[timr]

How is "mindfulness" a religious term? When you're "mindful" of something, you're conscious or aware of it. It's in the dictionary. Seems like the perfect word for describing a process of greater awareness...and if that word also happens to be used in Buddhism and Yoga to mean the same thing, well, that's hardly a coincidence, is it?

It's not as if they're talking about practicing Ganesh worship.

[afafsd]

The word as used in the dictionary isn't religious, but 99% of the people are using with connotations of a sort of religious-mystical-woo.

(I refer just to the noun-form "mindfullness" and not all forms of the word, e.g. "to be mindful of [some specific thing]".)

Reading the article made "Asana" sound less like a business and more like a slightly creepy cult. Which, hey, if that helps them make money then more power to them, but they should be very careful that this kind of thing (meditating before meetings?) doesn't start turning into discriminatory hiring practices.

[vidarh]

99% might have connotations like that to it, but that doesn't prevent large healthcare groups etc. from using it. E.g. Kaiser Permanente offers courses in "Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction", and so there is plenty of non-religious training material available for mindfulness meditation.

Even some of the best introductory resources on mindfulness meditation from Buddhist sources are refreshingly free of "religious-mystical-woo", or careful to separate the woo from the practice. E.g. my of my two favourite introductory resources, one (Gil Fronsdal's podcasts "Introduction to Meditation") specifically jokes about "the 'B'-word" and mentions buddhism just barely for context, and the book Mindfulness in Plain English mentions Buddhist traditions only for historical context.

As an uncompromising atheist and skeptic, this is the reason I ended up with mindfulness meditation over alternatives.

[Dewie]

The concept of a/theism might be orthogonal or irrelevant, depending on the viewpoint, to Buddhism.

By the way "uncompromising atheist and sceptic" sounds like a contradiction, at least in the sense of scepticism as the discipline of always questioning things (in general, not specifically when it comes to things like Buddhism, which I won't give an opinion about whether it is worth to investigate or not). But I guess it isn't really a contradiction if it is scepticism as in close mindedness. But it's good that you've found some material that caters to your specific sensibilities and cultural background.

[davesque]

It is a religious term because of the context in which it appears. For instance, the term "Mindfulness" appears along with "Equanimity" and even the conspicuous company name "Asana". When you hear those three terms together, I'd say it's rather unlikely that there's not some kind of religious backdrop to the discussion.

[timr]

Those are also just words with no inherent religious connotation: "equanimity" means "even temper", and "asana" is sanskrit for "pose".

Your objections seem to say more about your personal bias than they do the words being used.