SGM July 2014 Weekly Message Three: “Seven Secrets For Transcendence”
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Welcome back to the July 2014 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. It’s great to have you with us here at SGM.
This week we continue our exploration of the deeper secrets of meditation by journeying into Stage Three—Transcendence. After using your meditation cues to Consciously Relax in Stage One and find Blissful Concentration in Stage Two, you may find that you naturally or deliberately enter a stage of meditation I call “Transcendence.”
This state is described in many ways in many traditions. In this stage, you experience complete freedom from your inner limits, struggles, and pains as you experience a Core part of you that is beyond words, thoughts, and analysis. There’s a Core part of you that is free, clear, and connected to the One Life we all share. In Transcendence, you taste what it is like to let go of your habitual sense of self and discover a larger perspective that feels open, clear, and spacious. All tensions release and you find yourself in an effortless state of being.
Over the years of my own practice, I’ve found this state of awareness in many ways. From moments in nature, to t’ai chi, to loving interactions with others, to various meditation forms. I’ve also discovered that there are some very specific cues that you can use to enter this state—and it’s these that I’d like to share with you today. My suggestion is to experiment with one or more of these cues in your meditation practice and during the day this week and see what you discover. Here they are:
1. Feel your body as a whole from the inside. Feel the entire space inside your skin.
If you’ve heard many of my guided meditations over the years, you’ll know this is one of my favorite cues. This cue activates what is called “Interoception” the ability to feel sensations inside your body. Interoception is a function of parts of your brain, namely the insula and brainstem, that have to do with inner body sensations and the regulation of your inner state.
These parts of your brain are “pre-linguistic,” meaning that they are prior to and separate from language and thinking. This means that, when you are focused on inner body sensations and these occupy the forefront of your attention, your thinking, analyzing, judging mind fades to the background. In other words, your mind becomes quiet as you become absorbed in inner body sensations.
Once you have connected with feeling your inner body, you can expand this feeling by using three more cues. They are:
2. Space, Silence, Stillness
In their book, “The Open-Focus Brain,” bio-feedback researchers, Dr. Les Fehmi, Ph.D. and Jim Robbins, describe how these three cues release you from states of stress, frustration, and anxiety and allow you to expand your awareness into powerful states that heal your mind, body, and emotions.
Once you have connected with feeling inside your body, you can use any one or all three of these cues to deepen your meditative awareness into a transcendent state. You can focus into the feeling of open, clear space inside your body. You can listen to the silence of your inner space. And, you can be as still as you can be and become deeply absorbed in that feeling of stillness. With practice, you can merge all three of these cues together into a transcendent feeling of space, silence, and stillness.
If the space of your whole body feels like too much to hold at once, you might begin by using these three cues in a smaller space in your body. Which brings us to our next cue:
3. Focus into open, clear space, silence, and stillness in the center of your brain and allow that feeling to expand upwards and outwards through the top of your head
If you’ve practiced Core Energy Meditation™ or the Empty Vessel meditation from my Learn Qigong Meditation program, you are familiar with focusing into the center of your brain as a meditation cue. This is a great place to focus into space, silence, and stillness. You can listen to silence in the center of your brain, feel stillness there, and then allow a sense of open, clear spaciousness to expand from the center of your brain upward and outward through the top of your head.
You may be surprised at just how quickly and effectively this works. In the center of your brain there are no thoughts, so your mind becomes quiet as you focus there—and this experience is heightened when you focus into the three cues of silence, stillness, and spaciousness. Allowing that sensation to expand up through the top of your head can really open up transcendent awareness. You may feel your head tingle and light up and/or feel an open, clear, enlightened state—a feeling of Universal Energy, Oneness, or Vast Spaciousness.
For some people this takes a bit of getting used to. If you find yourself getting light-headed or dizzy, you can always bring your attention down into your feet and focus on feeling the ground underneath you. In Core Energy Meditation™ and Qigong meditation, we always finish by bringing our attention downward, at least into the lower abdomen and/or into our body as a whole to finish meditation, integrate the experience, and ground ourselves for daily life.
To merge your transcendent state with your outer experience, here’s a nice cue for the end of your meditation practice:
4. Feel your body within the space around you.
You can practice this cue with your eyes closed and/or with your eyes open. I like to do both at the end of my meditation time. First, with my eyes closed, I feel the entire space inside my skin. Then, I feel the space of my body within the space around me. Once I have that feeling with my eyes closed, I slowly open my eyes and take in the space around me. With my eyes open I feel the space inside my body within the space around me.
This is a great way to practice “being present” and to integrate your inner experience with your outer experience in the world. For example, sometimes when coming out of meditation you may feel like you’ve gone somewhere else and it is a little disorienting to open your eyes and come back to where you are here in this world. The technique of feeling your body within the space around you can help you with integrating these “two worlds.”
You can also practice this cue anytime, anywhere, to refresh your awareness and loosen the grip of stress, frustration, or being caught up in a limited point of view. You can simply pause what you’re doing, feel your body as a whole from the inside, then, feel your body within the space around you. Go ahead and give this a try now. I’ll give you a few moments. . . Feel your body within the space around you. . .
How did that feel?
Now, the next three cues can be used by themselves or as part of your meditation routine.
5. Imagine yourself as a clear still reflecting pool or the clear blue sky
If you are visually-oriented, as many people are, these two images can be quite powerful. In the picture above, you see both calm reflective water and clear blue sky—as well as clouds.
A great way to calm and clear your mind is to imagine yourself as a reflecting pool of calm, clear, still water. Any thoughts that come into your awareness you can imagine as ripples in that pool. You can allow those ripples to settle into the calm, clear stillness of your quiet pool.
You can also imagine yourself as a wide clear blue sky. When any thoughts arise, you can imagine them as clouds floating by or dissolving in the spacious expanse of the wide clear blue sky.
Besides doing this in your imagination, with your eyes closed. You can actually stare at a wide clear blue sky or at a calm, clear, pool of water to enjoy a similar effect.
Our final two cues, can be a little tricky. Because they are so simple, you might miss the experience. On the other hand, if you tend to be a “mind-oriented” person, you may find them natural and effective right away.
6. Awareness of Awareness itself, Awareness of “the Observer”
What happens when you pause what you are doing and see if it’s possible to be aware of the act of attention or the act of awareness itself? I know this may sound incomprehensible, but if you let go of trying to figure it out, you might find that you can “be aware of being aware.” Your thinking mind can’t figure this out, so it becomes quiet. For example, what happens if you pause and become aware of yourself as the reader of these words? What if you focus on the act of reading or observe yourself in the process of reading.
First, you may notice that you lose track of the meaning of what you’re reading. You are no longer absorbed in the words but are instead observing the one who is reading. If you get a taste of this, you may notice that your thinking mind pauses. It’s as if everything stops and there is just this clear, pure awareness.
You may find the following question gets you to this state even better.
7. Ask yourself “Who is this Observer?”
Go ahead and give this one a try. Ask yourself “Who is the Observer?” then “Who is Reading this?” and see what happens. Try each question and see what you discover. I’ll give you a few moments to do that now. . .
What did you notice?
Did you have a brief respite from your normal state of mind? Did your mind pause, stop, or expand for even a moment?
Underneath it all, underneath all the busyness, mental checklists, worries, fears, tensions, and frustrations of life, there’s a Core part of you that is always calm, clear, and spacious—free and unlimited by your habits of thinking, feeling, and acting. Taking some time each day to practice Transcendence using any one or all of the cues above can open up your connection to this part of you. As you do that again and again, you may find yourself progressively free from what has held you back, more open and accepting of new and expansive experiences, and more successful in connecting with others and the One Life we all share.
In next Week’s Message, we’ll journey into Stage Four meditation where we use this deep connection to tap into Inner Guidance for our lives.
Until next time,
What happens when you practice Transcendence a little every day?
Kevin