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.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyAugust 8, 2020Integral 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.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyAugust 1, 2020Integral Prayer Comments

Waking Up with Integral Prayer

Integral Prayer – Part 4: A Spiritual Practice for Emerging Consciousness

Integral Prayer not only connects us more fully and holistically with an evolving God, but is also a spiritual practice that deepens and develops our consciousness in an integrated way. Developing our consciousness through spiritual practice will be the most transforming and liberating if it can include the breadth and depth of our divine, human, and material reality. If it can engage in transcendence and immanence, relationship and individuality, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine, and further integrations.

At this moment, the world desperately needs people who are able to live and give from an embodied wholeness, who have access to a deeper way of spiritual knowing, indeed mystics who experience reality from a greater depth of connection and being—beneath the surface of chaos and disorder, offering love and life to the world from the hidden wholeness and the abundant source.

To come to this place, we need to awaken into new ways of being. Teaching and mental education alone will not transform us in this way. Not all spiritual practices will get us there either. We need a practice that can bring us into the space of emergent consciousness, the unfolding and arising of new growth and evolution from spirit. We believe this happens most effectively when we are practicing from a fully embodied being, and is enhanced when in a shared, collective field with others.

Let’s look at how these qualities of Integral Prayer can help us wake up to higher, deeper consciousness, and then at some of the effects we are already seeing from this practice.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyJuly 25, 2020Integral PrayerComment

Evolving Prayer with an Evolving God

Integral Prayer Part 3: Praying into, with, and from the Three Faces of God

Prayer is communication and communion. It is the WeSpace between God and us. This divine meeting place usually changes throughout our lives as we grow and develop. We change, and so does our understanding and experience of God. Often we don’t quite know how to pray in a way that seems to resonate fully with these changes.

Can we still find an evolving God in prayer? Can we still meet God in the dynamic unfolding of our relationship with the divine?

While at times we may need to demythologize, deconstruct, and differentiate through our ideas of God, hopefully, we can continue on our journey without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We can find our way to more liberating ways to meet with the divine, which can include and reintegrate the healthy gifts of traditional prayer.

This becomes possible through recognizing The Three Faces of God <link>, which gives us the freedom to hold an understanding of God that encompasses the breadth of divine presence and manifestation. Moving then from this understanding into the WeSpace, into the participatory experience of communing with each of these faces is what we call Integral Prayer.

Our prayer can evolve with each of these three faces, meeting God in transcendence, relationship, and participation.

Let’s look at these evolutions in prayer with each of our faces of God.

Practice, EvolutionLuke HealyJuly 18, 2020Integral Prayer, development Comment

Can the Trinity Evolve?

The Three Faces of God - The Foundation of Integral Prayer

If prayer is communicating and communing with God, we must know who this God is that we are spending time with. Am I praying to a distant cosmic force? A white dove? Do I still talk to Jesus? Do I simply dwell in my own divine being, silently and individually?

Most Christians have been taught a Trinitarian view of God, and the biblical, theological foundation of Integral Prayer is based on the Trinity, but an evolved form. Can the classical Trinity evolve while keeping its foundational truth for Christianity?

EvolutionPaul SmithJuly 11, 2020Integral PrayerComment

Is There a Better Way to Pray?

The difference between traditional prayer, Centering Prayer, and Integral Prayer

Prayer may be one of the oldest and longstanding traditions in all of humanity. Long before written history, humans were praying to the divine for help, guidance, and a change in the present circumstances in their lives.

But what does prayer look like for Christians today? As our views of God evolve, do we still feel comfortable asking for help and talking to God? Some do, some don’t. Some are confused or maybe even embarrassed about what they find themselves uttering below their breath in prayer—or maybe they’ve given all that up as childish or mythical.

Is there more? Is there a better way to pray?

Let’s look at a few common forms of prayer for Christians today to set the stage for how our understanding and practice of prayer might continue to evolve.

PracticePaul SmithJune 28, 2020Integral Prayer, Contemplation Comments

Erotic Spirituality

Part Six: Christianity and Sexuality

She exclaimed, “Kiss me—full on the mouth!
For your love is better than wine.”
He replied, “You are tall and supple, like the palm tree,
and your full breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.I’m going to climb that palm tree! I’m going to caress its fruit!”
She murmured back, “Breathe on my garden, fill the air with spice fragrance.
Oh, let my lover enter his garden! Yes, let him eat the fine, ripe fruits.”
So, he took me home with him for a festive meal, but his eyes feasted on me!
—Song of Solomon

Imagine an R rated book in the Bible! Scholars agree that the Song of Songs (or Solomon) is, first of all, an erotic love poem. It is passionate poetry about human relationships and sexuality. After all, there isn’t even a single mention of God in the entire book.

Mystics and saints down through the ages also tell us that it is an image of the passionate love God has for us. A beautiful and relatable metaphor for the passion and intimacy the depth of divine-human connection that we should strive after.

So which is it? Both of course! The energy of Eros—one of the strongest forces in the human body—is a powerful and sacred force of attraction that draws us forward, beyond ourselves into a union with another human and with God.

Paul SmithJune 21, 2020Ecstasy, Eros Comments

Should We “Follow Our Bliss?”

Part 4: Ecstasy Deepening into Bliss

“Follow your bliss”

Joseph Campbell famously said, “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” He went on to say, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Nowadays many, maybe especially religious people, see this as a sort of new age platitude. Whether it’s seen as flippant hedonism or unrealistic idealism, bliss is often thought of as something outside of the normal experience of life. A moment here or there if you’re lucky. But to follow your bliss? That is selfish individualism and not really how life works, right?

But my own experience these last few decades has been one of bliss, one of “the rapture of being alive.” I believe it is possible for us to live everyday in this state. Let’s explore how that might actually be possible.

MysticismPaul SmithJune 14, 2020Ecstasy, Bliss Comments

Embodied Mystical Solidarity

Luke HealyJune 7, 2020 Comments

Crossing the Barriers to Ecstasy

Part Three: Cultivating Ecstatic Emergence

Today is Pentecost Sunday in the Christian Liturgical calendar, often called the birthday of the church. If there is one descriptive word we could give to the first Pentecost, it would be “ecstatic.” If the church was, indeed, born in an outpouring of ecstatic joy that looked to onlookers like drunken behavior — times have changed!

Sacred ecstasy has not only been dismissed in past centuries, it continues to be impeded by a number of barriers and hurdles in our culture and religious traditions. This presence of energetic ecstasy is not a pursuit of happy feelings or wild behavior, but a vital experience and aspect of consciousness necessary for our spiritual evolution into greater liberation and enlightenment.

But many of us may feel blocked or have a hard time moving into this experience. Why is that? Here are four of the ways that the sacred ecstatic is being minimized or dismissed today in many, if not most Christian circles.

MysticismPaul SmithMay 31, 2020Ecstasy Comments