Is It Possible to Pray Continuously?
Part Two: Whole-Body Mystical Presencing
Whole-Body Mystical Presencing is a practice to enter into the everyday, every-moment reality of Christ consciousness. It is a way to welcome and invoke holistic presence at all times, not just in “spiritual” settings or “sacred” places and times. All of life and every moment is sacred. We can presence into this way of being at any time.
Before we get into the specifics of this practice, I want to draw upon some of the Christian heritage for this way of being, along with sharing some of my own story coming to this practice.
The most common form of every-moment-practice in the Christian tradition comes in the lineage of seeking to “pray continuously.” This originates from a short phrase from the Apostle Paul’s exhortation in I Thessalonians 5:17 to “pray without ceasing.”
While some focused more specifically on the “without ceasing” part—we are more interested in prayer “at any moment.” Our intent here is not the perfectionism and idealism of a life of total, unceasing prayer, but rather an invitation to integrate more of the “regular” moments of our lives with the spirit of divine presence.
Praying Continuously in Christian Tradition
Brother Lawrence in the Kitchen
Several prominent figures practiced and wrote about seeking this unceasing prayer—both in the monastery and out. Perhaps most well-known was Brother Lawrence, the monastic cook who sought to practice the presence of God in every moment, famously even while doing the dishes.
He wrote, “We ought to cease for one brief moment, as often as we can, to worship God in the depths of our being, to taste Him [sic] though it be in passing, to touch Him as it were by stealth.”
“The Way of the Pilgrim”
In Eastern Orthodox tradition, The Way of the Pilgrim chronicles an anonymous Russian vagabond using The Jesus Prayer as the method to always have a prayer on his lips. Puzzled and inspired by the scripture encouraging to “pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17), he traveled far and wide seeking wisdom on how to do this.
He took up the instructions of St. Simeon the New Theologian, “Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently, and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. Carry your mind, that is, your thoughts, from your head to your heart. As you breathe out, say, ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.’”
More recently in the 20th century, Frank Laubach wrote about his “game with minutes,” detailing a process of trying to pray without ceasing. He kept meticulous notes chronicling the minutes he thought of God and prayed throughout a day, tracking his progress over many years. While he was driven to succeed in this endeavor, he held the grace in his forgetting that “one can begin all over instantly at any moment.” Over time, he came to a regular connection that had transforming effects.
In Letters By a Modern Mystic he wrote, “The moment I turn to Him [sic] it is like turning on an electric current which I feel through my whole being.
Thomas Merton Portrait by Jim Nally (photo by Jim Forest)
As another sort of continuous prayer, Thomas Merton wrote about a practice called “recollection.” He didn’t mean simply “to remember,” as in the common usage of the word. He saw this practice as a re-collecting of our entire being, in every moment possible:
“When I am not present to myself . . . my senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.”
Merton distinguishes this practice from concentration, not just a focusing of thought, but bringing “the soul into contact with God.” It is an experience of recollecting our presence. Presence to ourselves, to God, and to everything in God. He says, “Recollection, then, makes me present to whatever is significantly real at each moment of my existence.”
My Story of Praying Continuously
Inspired by these practitioners and others, I was drawn by the allure of possibility to live every moment of my life in communion with God. In my 20s, I embarked on my own journey of seeking to pray continuously—with sincere devotion but also a good dose of lofty idealism. I had been reading many of the Christian mystics but was taken by the simplicity and comprehensiveness of Brother Lawrence. A prayer on my lips at all times, even doing the dishes. I simply tried to remember to talk to God more. While I did pray more than I had, I didn’t see much difference in the way I lived my life. And I forgot all the time for very long stretches.
It was time for a more systematic and intensive approach. With two of my closest spiritual companions at the time, we read Frank Laubach and created our own “game with minutes.” Each week, we would pray together and ask for a phrase from God to carry with us throughout the week. This was like the Russian pilgrim constantly repeating “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me” but more personalized. Sometimes it was simply one word, sometimes a short phrase. I don’t remember any of them specifically—the mental meaning was less of the point. It was a mantra to bring us into a prayerful presence, as often as we could remember throughout the day. We reported back to each other each week, which added some accountability—as well as some subconscious competitiveness, at least in me.
Over time, the practice fell away. The mental effort wore me down and it was just too much to try to keep my thoughts always on God. I couldn’t really see what I was doing wrong. I guess I just didn’t have the strength of Brother Lawrence or the dedication of the pilgrim.
Years later, the practice came back to me but in a different way. After many years of being in a dark night experience, I had a sudden, embodied awakening to the energy of Christ alive in me. It was like a kundalini unfurling of spondic, unending vitality and bliss in my body. The awakening of Shakti settled into my heart and is always present, even still. I can feel it now.
This awakening also brought about a new sensitivity in me. A much more conscious awareness of the realm of spirit and energy around me. The veil became translucent and permeable. I now had access to this mystical, charged reality of all things immersed in the divine—seen and felt. It became the reality of communion that I had sought in trying to pray continuously.
But now it was no longer a mental effort directed by my mind and will. It was as simple as opening an eyelid that had previously been resting shut all the time. The inner eye of the heart that had been asleep, or at best drowsy. No longer a struggle, it didn’t require any conscious effort, but still necessitated a turning. A subtle and imperceptible act of “going there.” Opening the eye to enter the realm of this deeper consciousness.
I would still forget for long stretches, staying in my ordinary, everyday reality, neglecting to “go there” as I could at any moment. My old consciousness thought, “If I just keep going there more often, if I do it enough, I’ll eventually flip to being there by default.” But my spirit knew that it didn’t work in the aggregate like this.
The reality of divine presence and communion wasn’t determined by my movement or choice to “go there.” I was always already there. The reality was present whether I opened my inner eye and saw it or not. I had to release my over-reliance on my own mind to be the initiator of this way of prayer, of this practice of divine presence.
I wasn’t praying continuously so much as I was being prayed in every moment.
Prayer is Presencing
This reorientation reflected an unconscious shift in my experience of prayer. It was sometime later that I came to recognize in my understanding what it was.
Prayer is an activity of connection to God. Where God is greatly affects then how we pray. If God is distant or outside of us, we have to reach out. If God is not in our minds, we have to constantly remember and think about God. If God is not already within our being, prayer is a movement toward communicating and connecting with the divine out there.
When we reorient our perspective and embrace the experience of God as a tangible and felt reality that is indwelling our whole body and everything around us, prayer simply becomes an act of consciously presencing the experiential sense of God-Being-Us. It is taking seriously our divine participation and living more into that reality in our everyday consciousness.
This comes not just in thought or passive awareness. It is an energetic and transformative way of being that interflows with the divine within, among, and all around us. We live into it through a dynamic presencing in our whole body, which we’ll explore more in the following parts of this series.
In my path along this practice, I can say that progress is real and the conscious experience of living, divine presence evolves into greater depth and richness. Not every moment. We won’t always recognize or feel it. But then that is also part of the path. It does not require mental reflection of the experience for the experience to exist. It becomes an underlying reality. A different consciousness regularly attuned to deeper presence, whether in thought or more-than-thought.
This is life itself becoming our practice, which eventually no longer feels like practice, but joining in the song of life itself—at one with the music we are both hearing and making, whenever we catch the tune and hum along with it.
“Divine Enlivenment”
A Practice of Invoking Presence from the Source:
1. Sit relaxed in a comfortable position with your feet on the ground. Let your awareness move down through your feet, grounding with the energy of the Earth that flows across the globe and into you. Open your feet center and receive this energy. Feel and image the inner ground in which your immediate current state of being is rooted. Stay here as long as you like.
2. Next, presence your awareness in the space of your spiritual womb. Let your awareness sink down into the depths of your inner being. Welcome a sense of the depthless spring beneath the ground of your being. The Source from which all life is generated. The divine wellspring. The underlying origin of your everyday mental-emotional-motivational life. The primordial source flow of your life and vitality. It may be very subtle in your awareness, perhaps even just a faint sense or intuition. You are fundamentally connected to this source at all times. Feel the deep knowing of this reality at the core of your being.
When you’re ready, speak out loud, or silently within, the declaration: “I open to you, divine wellspring of my lived experience.” Or, “I open to the divine animation that is the root of my motivation.” Or use any form of words, any metaphor, that opens you up to feel the spacious, generous mystery of indwelling potential. Stay here in this posture of invocation as long as you like.
3. In the awareness of your heart space, open with loving receptivity the energy flowing up from your womb—whether felt or unfelt. Open your hands to receive the energy of divine presence arising from the depths of your being. As you gather it in your heart, hold this force of awareness and animation in the loving field of your personal heart, and the encompassing collective heart, perhaps even expanding into the universal heart of bliss.
4. Welcome your mindful awareness in your head space, engaged with your vitalized, embodied being. When you’re ready, speak out loud, or silently within, the declaration: “I am divine presence. I choose to live in divine presence, arising from the depths of my being, whether I think of it or not, whether I feel it or not. I give my mind permission to not have to control the movement into deeper presence. I welcome receiving this awareness generated from any source, external or internal, recognized or not, chosen in the moment or gifted at any time.” Repeat this phrase again.
5. And now in the flow of integrated awareness in your whole being, be fully here in this moment. The inner eyelid of your Divine Presence open and active. Let yourself move on any inclination deep within to open your incarnate being—your whole embodied attitude of soul—through breath, gesture, posture, facial expression, or any form of manifestation to the totality of what there is, to the whole presence of Being, manifest here and now in this situation. Add movements, sounds, and declarations that well up from the hara, the spiritual womb, the life center in the belly, to affirm your divine gesture. Allow the primary energies of bodily life to unfurl their divinizing power, the indwelling empowering presence of divine animation. This can be experienced as an all-consuming, all-sustaining, all-creating everywhere active experiential fire.
Stay in this place of expression and opening as long as you like.
At any time following this practice, you can invoke the wellspring with the phrase, “I welcome Presence at any moment, chosen or received.” Or any other phrase, movement, gesture, posture, sound, or expression that is given to you now or afterward, as spirit reveals and offers you.
(this practice draws upon and adapts practices from John Heron, integrated with WBMA)