When it comes to medical procedures, I’m a complete wimp. Spoiled by pristine good health, I view hospital stays of even one night as terrifying and rare. So this past week, when I had some surgery that required a night’s stay, I eagerly volunteered to work with a pre-surgery coach, visualizing comfort and a great outcome, and recruiting friends to do the same.

What surprised me was how willing the hospital was to go along with the process, which is outlined in a book called “Prepare For Surgery – Heal Faster.” The “Prepare…” routine involved taking an IPod loaded with meditation prompts into surgery and taping several “healing statements” to the front of my hospital gown for the doctor and the anesthesiologist to read.

The thought occurred to me that maybe their attention should be on something other than reading meditation statements, but apparently they are good at multi-tasking.

The fact that I’m home and writing this blog post just 48 hours after leaving the recovery room is the best recommendation for positive visualization that I know. Now I just have to behave myself for at least two weeks. No overdoing. And that will be the hardest part of all.

Sarito Sun

Every coach needs to be the client sometimes and feel that breath-sucking moment that comes from being challenged outside your comfort zone

I got to experience it last week when a seemingly innocent conversation with mine led to the astonishing agreement that I’d meditate 20 minutes each morning and 20 minutes each night. When I hung up the phone, I wish I’d countered with “How about TWO?”

Twenty minutes doesn’t seem like much EXCEPT during meditation. Then distracting thoughts bounce around like pellets in an ice storm.

Friday night, though, some friends and I beat the 20-minute discomfort by trying something new: laughter meditation, using a CD by laughter meditator extraordinaire, Sarito Sun.

For more than 35 minutes, broken by five minutes of silence, we laughed. We bent over laughing. We got on the floor and kicked our legs in the air. We danced around the room. We were a laughter choo-choo train.

Especially during the laughter but mostly during the silence, too – the ice pellets stopped bouncing. So little room for mental multi-tasking during laughter. So much room later for amazing deep sleep.

The time of day was not appealing. 7:15 AM for morning meditation. But after the moaning and groaning, I have to admit that the Sikh meditation exercise was one of the most lasting gifts I carried away from a vacation week at Chautauqua.

Repeating it for 15 minutes each morning feels symbolic of another lesson learned there, that regular practice is as important as success. It is so easy to flit, to try one thing and then another, when remaining faithful to a regular routine can provide the structure we need. To say nothing of the calm that comes from putting the cell phone on “quiet” and closing the door.

If random thoughts sneak in, as they inevitably will, try calling them by name, as Elizabeth Lesser suggests in “The Seeker’s Guide.” Just say “thinking, thinking, thinking,” and they will skulk away. At least temporarily.