How to Pray in Faith Transition

Prayer takes many forms, but at its core, it is an intentional act of putting our focused attention toward something uplifting—it’s an act of lifting up the gaze of our heart.

When we are feeling doubt, confusion, or religious betrayal, we can get stuck on which religious brand of thing we are looking at or praying “to.” This can get us to stop intentionally praying all together due to confusion and old conditioning around prayer.

In fact, this idea of “no longer praying” is misleading as I see it, because we all, in fact, are praying all the time—we are almost always focusing in on our desires and intentions with our words and actions.  We may not be intentionally uplifting our gaze, but we may be inadvertently be “praying” out our anxieties and fears all day long.

When we are in a troubled faith space, or even when we are very certain of the shape, form or name of the higher power we have trusted in, it remains helpful to return to the fundamentals regularly. “God,” after all, is actually the word “Good.”  Scriptures from all traditions say god IS good.  So think about something that makes you feel uplifted and good inside. We’re told god is love, so think about a time where you felt real, tender love for something, even an animal. Then sit in that sensation.

Healing with prayer starts with a vision of what wholeness looks like. For yourself, for others, for the world.

You don’t have to believe in anything to do this except the idea that goodness exists—even if it is simply a nice cloud or a pretty flower or a fluffy kitten.  We can simply look to that and it becomes a doorway.

One of the simplest forms, especially for those struggling with their own faith or conditioning around spiritual matters, is meditating on beauty—that can be visual beauty, as we experience in nature. Even more powerfully, we can send out beauty. We envision the most loving version of highest good for all life on Earth.  We imagine people all over the world putting down weapons, looking up, smiling, laughing, being transformed by joy. We envision this, we bless the world with this idea.

If you’re not in a great headspace, it may take time to get there where this doesn’t feel contrived. In that case, stick with the kitten, or holding your baby, or some other sweet experience where you can bring a past experience into a present state of love.

But if you can, it can be very healing for everyone to set aside any beliefs or ideas of cause and effect and simply sit with a beautiful vision of what could be possible in a world of love and forgiveness. In fact, this is a very, very ancient spiritual technique to sow ideas into the human consciousness using the inner doorway of our own consciousness. But you don’t have to worry about that, because in the meantime, the uplifted vision starts to takes seed in us, too. It can start to ripple out into off-cushion life more quickly than you may think.

“Prayer” here is the very basic idea of “connecting within to the life-supporting, healing force.”  It’s fine if you have a specific name you use or image you think about. It is most important that it feel healing. If thoughts keep intruding, this is where the Name comes comes in. You think of any root world that keeps you in a healing mindset. It can be one of the many names of our heavenly parents, or simply “peace,” “yes,” “come,” “still,” or “open.” It can be the sound of your breath of life going in and out, or a sound of a bird outside, if you can keep focus on that.

Early on, any mantra is primarily a helpful tool to steady and quiet thoughts and something to return to when the mental yammering sets in. However, many mantras have been imbued and charged with tremendous devotional power over millenia by millions of humans and do have great energy that can fuel your practice—but that will take time to see what works for you and is another post.

This kind of prayer is focusing on a state uplifted of wholeness, creating a place of rest for yourself. You generate within yourself the sensation of feeling whole, holy, healed, and wholly held. I often call it non-directional prayer. It radiates out of you like a dandelion gone to seed in all directions from every pore. If you’ve ever felt that sense of wholeness, you actively bring that past experience to your recollection to bring the experience into the here and now.

If you haven’t, you image what you think it would feel like. Set aside the self pity about not having tasted it yet (that you remember). Be patient, your job is to wait and listen and stay in that space and rest. The important thing is that, rather than seeking outside experiences to make you feel certain desired states, you work from the opposite end–you start with the desired state and stay inside it. You skip the external preliminaries.

Just a few minutes outside each day breathing the holy breath and keeping the mind on a moment or memory of beauty, kindness, or compassion will start cleaning out your spiritual pipes and set your feet on the path of tuning in to your own inner antennae. Everything you need is inside of you, my friend. I promise!

We meditate on beauty as a means to sow it more deeply into the soil of human consciousness.  In the process, we ourselves begin to heal from the inside out—in body, mind, and heart.