step into it, grasping opposing edges with your hands. You then lift your feet off the ground. The hoop wobbles, but it supports your weight - your feet stay off the ground. You lean back, then you hook one leg, then the other, over the hoop. You are fully supported by the hoop; backs of knees, hands, forearms and upper back all resting on it. It feels unstable, but you are hovering a metre off the pavement. Using your hand nearest the garden wall, you begin to propel yourself forward. You are gliding, but as you slow down, you once again need to give yourself some momentum by pulling yourself on a gate or roadsign or street light, and so, wobbling, unstable, but still a metre off the ground, you are moving along. Now this is a dream qualia memory. The memory of a dream, returned. I fall asleep.

All meditation requires one to set aside the ego. Neither a moment of triumph nor embarrassment; not a moment of despair or jubilation - just a moment of being supremely aware of all around, the consciousness pure, unsullied by your biology or predicament. The moment when the calm 'inner you' - not the 'outer you' visible to others or to you in reflections - is aware of being.

This time seven years ago:
Public and private land in Poland

This time eight year:
Two Warsaw sunsets over water

This time 11 years ago:
Farewell to the old footbridge over Puławska

This time 12 years ago:
Let's ban cars with engines over 2.0 litres

This time 14 years ago:
Ul. Kórnicka gets paved over