One can probably credit a subset of hippies in the 1960s in the U.S. for traveling to India and bringing "Eastern" practices here to the (more or less) mainstream, including Buddhism and "Sati," which is the basis of mindfulness. I don't know enough about other countries to comment on how popular it may be in other places and how it go to be that way.

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.