Praying From Your Inner Divinity
Integral Prayer – Part 6: Embodied Awakened Consciousness
There are three movements to Integral Prayer (into, with, and from), and this week we’ll go more in depth with the 1st-person movement of praying from your inner divinity.
In traditional prayer, we are generally trying to “reach out” to God from our ordinary self. In Integral Prayer from our 1st person inner divinity, we are instead coming from our awakened consciousness within in order to reach out to others.
This flips the script of prayer, empowering us to own our divine self, our part in the body of God, our participation in divine nature. In this movement, God is not a separate being that we have to seek out, but rather we become God’s movement to others in love.
We do this best by moving into a state of consciousness that opens us up to embodied awareness in an energetic way, moving into our Christ consciousness (the divine and material incarnation—“in whom we live, move and have our being”). We call this state awakened consciousness.
It’s usually helpful at first to access this consciousness through a meditation that moves us into this energetic, embodied state, such as our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. With more practice, we can move into this awakened state at any time throughout our day—or even all the time! We can then not only pray from but live out of this inner divinity as well.
Awakening Divine Consciousness in the Four Centers
To get to this state of awakened consciousness, we usually need a transition from our ordinary consciousness. We call this the entry state that helps clear away the interior chatter and regular impulses we generally experience in our everyday self. This state is one of attention.
From there, we can move into the knowing state of awakened consciousness, which is more a state of awareness from—not awareness of, which is a very crucial distinction.
We are not doing this as a type of body scan, simply noticing or thinking about places in our body. We are not viewing our bodies like a separate object, but moving into sensing from these centers as organs of perception and knowing. Our whole body participates in our consciousness—not just our head/mind.
Each center of spiritual knowing has its own entry state and awakened knowing state (and unitive or transcendent state, which we’ll explore more in a future writing).
So let’s go through the four centers and see how we move from the entry state into the awakened knowing state in each. We’ll look at the nature of expressions that arise in the knowing state, and then how we can both pray from and live out of this awakened consciousness.
While many different arisings can come from this awakened state in each of the centers, here are some of what we’ve identified so far.
Heart
We always start with the heart, because it is our primary center for moving into the energy of love. This deep love is also the heart of our divine consciousness, for God is love.
Beginning in our heart also gets us out of the trappings of our head most easily as well. In our entry state, we drop our attention down into our heart and the energy of the flow of love.
We move into the knowing state by awakening to awareness from the radiant center in the deep heart, the core of our hearts emanating love and bliss.
When we pray from this center in awakened consciousness for others, we transmit that love out. We can send that love in an energetic sense to other people, to cities, to the world. This energy can truly be felt by another through the concentrated energy field, especially coming from a group. We can also express this love in prayer for one another through heart-source images, words, or sensations.
We can live out of this divine heart by being charged with radiant love, energizing our actions and amplifying the connections and relationships in our lives. I dare say living primarily from this heart of awakened love would alone significantly transform our entire life and greatly affect those around us.
Feet
When we move to sensing from our feet, we are welcoming the material reality of our body and the earth. We are moving into the embodied energy of our physical being, of our skin and bones, of our very cells.
In the entry state, we ground ourselves to this deeper physical presence in this time and place, where we are now in our lives. We use the earth to help us in this rooting to the moment, keeping us oriented to our immanent presence. The earth also is a source of energy for our bodies, with a powerful energetic field in which we can tap into.
As we move into the knowing state from our feet, we begin to move into the felt sense of our incarnated entanglement. This is the experience that we are not separate from material reality—we are a part of it. We can feel the energy of deep intertwining in the very fibers of our cells. This is knowing from our interbeing.
When we pray from our feet, from our material embodiment, we can offer to others the feelings we are experiencing in our bodies from this state. Our awakened consciousness expresses somatic sensations and energy that are about ourselves or others. Praying in this way for others can bring them into greater physical awareness, felt embodied symbols and metaphors, and even healing.
We can live out of our divine feet by walking forth into our daily lives, into the vibrant reality of what constitutes our life in the immediate immanency of our individual and collective being. We can be grounded in the flow of earth energy and participate in the wave particles of incarnation.
Womb
Moving to awareness from our womb is to move to the ground of our being, to the seat of our unique self and our divine self.
In the entry state, we center down into this space of vital holding, letting ourselves rest in the flowing embrace of generativity. It is a release into simply being.
In the knowing state, we begin to sense the arisings from the divine wellspring. These appear in the form of intuitions, or the sensations of courage and creativity.
We pray from our spiritual womb for others by offering to others our intuitions, the sense of knowing that we can’t always quite explain rationally or give reasons why we know. We just know. It doesn’t mean we can’t be wrong, but often we’re too timid to share these intuitions unless we feel like we can explain them in some way. The awakened womb is not subject to the mind but is given an active partnership.
We can live out of our divine womb by coming from this deep ground of being, living from a centered place of assurance and clarity. We follow this flow of being, guiding us through the offerings of our deepest intuitions into the truest expressions of our unique self, courageously creating and generating from this loving/eros energy.
Head
We are probably most familiar with the state of awareness from our heads, but often this space is filled with the tyrannical chatter of our busy minds. Or we think of our thoughts as reaching into the storage bank of acquired knowledge through education or training.
So for our entry state we need to clear the mind. While many meditation techniques essentially try to use the mind to still the mind, we have found that moving down into the energy of the heart, the radiant love and bliss, and then returning to the mind yields a surprisingly clear and vibrant stillness.
Here, many practices want to simply remain in the stillness or ascend to transcendence. Both of those are perfectly fine. But the knowing state in our heads is the place of awareness to the arisings of visionary knowing, which we welcome. This is “sight” or perception of the invisible world. These often come in the form of images, words, thoughts, and even smells or sounds. They have a different quality and feel than our usual thoughts. They also are not “under our control” like the imagination. They arise from this deeper state of knowing.
We pray from our minds by offering to others the visionary knowing and sight that comes forth. These can come in the form of images, pictures, words, sounds, smells. They are often symbolic and reflective of “thought” beyond rational explanation. They express through the metaphorical, offering wisdom that touches deeper into our whole being.
We can live out of this divine mind by approaching every situation with a deeper seeing, perceiving beyond the veil of the physical world and recognizing the visionary realm at work and present all around us at all times.
(For more on awakened knowing in the mystical languages of each center, you can read more here and here.)
Praying and Living
In each of these spaces, we can pray from and live out the knowing state of awakened mystical consciousness. These are two movements of how we show up in our lives and relationships from a new way of being, coming from our inner divinity.
If we feel uneasy or are still unsure about praying from our own inner divinity, we can practice first alone with ourselves. Eventually, we can get to the point where we feel comfortable sharing this knowledge with and for others, always offered with love and humility.
But waking up to pray in this way, to come from our inner divinity, this is not just an internal process. In fact, we can only go so far alone. The nature of God is in the communal dance of an evolved trinity, and so too our inner divinity needs the dance of relationality. This is the WeSpace prayer, which we will explore next week.
We are not separate from God. We have divine consciousness within us, not as an outside gift, but as the very nature of our deepest and truest selves. We can awaken to the experience of the new way of being of living from this embodied Christ consciousness—the Christ is you! We can pray from our incarnated being as we learn to listen to that divine voice that sounds like us, that sounds like our awakening into empowered, embodied divine participation.
Our WBMA “Naming Practice” can help us learn to give voice to what we’re experiencing from our awakened, divine consciousness in each of our centers. You can practice with it in WeSpace or individually, using this guided recording (pausing when invited to name your experience):
Next week, we’ll explore Integral Prayer in the context of a loving community of practice.
You can also join one of these communities yourself. WeSpace groups are now enrolling! Sign up for one here:
Want to learn more first? Read more about WeSpace here.