The New York Times Health section, The Well, has an article today about the scientific findings of an 8 week course in Mindfulness Meditation. It helps grow the area of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, which is associated with feelings of well-being.
Mindfulness practice teaches you to focus, to observe internal feelings and the external situation all the while breathing (which relaxes reactivity).
Another way of saying this is that it helps to de-emphasize the activity of the earliest part of the brain which is connected to feelings of fight or flight.
When you calm feelings of turbulence within, you cope better with the turbulence in the outer world. Read it!
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/how-meditation-may-change-the-brain/
