I feel like I haven't heard the word "mindfulness" (outside of the context of a schoolmarm telling a 19th-century child to be mindful of her work) until recently, but now it seems to be everywhere. Is this a clinical term or a new-age term?
In their shotgun approach, some New Age practioners may incorporate mindfulness, but they haven't invented it...
In their urge to explain everything with the left brain :) academics and clinicians strive to explain mindfulness...
Anyway if you get the urge, it's a fun thing to learn and study. You'd probably find it beneficial/profitable, too.
It's delightful to me to learn how much of our behavior is stimulus-response and how much is choice. The concept of free will much more than a yes/no question--- it's much more like oil and water. it becomes binary if you never shake up the container, but once you do, you realize our choices and thoughts are a complex mixture of free will and reactionary behaviors :)
The habits are usually beneficial b/c they save time, but when they get in the way they can be reversed, by first becoming aware of them through mindfulness.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%B... [1]: Linehan M., Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder
The Theravadan tradition of Vipassana is sometimes called "mindfulness meditation" (it's also called "insight meditation") so there's a good chance when you hear the word it traces back to them.
If somebody's giving a teaching it has a fairly specific meaning but when people just toss it around they're essentially saying they're making an effort to pay attention to whatever's in front of them, or whatever their mind is doing, or just whatever's happening at that moment. You kind of have to pick up from context exactly what it means to the person using it.