How meditation can alter our genetic code to provide good health and wellness is among the topics discussed at The American Meditation Institute’s annual CME conference. If there’s one mental practice that has stood the test of time and rigorous laboratory testing, it’s meditation. In an article published in the Psychoneuroendocrinology journal, a 2014 clinical study reports that mindfulness meditation training can lead to epigenetic alterations of the genome. These changes down-regulate genes previously implicated in inflammation and accelerate cortisol recovery time from social stress. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, PhD, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.