"Mindfulness" may be a word that can't readily be dismissed as trivia.
Yes, it's current among Fortune 500 executives who have "leadership coaches" as well as with the moneyed earnest, who shop at Whole Foods, where Mindful magazine is on the newsstand.
"Mindfulness" became an American brand when the be-here-now Eastern-inflected explorations of the '60s came to dovetail with self-improvement regimes. In the 1970s, Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist in New England, saw in "mindfulness" a chance to scrub meditation of its religious origins. Kabat-Zinn believed that many of the secular people who could most benefit were turned off by the whiffs of reincarnation and other religious esoteric that clung to it. So he devised a new and pleasing definition of "mindfulness," one that now makes no mention of enlightenment. "The awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."
Under cover of this innocuous word, Buddhist meditation nosed its way into a secular audience bent on personal growth and even success strategies. The idea that people might overcome psychological and physiological shortcomings with self-induced comforting thoughts had already taken hold by other names: positive thinking, the recovery movement, self-help.
In the United States and abroad, the powerful have really made mindfulness their own, exacting from the delicate idea concrete promises of longer lives and greater productivity.
Mindfulness as "keeping in tune" has a nice ring to it. But it's "focused on the task at hand" that appeals to managers, who are conscious of performance goals. Might workplace mindfulness be just another way to keep employees undistracted and to get them to work harder?