I have to tell you two stories about meditation—one that backfired on me and the other that helped me.

As you may know I worked in a health care setting; one of my offices was at the corporate data center where the main support desk was located. One day when I was there, the support center staff asked if I could do a lunchtime meditation with them to help with stress. These people were the front line support for 12,000 employees , the stress came from the hospital floors when the computer systems were down or response time was slow and so on, as you can imagine trying to keep composure was really hard. I invited most of them into the conference room (of course I needed to keep a crew on during lunch) and started a guided meditation. As the meditation hour progressed I could see them really getting relaxed and felt good about it. Now the problem,  most of them fell asleep! And the rest were really out of it. I had to get them up and help them shake it off to get back to work!

The cyst in the middle of my chest was really starting to bother me and knew it was getting infected, I was holding off getting it checked and went to a black belt sparring class that night. Bang! I took a punch right onto the cyst, puss went everywhere and actually had relief. That night my wife said will you please get that looked at, you are at the hospital every day. I scheduled an appointment with a surgeon and because of the infection that day it had to come out. He asked if it okay if he invites a group of interns to watch the procedure, I said,'no problem' and as I lay there he started and explained what he was doing to the group. Well, time to practice what I preach, I started to meditate, calming my breathing, placing my mind somewhere else. I noticed the room getting quiet, then, the surgeon slapped me hard across the face, I looked up at him and said, 'Hey, what are you doing!?' he responded, 'we thought we lost you!' I said to him 'I was TRYING TO MEDITATE', 'wow, you really calmed everything down, well you can go back to meditate now,' ya sure! The point is I was actually able to calm everything down in this situation. The power of meditation, calming the mind, should really be worked on by everyone. For more information on my medtation sessions take a look at http://www.masterinthemorning.com/Schedule.html