SGM Oct. 2014 Weekly Message Two: “Relax Deeply Using Open Focus”
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“Relax Deeply Using Open Focus”
Press the play button or click here (right click + save target as) to download the audio file
Welcome back to the October 2014 Edition of Spiritual Growth Monthly. I’m Kevin Schoeninger. Thank you for being with us here at SGM!
This month, we are exploring Dr. Joe Dispenza’s three-step process to manifest phenomenal healing and life transformation. He describes this process along with some amazing stories of results using it in his most recent book “You Are The Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter” (Hay House, 2014). Last week, we learned how Dr. Joe discovered this process through his own healing from several crushed vertebrae when he was hit by an SUV during a triathlon 30 years ago. Dr. Joe was amazed by his total recovery and this sent him on a mission to more fully understand the steps he used and how they worked.
Over the past three decades, in workshops around the world, Dr. Joe has guided participants through the three steps. As they practiced these steps, he monitored what was happening in their brains using brainwave and brain mapping technology. As he observed what worked best, he continually refined the three steps to make them more and more effective and reliable. In this latest book, he gives us the results of that research.
First, he uses Open Focus meditation to relax the analytical mind, emotional attachments, and the body. Then, he has participants rest in an open state of awareness in which they experience themselves as pure consciousness. Finally, he has them mentally rehearse their desired experience, along with the elevated positive emotion that comes with that desired experience.
Dr. Joe has developed a specific script that he calls “Changing Beliefs and Perceptions Meditation” that includes the three steps of his process. You can find that script on pages 305-319 of “You Are The Placebo.” There is a longer version that leads you through the process of changing two beliefs or perceptions and a shorter version that leads you through changing one belief or perception. We’ll follow the shorter version for our practice through the end of this month.
This week, we’ll practice the first of these three steps by following a guided Open Focus meditation to relax deeply. In the next two weeks, we’ll add on the next two steps of the process.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you may remember the Open Focus method from a few years back, when we explored the book “The Open Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body” written by the director of the Princeton Biofeedback Centre, Dr. Les Fehmi, Ph.D., and award-winning science writer, Jim Robbins.
In this book, we learned the importance of focusing on the feeling of space inside and around the body, to quiet the mind, calm the emotions, and relax the body. This fairly quickly releases us from the stress of narrowly focusing on thoughts and tasks, as we immerse ourselves in a more diffused form of attention.
In this week’s guided meditation, I will follow Dr. Joe’s script for step one, the Open Focus part, as described on pages 313-316 of his book. I have chosen to add a brief introduction and a brief conclusion of my own onto this practice to make it a complete meditation in itself.
You can follow along with the guided audio in PART B of the recording above.
Enjoy!