If you have ever completed a mindfulness course, downloaded a mindfulness app, or been referred by your GP for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, you have already been doing something that originated in Buddhist meditation. The word “mindfulness” has travelled so far from its source that most people now encounter it as a secular wellbeing technique with no particular history. That is not a problem, exactly, but it does mean sometimes something has been left behind along the way.
The question “what is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?” is one of the most commonly asked questions for us. The usual answer, that mindfulness is a way of being present, while meditation is a formal practice, is not wrong necessarily, but it needs greater nuance. From a Buddhist perspective, the relationship between the two is richer, more specific, and more useful than most popular accounts may suggest. Understanding it can change the way you practise.
At Samadhi, we teach meditation rooted in the Buddhist tradition — shamatha, vipashyana, and the heart practices of loving-kindness and compassion — through online classes, retreats across the UK, and our study programme, The Buddha’s Path. Many of the people who join us have some mindfulness experience already. What they often discover is not that mindfulness was inauthentic, but that there is a much larger landscape available to them too.
Where "mindfulness" comes from
The English word “mindfulness” is a translation of the Pali term sati (Sanskrit: smṛti), which appears throughout the Buddha’s earliest recorded teachings. Sati originally carried a sense closer to “remembering” or “bearing in mind” — the capacity to hold something in awareness without forgetting it. The word “mindfulness” was coined as a translation in the late nineteenth century, and the word has been doing a remarkable amount of heavy lifting ever since.
In the Buddhist tradition, sati is not a standalone technique. It is actually an aspect of your mind, a mental factor. The Buddha discusses using this factor wisely as one component of the Noble Eightfold Path — specifically sammā sati, “right mindfulness” or “wise mindfulness.” But mindfulness always operates alongside other factors of the mind, such as intention, attention, investigation, and what the tradition calls introspection (sampajañña), the capacity to monitor the quality of your own awareness. Mindfulness, in other words, was never meant to work alone.
The modern secular mindfulness movement traces largely to Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in 1979 developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Kabat-Zinn studied with Buddhist teachers including Thich Nhat Hanh and practitioners in the Vipassana tradition, and he deliberately extracted the techniques from their religious framework to make them accessible in a clinical setting. This was, in many ways, a generous and skilful act. MBSR has helped millions of people, and its derivative, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), is now recommended by NICE in the UK for preventing depressive relapse. These are wonderful achievements.
But extraction often means something gets left behind.
What secular mindfulness does well
The secular approach gets so much right, and the Buddhist tradition benefits nothing from dismissing it.
Secular mindfulness programmes teach people to pay attention to present-moment experience, thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, without immediately reacting. This can be such a valuable practice. For someone who has spent so long on autopilot, thrown about by habitual stress responses, learning to pause and notice what is going on in a nonreactive way is a real change from the norm. The research base is strong: mindfulness-based programmes have been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, improve emotional regulation, and lower stress. The NHS offers MBCT precisely because it works.
Secular mindfulness has also made contemplative practice accessible to people who would never walk into a Buddhist centre. It meets people in hospitals, workplaces, schools, and therapy rooms. It asks nothing of them in terms of belief. For a great many people, it is the first time they have been given permission to sit quietly and pay attention to their own minds.
All of this is good. And yet, when people who have done mindfulness courses come to our retreats or classes, they often notice that there can be more to this than they first realised.
What the Buddhist tradition adds
I have had MBSR training. And we’ve had MBSR-trained teachers join our retreats and sometimes comment, with surprise, on three things in particular. Each points to something they feel the secular extraction has left out.
Relaxation as a skill, not a side effect. In some secular mindfulness training, I was told that “relaxation” can be almost a taboo word. You do not want to promise a particular outcome, so you avoid implying that meditation will make you feel a certain way. This is understandable, but the Buddhist tradition takes a quite different view. In shamatha meditation, relaxation is not a pleasant bonus. It is a skill, and the first and most foundational skill you develop for successful practice. Relaxation, as a skill, is a profound settling of the body and mind that makes stable attention possible. Without it, the tradition teaches, meditation can become an exercise in strain. Relaxation is not a destination, but it is the ground on which everything else is built.
The heart practices. Secular mindfulness tends to focus on attention and awareness. The Buddhist tradition includes these but also devotes enormous care to what are sometimes called the “heart practices” of loving-kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), empathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). Together, these are part of a comprehensive system for transforming both how you pay attention and what kind of person that attention is in service of. People who discover these practices after years of attention-only mindfulness often describe them as providing a warmth and emotional richness that was missing. We explore these “Four Immeasurables” in depth in The Buddha’s Path study programme.
Investigating the causes, not just the symptoms. Secular mindfulness teaches you to observe your thoughts and feelings without judgement. MBCT goes further than pure mindfulness and draws on cognitive-behavioural techniques to help people recognise and disengage from habitual patterns of thinking. The Buddhist tradition, however, operates at a deeper level still: it provides a comprehensive psychological framework for understanding why those patterns arise in the first place. The tradition identifies specific mental tendencies — craving, aversion, restlessness, dullness — and maps how they interact to create suffering. When you understand that your anxiety is not random but arises from identifiable causes and conditions, you gain something that observation alone, or even cognitive restructuring, cannot fully provide: the possibility of addressing the root.
Mindfulness is a component, not the whole
Here is perhaps the most important distinction. In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness — the capacity to bear something in mind without forgetting — is a component of meditation, not a synonym for it.
Buddhist meditation is a much broader endeavour. It includes shamatha (training the mind in calm, stability, and clarity), vipashyana (using that stability to investigate the nature of experience), the four immeasurables (the heart practices mentioned above), and contemplative inquiry into the causes of suffering. Mindfulness supports all of these, but it is not the whole of any of them.
B. Alan Wallace, one of the foremost Western authorities on shamatha and a key influence on the teaching at Samadhi, has argued that equating mindfulness with the totality of Buddhist meditation is like mistaking one ingredient for the entire recipe. Bare attention — simply observing without judgement — plays a role, but practised in isolation, he argues, can also prevent wholesome qualities from arising. If all you ever do is watch, you never cultivate the compassion, wisdom, and ethical sensitivity that the tradition considers essential.
This is not a criticism of secular mindfulness. It is simply a recognition that what Kabat-Zinn extracted was one strand from a much richer tapestry. The original tapestry is still there, available to anyone who wants to explore it.
So which should you practise?
This is not really an either/or question. If secular mindfulness has helped you — and for many people it really has — you have not been wasting your time. You have been developing a real and valuable skill. The question is whether you would like to explore the possibilities that training the mind can really offer.
If you have completed an MBSR or MBCT course and found yourself thinking, “I wonder if there is more to this,” you are right. The Buddhist tradition offers a complete system of mental training that includes the attentional and present-centring skills you have already begun developing, and extends them into areas that secular programmes may not reach: the cultivation of genuine inner wellbeing, the transformation of difficult emotions at their source, and an understanding of the mind that goes far beyond stress reduction.
You do not need to become Buddhist to explore this. At Samadhi, our online meditation classes draw directly on the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition but are taught in a way that is accessible to everyone, regardless of background or belief. Our podcast includes guided practices you can try at home. And if you would like a structured path through the full breadth of the tradition, The Buddha’s Path programme covers shamatha, vipashyana, the four close applications of mindfulness, and the heart practices across twelve modules — all on a donation basis.
Frequently asked questions
Is mindfulness the same as meditation? Mindfulness practice is a type of meditation, and most people encounter the two words as near-synonyms. In secular settings, “mindfulness” has become an umbrella term referring to both the practice itself and the quality of awareness it cultivates (being “mindful”). In the Buddhist tradition, however, mindfulness (sati) is something more specific: one mental faculty among several that work together in meditation. It is the part that “bears in mind” what you’re attending to, and prevents you from forgetting it. But meditation also involves introspection, concentration, compassion, investigative wisdom, and more — each a distinct skill or quality with its own training. From this perspective, mindfulness is an ingredient rather than the whole recipe. Both traditions agree, though, that meditation is not limited to sitting on a cushion. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, means familiarisation or cultivation — and this can happen anywhere. When you are caught in frustration and consciously bring patience to bear, or meet anxiety with compassion rather than resistance, that too is a form of meditation.
Is mindfulness Buddhist? The concept and practices of mindfulness originate in the Buddhist tradition, where they form part of the Noble Eightfold Path. Modern secular mindfulness programmes such as MBSR and MBCT draw on these Buddhist roots but have been adapted for clinical and secular settings. You do not need to be Buddhist to practise mindfulness, but understanding its origins can deepen your practice considerably.
What is the difference between mindfulness and shamatha? Mindfulness is one component within shamatha practice — it is the faculty that keeps your attention on the meditation object without forgetting it. But shamatha also involves introspection (monitoring the quality of your attention), specific methods such as mindfulness of breathing, and a mapped progression through stages of attentional development. Modern secular mindfulness extracts one strand from this richer system. We explore this in detail in our shamatha guide.
Can mindfulness help with anxiety? Yes. Research consistently shows that mindfulness-based practices can reduce symptoms of anxiety. The Buddhist tradition adds a further dimension: rather than simply observing anxious thoughts, practices like shamatha and the four immeasurables address the underlying mental habits that produce anxiety in the first place.
Do I need to have done mindfulness before starting Buddhist meditation? Not at all. Many people come to Buddhist meditation with no prior experience and find it perfectly accessible. If you have done mindfulness before, you will find that some of the attentional skills you have developed transfer directly.
