Tomorrow at work we will be having a one-hour "mindfulness" workshop.
It's supposed to help with stress management. I hope it is not too 
Mindfulness is a big thing now.
I fucking hate it. I expend a tremendous amount of effort *not* to be in the here-and-now when I'm stressed out. Trying to undo that always raises my anxiety level, sometimes to the point of it being intolerable.
I have been partially checked-out as my normal state ever since I can remember,
not that reality is that bad, it's just how my brain works. I really do wonder
how a bad situation can be improved by total focus on how one is feeling. 
Coupla benefits I'll name:
1. Experiencing an emotion non-judgmentally. That is, the bodily sensations (breathing, tension, temperature, sensations, etc), the feeling itself, the thoughts (not trying to control them or hold on to them, but just noticing them). This teaches you to a. recognize and b. better tolerate emotions (without acting on them), which not everyone has any real ability to do. ex. re-training oneself to be able to know that feeling unhappy doesn't necessarily mean one has to get up and "fix" that feeling immediately.
2. Focusing oneself
away from one's emotions, and
also away from the past and the future. Especially helpful with people with PTSD and/or worriers- to remember what's happening in the present moment, to focus on it, rather than on traumatic memories or on fears about the future.
That said, in general, I have always been better at throwing my mind into something entirely unrelated to reality than at reigning it in on anyone's command. I also think having way the hell too many therapists tell me to do deep breathing and to count to ten (and all the other cliches) when I was upset (rather than dealing with me at whatever my actual developmental level was at the time, validating what I was bloody feeling, talking to me, and figuring out things like, oh hey, she has horrible things happen to her at home and gets punished for reacting to them, or at best gets told to take a tranquilizer), combined with having asthma and frankly often just plain not feeling right in my own skin (hooray persistent sensory issues that get worse when I'm upset!), have classically conditioned me to feel MORE tense when I do them.
One of the best things a therapist taught me in the direct-coping department were grounding techniques, which are
kind of like mindfulness, except without the part where I have a panic attack, lol.
