Submitted by a Zen Student at Kannon Do

I’m originally from Belarus (former Soviet Union) and I never had a meditation experience in my country. I started to meditate 3 years ago.

After taking my first 40-minute meditation session, I felt a huge improvement on how I felt and how my positive energy was transmitted to people around me. It was one of the most relieving feelings in my life. Nothing before in my life could give me such a feeling of peace with myself. I was not bothered by chaotic environment around me, I could handle it with ease and, surprisingly, people around me changed their behavior for a better. If people were angry and they noticed that I just was at peace even though they were on fire, they were able to calm down. It’s something that I never experienced before in my life.

In addition, I was able to be more productive and focused on my job objectives even though I was not thrilled before with some of my job tasks, I could finish them as they were the most interesting tasks in my job. I’m literally still cannot believe how can it be. All my 30 years of life I was doing various things to make myself happy and was not able to achieve it. Meditation opened my heart, my head and my soul to be there in peace with myself first of all, accepting the fact that I cannot be in control of outside world. I’m very grateful to Les for his teachings. I still remember his saying that we need to forget about previous drama that happened to us, it holds us backwards from achieving our unique potential that we deserve. Let’s meditate to peace.