Be where you are, otherwise you will miss your life - Buddha

Mindful Action is when the thought doesn't drift away from the activity being performed.

Meditation is complete seizure of physical and mental activities.

Seizure of physical activities is pretty easy. In fact we do it everyday. During sleep, physical activities seize, yet, thousands of mental modifications goes on happening.

Bringing mental activities to a complete halt is not an easy feat. A significant number of people have embarked on this impossible journey of trying to shutdown their mind with brute force. Let me be the harbinger and break it to you; Just sitting down in meditative poses and expecting the mind to get to rest by itself is never going to happen. There is no Santa Claus. Drop this madness of sitting in padmasana without the necessary priming.

On the contrary, unleashing the mind and attaching it to a specific activity is quite easy. It is the core nature of mind - to cling. Practice of attaching the mind and body is mindful action. In plain language, doing something where all the thoughts are hovering around that task in hand is mindful action.

Dancers, singers, inventors, sportsperson naturally practice it everyday. When, Lionel Messi is dribbling the football past the opponents, does he think, "what is for dinner?" But a mailman's mind travel places while (s)he is driving the truck to deliver. This is the curse of any routine work. Once human mind recognizes a pattern and continues to perform the same task, the mind starts edging away from that repetitive action.

Hence, the routine workers are in dire need to find ways to explicitly bring the mind back to the body. As simple as, threading a needle, cutting vegetables to precision, shaping the beard with symmetry to making an impossible bottle are simple day to day tasks one can practice to keep the thought and action on the same thing for a specific span of time. Challenging self often and practicing new things every now and then, will continue closing the gap between mind (thought) and body (action). Basically, fill the evening hours with something interesting.

When these mindful actions fill the whole day,  the mind automatically seizes when body is at rest. Meditation sets in naturally.