Mindfulness and Buddhism

There's a common public perception linking mindfulness to buddhism. This is because we spend an awful lot of our psychological suffering comes from our thinking. We realise know it's actually the thought of the thing that creates the emotional upset. So virtually all the world's cultures have evolved some kind of practice to get out of the thought stream. Some of them are what we call mindfulness, practices of doing something simple like being with the breath. And indeed, buddhist traditions have evolved those extensively.