It is, that's a common feature to any practice, it is essentially the foundational skill for all practice, but beyond that commonality, one's approach to meditation may be accented differently. Like in concentrative meditation, your objective is to develop 'one-pointedness'. For the sake of clarifying what one-pointedness is, you could think of an animal like a squirrel, specifically that they're really scatterbrained. It's a good survival strategy for them, by having their attention flit around from sense sphere to sense sphere, or from one object to another object, they can keep an eye out for threats. In concentrative meditation we're trying to train the very opposite of that tendency, since humans are kind of like squirrels in that regard. Should we develop that ability to not have our minds be drawn this way or that way without our consent, then our minds become very pliant, and they will do what we want them to do.
But you do have to observe your impulses to develop that skill, it's just that in this case you're observing them in order to release or relax them, so your mind progressively calms down more by letting go of more, and thus gradually becomes 'unified'. In fact a 'collected' mind is a better term to use than a 'concentrated' mind, since the latter implies a lot of effort, while the former implies a more gradual 'coming-together'. In fact a 'collected' mind is exactly what is suggested by the original Pali/Sanskrit word (samadhi).
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