The current abundance of brain science/neuroscience is excellent and confirms the efficacy of mindfulness in improving our situation. It’s all very important but I think secondary to understanding and building a new relationship with the autonomic nervous system which is directly impacted in a good way with mindfulness. Mindfulness facilitates keeping the ANS in balance and prevents it from getting stuck in fight, flight or freeze, a very common but under recognized phenomena. I think the ANS is the master switch in the body that everything else plays off. So, the brain and everything else is first influenced by the ANS not the other way around. Two of the many reasons why this is so is because it is the seat of the unconscious and can be brought under conscious control as we have learned from thousands of years of Yoga practice and modern science. So…it is where the conscious and unconscious meet. A big deal! Also the ANS is in charge of our relationship to death as it regulates fight or flight. Understanding the death experience is the primary mandate at the deeper levels of all meditative and contemplative traditions. That Understanding is so important because it brings about the realization that we are way more than we think. That new relationship is what begins to transform the body to be a true reflection of who we really are.