Mindfulness sounds an awful lot like Greek philosophy to me

I don't know much about Buddhist philosophy. I thought this was a nice introduction.

Mindfulness involves, among other things, cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them. It can, if practised rigorously, let you experience feelings with a kind of dispassion or ‘non-attachment’ – neither struggling uncomfortably to escape the ‘bad’ feelings nor trying, desperately and futilely, to hang on to the ‘good’ feelings.

Even if you’re not trying to escape an eternal repetition of 12 successive conditions, even if you would just like your one and only life to be better, you are still seeking liberation from conditions – from chains of causation that otherwise shackle you. The things in your environment – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos – are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behaviour, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. And they will keep doing that unless you become more mindful – unless you start paying attention to what’s going on, and thus respond to it reflectively, not reactively.

If you interact with such feelings via tanha – via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings – you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behaviour can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

I’m not talking about an abstract understanding – an academic awareness – of these chains of causality. I’m talking about a carefully cultivated experiential understanding, a mindful awareness that brings the power to break, or at least loosen, the chains. This kind of awareness, which critically includes an awareness of the feelings evoked by perceptions and by thoughts, and the feelings that guide trains of thought, can be heightened to surprising levels through meditation.

Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about ‘getting in touch with your feelings’ and ‘not making judgments’. And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings – anger, love, sorrow, joy – with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgements – that is, you are not mindlessly labelling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights. So what ‘not making judgements’ ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgements for you. And what ‘getting in touch with your feelings’ ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them. And all of this means informing your responses to the world with the clearest possible view of the world.
https://aeon.co/essays/nirvana-can-seem-an-exotic-metaphysical-idea-until-you-look-closer