Google the word “mindfulness” and you’ll find an abundance of websites, apps, books and guides extolling the virtues of the practice. It would be easy to think the term was coined just a few years ago by stressed-out business types keen to put their lives on a calmer and more even keel.
But the ancient cornerstone of Buddhist practice based on breathing and meditation exercises has been around for centuries, shaping lives and minds. At the very heart of Buddhist teaching, it is best summed up as a whole-body-and-mind awareness of the present moment: to be mindful is to be fully present, not lost in daydreams, anticipation, indulgences, or worry. This includes dropping the mental habit of judging everything according to whether we like it or not.
It isn’t something we do in a class for an hour on a Thursday night after work and then forget about for the rest of the week. In Eastern culture, it is a way to live your life. How does that settle with the books and apps that feed the latest fads and promise to change our lives?
A Buddhist Society conference heard recently that the mindfulness movement is in danger of being turned into a commodity, “a product to be bought and sold on the free market”, and that more than 500 scientific papers on mindfulness were being published every year, with more than two dozen UK universities now offering mindfulness courses. 
Global corporations such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and American Express, for example, as well as public sector departments, have introduced mindfulness training for their staff.
What does mindfulness really mean? The NHS choices website defines it as "paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you", as a way of improving mental wellbeing. It sounds a lot like those words of wisdom your granny used about not wishing your life away and enjoying what you have. Which makes one wonder if we really need all those books and apps.
Dr Craig Hassed is co-author of The Mindful Home, a new book which offers to unite two contemporary trends: the desire to live in a lovely home and the ever-increasing interest in the practice of mindfulness. It sounds like a cross between a television makeover show and a self-help manual. Hassed, an Australian-based expert in mindfulness who has published extensively in the areas of mind-body medicine, agrees there is the risk of commercialisation when any subject becomes popular.
“That doesn’t undermine the value of mindfulness. It just means the delivery of it can be less than optimal,” he says.
Hassed advocates the benefits of living in a mindful home – not multi-tasking when we are communicating with others, cutting down on noise and distractions and creating an enriching environment. It all sounds like common sense, but according to Hassed, most of us aren't very good at it, and instead buy into the "modern myth" that "multi-tasking" helps us use our time better and get more done, when it fact, it has a "terrible" impact on our ability to attend properly to what we are doing. 
“It’s pretty obvious that paying attention is good for learning," he says. "Kids grow up in a world that promotes distraction rather than attention and nobody ever thinks that training attention is a skill they need to develop. Especially in a world that is, as it were, driving us to distraction,” he says.
Now used frequently in the NHS to treat mental health issues as well an promote physiological benefits, mindfulness attempts to bring into focus our ever-wandering attention spans.
"If we’re not really paying attention, especially if we are multi-tasking while talking to people, it is only a superficial conversation at best and we don’t remember as much so there is much less connection between people," says Hassed.
"Children are being brought up in environments where they are on screens most of the time. It affects their ability to recognise and respond to emotional cues. Mindfulness is associated with emotional intelligence, empathy and better patterns of communication."
An estimated 2,200 mindfulness teachers have been trained to minimum standards over the past 10 years, but only about 700 were active and had professional clinical training that qualified them to teach mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to people with depression, according to a new report.
This doesn't sit well with Bhante Rewatha Thero, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk who first learned the technique as a 10-year-old novice, and now teaches an updated, secular version at the Glasgow Mindfulness Centre.
“People start teaching mindfulness without proper training," says the 44-year-old, who has been based in Scotland for 13 years. Only last month, two people asked to take the centre's eight-week course, with a view to delivering their own mindfulness course in January. "And their work was paying," he says. "This was quite shocking.
“You can’t teach mindfulness after doing an eight-week course. You are working with vulnerable people, you need to have proper training and your own personal development, what we call the embodiment of the practice. 
“You have to apply that practice into your life and only then can you teach it. If people start teaching because they can charge £250 or £300, it can be a really good income, but without proper practice …”
In a troubled, fast-paced world, focusing on the here and now can be tricky, so maybe there's more to Hassed's theory about the importance of a calm, relaxed home that you might think. There is, after all, much to be said for taking time to clear our head, take in our surroundings and count our blessings.
For those who want to take the concept further, there is The Glasgow Mindfulness Centre. Situated in a converted Maryhill flat (nicknamed the Tenement Temple) and originally set up to provide a temple to Sri Lankans living in the area, Thero’s centre offers courses to GPs and other medical professionals as well as those suffering from stress and anxiety.
He first heard of secular mindfulness after speaking to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of recognised programme of mindfulness-based stress reduction or MBSR, nine years ago, and quickly realised the exercises taught by Kabat-Zinn were very similar to those he had learned decades ago in a monastery in Kalutara province, south of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. He then studied secular mindfulness at Bangor University. 
“My devotees in Sri Lanka asked me, ‘You have been a monk for more than 25 years, why go to university in the UK and spend a lot of money to learn mindfulness from lay people?’,” he says.
“I told them I need to know because I know mindfulness but I know nothing about mindfulness in medicine, healthcare and education. 
"In my language, Singhala, we don’t have words for stress, anxiety or depression. Our life was very simple but now because of the open economy, health professionals have had to create new words to describe the problems of stress and anxiety they are dealing with. Now people from Sri Lanka are coming to Britain to learn secular mindfulness.”
Completing the circle, with a psychiatric consultant from Glasgow, Thero will return to Sri Lanka in March to train health professionals there how to deliver secular mindfulness. He laughs out loud at the paradox. “They want to know about the effects of traditional mindfulness on the brain, what kind of research has been done in the West and for me to explain more about it.”
Thero is quick to point out that mindfulness is not a therapy but a skill you develop to manage everyday stress. "I originally advertised the course as free of charge and people didn’t come," he says. "Then I said we have a standard fee, a donation. So the people who come here pay money if they can, and those who can’t pay don’t. On every course I have two or three people who don’t pay but I know genuinely they will get the benefit of this course. That money we send to Sri Lanka to educate 54 children in mindfulness, pre-school, and then we support them.”
Gillian Hendry, from Knightswood in Glasgow, became interested in mindfulness after experiencing depression and anxiety. The 31-year-old massage therapist and mother-of-one attended a taster course in Maryhill, followed by the eight-week MBSR course. Initially, she admits, she was sceptical.
“The first day I thought it was probably quite common-sense stuff, talking about breathing and meditation. I’ll be totally honest, I wasn’t completely convinced after the first week. When you start to see the results after a couple of weeks of doing the exercises and the practice, that’s what convinced me of the benefits,” she says.
“I had to do a couple of interviews and a bit of public speaking during the period of the course and I found that I have been able to bring in the practices and skills I have learned. It has really helped me to deal with anxiety. Most of anxiety is basically when you’re thinking about the past or worried about the future, it helps by bringing you back into the present moment.”
Now, she spends half an hour at the start of each day on meditation, a little bit of yoga, and linking her breathing with movement. “I think, ‘Before I even begin today I’m going to sit here and do nothing, just breathe and get to that still place, and then I’m going to get on with my day’,” she says.
Taking a few minutes at different points during the day to do basic mindfulness exercises can also help, whether she is waiting in a queue at the supermarket or about to meet a work client.
“We have automatic reactions to things. If you can give yourself a few minutes to breathe and come to terms with what is actually happening before you respond to a situation, it can help you so much,” she adds.
The benefits of mindfulness are, according to the authors of The Mindful Home, wide-ranging: "If while driving you are looking at what is happening on the road rather than thinking about what you are going to do when you get to your destination, then you are driving mindfully. If you are a student, listening to the teacher, rather than the din of your own thinking, then you are much more likely to remember what is said and be able to learn. If you are focused on your work rather than worrying about the deadline, you are more likely to work efficiently, use time effectively, work with less and feel less tired at the end of the day."
Your granny was right, then. As for creating a mindful home, the authors explain that the concept is simple. "Unfortunately, much of the time when at home, we are still mentally at work. Equally, at work we may be preoccupied by things that have happened at home. A good rule is to mentally be at work when we work, and be at home when we are at home."
Maybe Craig Hassed's mindful home can translate to a way to live our lives, spending less time being distracted by phone and screens. Next time you hear someone mention mindfulness, take a look around you and enjoy the moment. There's a lot to be said for it ...
The Mindful Home, by Dr Craig and Deirdre Hassed, is published by Exisle on November 30