Sekhem: Letting Go, Feeling Connection, and Returning to Source

The Goodbye Meditation: Opening the Capacity to Feel

Sekhem teachings with Patrick Zeigler.

The goodbye meditation has a simple central purpose: to feel. Just feel. As the capacity to feel opens, love can be felt more deeply. Feeling love more deeply begins to open a deeper spiritual connection and can support the initiations.

Patrick Zeigler recalls his Reiki master attunement: “I discovered this when I did my Reiki master attunement. How do you think you feel when you spend five thousand dollars? There are a few months before it happens. A big deal is made of it, and you have all that anticipation and excitement. Then, when it happens, there is this feeling: it darn well better be good.”

That same process can happen with many things. Pilgrimage is an older example of it, and this is part of the significance of sacred sites. A pilgrimage to Mecca may involve planning a whole life around the journey. Arriving then carries an enormous sense of wonder. A first journey to Egypt, or entering a temple, can bring that same response: awe, and the unmistakable experience of really feeling.

These experiences are designed to awaken feeling and a sense of awe. The question behind the goodbye meditation is how to open that capacity directly. One of the strongest ways is to work with the people you love.

Letting Go Without Giving Up Love

One of the basic elements of reaching samadhi is the ability to let go. There are attachments to particular people and attachments to things. One of the keys to samadhi is letting go of all those attachments.

This does not mean no longer loving someone. It means letting go of the attachment.

The goodbye meditation brings emotional attachments into feeling. Sometimes, in the very act of letting go, the response is, “I can't let go.” That response, too, becomes something to feel.

Have tissues available. Tears may be part of this work, and there is room for warmth and humor around them rather than a need to avoid them.

Feeling the Whole Range

The meditation draws on the distinction between virtual reality and imaginary reality introduced earlier. Through imagination, it becomes possible to say goodbye to different people in relation to both the past and the future.

Some of those people may already have died. Returning to an encounter with them can bring forward feelings that have remained held in connection with that person. The invitation is to feel those feelings one hundred percent.

The explanation here describes this as filling the body with different endorphins: happy endorphins, sad endorphins, angry endorphins and love endorphins. Whatever arises, feel it. The intention is to let the whole body fill with this range of feeling, building toward a grand finale described as going home.

Question: “I was hoping you were going to say orgasm.”

Response: “It is like that. You build it, build it, have the orgasm, and go home.” The comparison points to the way the meditation builds toward release.