YouTube: A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer
“On the path to spiritual understanding no practice is more important in terms of spiritual transformation than the practices of meditation and prayer.”
Because the terms meditation and prayer tend to evoke different meanings, we treat them as two completely separate practices. Meditation is often thought of as the art of listening to God while prayer is thought of as the act of talking to God, usually in the form of a request. In my book, I treat these practices as two halves of a single process. Meditation provides an infilling of inspiration from our inner resource and prayer is the act of directing this inspiration into specific areas of our experience.
Let’s say you have a healing challenge. In meditation you still your mind, releasing all images of yourself as incomplete. You pull your thoughts from the appearance of illness and open your mind and heart to your spiritual wholeness. This opening process is not a blind groping for something you do not have but a receptivity to your spiritual reality. Regardless of the condition of your body you are whole and complete right now. You invite this wholeness to come forth, to become part of your conscious reality.
Thus inspired, you engage in prayer by releasing all negative energy around this appearance and then directing affirmative statements to your body, particularly to the affected area. Think of meditation as an inhaling and prayer as the exhaling of divine energy, two parts to the single activity we call breathing.
The basis of this approach is the understanding that as a spiritual being you are already whole and that you are right now fully immersed in the presence of God. You don’t ask God to make you whole, you acknowledge your wholeness. You don’t ask God to act as your healer, you acknowledge that God as your source is your wholeness. You are aligning yourself with the presence and action of God in and as you.
In the following weeks we will further explore both aspects of this spiritually aligning process.