Posts tagged Integral Prayer
Do You Resonate When You Pray for Others?

A Prayer that Resonates

One of our core mystical practices in our WeSpace Groups is something we have called "Integral Prayer." That is admittedly a name that does not say much about what it actually is. We have had to keep putting a lot of energy into helping others understand what we mean by that terminology. In a long, wonderful conversation Luke and I had about this, Luke came up with a much more lively and descriptive name to help with that understanding — Resonating Prayer.

We can pray predictably, saying the routine words or affirmations of a religious ritual. Or we can pray in a resonating way. One of the dictionary meanings of "resonate" is "to affect or appeal in a personal or emotional way." Or "to strike a chord with." So we might say this is prayer that comes from deeply personal and vibrating, felt resonance within that seeks to strike a chord in another.

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PracticePaul SmithIntegral Prayer, practice, Transmission Comments
How Do Mystics Pray?

Integral Prayer Part 9: The Flowing Dance of Integral Prayer

There was a time where I pretty much stopped praying altogether. The old ways and forms of prayer that I had done in my life just didn’t seem to fit anymore. I turned to meditation as my more primary form of spiritual practice and took refuge in the silence.

It’s not as if God was absent in this form. Nor were the exercises without their effects and value. In fact, I loved the silence. I found it so refreshing.

But part of me missed something, or perhaps, someone. I knew that God was in the silence, but was that the only place? Was this the only path to divine participation? Was it all about development of awareness and perception in my own individual spiritual training? And was God still an accessible, personal presence?

Both prayer and meditation are vital to our spiritual path, but like most conceptions that serve us, they really blossom when they open up to the wider expanse of possibility in the evolving unfolding of inclusivity and complexity. This is the integrative path, welcoming a freedom of movements through a broad range of potential expression.

This is prayer as a mystical dance with the divine.

You can dance with a few fundamental, basic steps, but you’ll flourish into the flair and flow of a beautiful, joyful dance when the whole repertoire of movement is available to you, even including a few surprising turns and improvisations.

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Mysticism, PracticeLuke HealyIntegral Prayer, embodiment Comments
Praying Into All of Unified Reality
Praying Into All of Unified Reality

Integral Prayer – Part 8: Whole-Body Transcendence into God-Beyond-Us

In the third movement of Integral Prayer, we are addressing the 3rd person, infinite face of God-Beyond-Us. This is not the remote “God in the sky” who is unreachable and inaccessible, but rather the great Mystery who is always beckoning us onward, who is inviting us into the participation beyond the usual boundaries that we experience within the confines of our small self.

We don’t pray at this distant God, but rather we move into the Mystery in all its facets of reality. This is not an act of moving out of ourselves, because we are a part of that reality. Rather, it is to expand beyond while still being rooted to our own fullness. It is not separate from our being.

Praying into unified reality is a movement of holistic transcendence. We can experience it in each of the four centers, each in its own unique form—and each providing a crucial element to the fullness of an embodied expansion into the all.

Sometimes transcendence gets a bad rap because it is seen as an act of escapism and disassociation. While this can be true of less healthy forms, holistic transcendence into all reality will actually be a movement of much greater connection, much greater presence, and much deeper being. It is, in many ways, an immanent transcendence.

As much or more than ever, today we are so often experiencing constriction and enclosure in our lives. You may even feel this contraction in your body, perhaps in your chest or gut.

Praying into unified reality opens us from our constricted self-sense and into the freedom and joy of the expanse of the mystery beyond ourselves. The mystery of embracing all, embodying all, being all, and going beyond all.

So let’s go on that journey, let’s explore a movement together into all of unified reality.

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PracticeLuke HealyIntegral Prayer, transcendence Comments
Praying With God Being All of Us

Integral Prayer Part 7: WeSpace Prayer

The second movement of Integral prayer is the shift from praying to God to praying with God. This is moving into the relationship of prayer, not just talking to someone, but enjoying the silence of one another’s presence, and also speaking with one another.

Learning to pray with God-Beside-Us is the process of engagement with the personal face of God. This looks like learning to listen and interact with those in the invisible realm, like The Living Jesus, God’s motherly/fatherly presence, Mary, or other spiritual guides.

And it can also look like praying with the face of God-Beside-Us in all of us.

Prayer is a movement of connection between God and us. But when we realize that God is not just “out there” and discover the divine face within, we also begin to recognize that this inner face of God is not just in us, but is in other people as well. Of course it is! And not just as a nice thought or way of looking at others, but even a consciousness from which we can share and pray with together—the personal face of God-Beside-Us in and among one another!

When we can intentionally share in this awakened consciousness together with others, we are joining in the awakened field of mystical communion. This is prayer as a communal participation, not as a performance or modeling, but as an inter-subjective participation in our divine interbeing.

We call this WeSpace Prayer. And here are some dynamics of how we pray in this way.

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WeSpace, PracticeLuke HealyIntegral Prayer, PrayerComment
Praying From Your Inner Divinity

Integral Prayer – Part 6: Embodied Awakened Consciousness

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.

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Practice, MysticismLuke HealyIntegral Prayer, Prayer, embodiment, ConsciousnessComment
Do You Believe in God Being You?

Integral Prayer – Part 5: Enacting God in our Being

In Integral Christianity, we boldly claim and own the 1st-person reality of God-Being-Us, that we can identify as divine expressions of God. This is not us trying to become God through any kind of ego movement. It is a movement of awakening into the already present reality of God being us, into Christ consciousness.

In Integral Prayer with the Three Faces of God, we even seek to enact and speak from this divine consciousness. This is learning to take the step from divine identity to divine participation (2 Peter 1:4).

Learning to pray from God-Being-Us is something of a big step for a lot of us. And we may have a few mental hurdles that we need to leap before we can begin to attempt praying from God in our very own embodied being, from our own awakened Christ consciousness.

So this week, we’ll go through a little Q&A around some of those pesky skeptical thoughts we might find arising in our minds when we begin to speak about living out our divine participation in our knowing. And then next week we’ll look more specifically at how we experience this from within our own bodies.

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Practice, MysticismLuke HealyIntegral Prayer Comments