Sekhem: Saying Goodbye, Releasing Attachment and Feeling Love

Sekhem Goodbye Meditation: Opening the Capacity to Feel

Sekhem teachings with Patrick Zeigler.

The main purpose of the goodbye meditation is to help you feel. Just feel. As the capacity to feel opens, it becomes possible to feel love more deeply. Deeper love can begin to open a deeper spiritual connection, and the initiations can support that opening.

Patrick Zeigler’s experience of his Reiki master attunement offers an example of how anticipation can build feeling. He had spent five thousand dollars, with a few months to wait before the attunement. The importance placed on it, the money spent and the waiting all created anticipation and excitement. By the time it happened, the feeling was, “It darn well better be good.”

The same process can happen with many experiences. Pilgrimage is an old example of this, and part of what draws people to sacred sites. A pilgrimage to Mecca can involve planning a whole life around the journey. When the moment finally comes, there can be a powerful sense of wonder: “Wow, this is amazing.” A first journey to Egypt, and the moment of entering a temple, can also bring that response. You feel it. You really feel.

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

Love and the Release of Attachment

One of the basic elements of reaching samadhi is the ability to let go. There are attachments to particular people and attachments to things. A key to samadhi is being able to release those attachments.

This does not mean no longer loving someone. Love and attachment are not the same thing. The invitation is to let go of the attachment, not the love.

In the goodbye meditation, emotional attachments become something you can feel. Sometimes, as letting go approaches, the response is, “I can’t let go.” That response, too, brings you into contact with feeling. Have tissues available for the emotions that may arise.

The meditation draws on the distinction between virtual reality and imaginary reality introduced earlier. It invites goodbyes to different people, reaching into both the past and the future. Some people may already have died. Returning to those relationships in imagination can bring forward what you have continued to hold on to. The invitation is to feel it fully, one hundred percent.

The teaching describes this as filling the body with different endorphins: happy endorphins, sad endorphins, angry endorphins and love endorphins. Whatever feeling arises, feel it. Happiness, sadness, anger and love all belong in the experience. These feelings build toward a grand finale described as going home.

Transition, Return and Embodiment

Question: Is the finale an orgasm?

Response: It is like that. The feeling builds and builds, reaches an orgasm-like release, and then you go home.

Within this explanation of the meditation, physical death is described as a moment when something magical happens: an endorphin is released that helps a person release and leave the body easily. This is the basis for inviting an imagined experience of dying.

The word “transition” is used deliberately. It can mean awakening, a state of samadhi, or what you think of as death. In this teaching, samadhi and death are described as very close to one another. The distinction is between leaving the body and coming back. In this meditation, the intention is to come back. Everybody comes back.

The practice asks for full participation in an imaginary experience: it is now your time to leave, and you say your goodbyes to everyone. By entering that imagined reality wholeheartedly and then lying down, you can feel what it is like to make the transition.

The sequence is to go home, have that experience, come back and embody it. Full participation matters. It may bring enough tears that the box of tissues becomes useful.

Sharing: I’m already a crybaby.

Response: Be a crybaby. Let yourself really cry. If laughter comes, laugh. There is room to have fun as well as to cry, and support can be as simple as someone handing you tissues.

How often is there permission to enjoy crying, to enjoy those beautiful tears? Here, there is also permission to enjoy feeling anger. The aim is to feel, rather than exclude part of the emotional experience.