Falling back

Today is that delicious day we each get once a year when we set our clocks back and get an extra hour of either sleep or daytime activity. I got a little of each.

I expectedly awakened a little earlier than I normally would on a Sunday, and I indulged myself in an extended period of prayer, something I'd been yearning for since mid-summer when I began the chaotic wind down of my old job and transition into what is seeming to be an equally busy new job.

For me, prayer satisfies me most when I do it regularly.  I think of it as being a bit like exercise. When I am doing either every day, I slide into it easily and often get into "the zone"--that enchanting place where time and space cease to exist, and I am mindfully in the present.  However, not unlike being off exercise for a while, when I come back to prayer after time away, I struggle.

Now it isn't as if I haven't prayed for months.  I have.  Yet instead of deep, solace-inducing communion, my prayers have been less two-way communication and deep listening and more pleas for aid, like "Help me know what to do right now," "Show me the way," or "Help me get through this day." More often than not, I heard no answer.  I am sure that the answers were there, but I was either not present enough to receive the answer or overly intellectualizing to figure the answer out myself. Most likely, both.

This morning the need to develop my prayer muscles was clearly apparent.

With that said, I did hear that I should write a blog post, so here I am.  I do often feel that writing becomes a prayer for me, and my listening becomes richer when I allow myself to not know what it is I am going to write but rather just allow it to flow through me.  As I write this post, I understand some of what was missing from my prayers this morning that I couldn't seem to know when I was in them.

Back in the day when I prayed with clients, I used the term "let your prayers pray you."

"God," I said, "would let us know what we should be praying for."  Then we would sit and pray together.  Often what would come up would be things about which my mind would never have thought to pray.  "Thank you for the birds that sing outside my window every morning," or "Thank you for the sun and its warmth on my skin when I walk."  Occasionally, I expressed gratitude for just being still.

The most interesting thing about letting my prayers pray me is that much, maybe most, of my prayers uttered from that space expressed gratitude and, more often than not, they acknowledged the little things in life of which I so often don't even make notice.  I believe that focusing attention on the exquisite order of the world around me diminished whatever might have been on my heart and mind that day to an appropriate proportion.

The practice also reminds me of the non-linear nature of the Universe. For instance, my struggle to pray this morning did send me to computer to write about prayer.  Now I remember what I had forgotten about praying and can go back to prayer again with an open heart and mind.

Soon, I will do that.

As I ponder doing so, however, the thought that nags at me is how I got so far from my prayer practice to have forgotten how to connect.  The answer may go back to the metaphor of exercise.  My actions haven't made either priorities when in my heart I know that I ache for both. Articulated priorities, which aren't acted upon as such, are clearly not the focus of our intention.

In the busyness of a life that seems to be driven by urgencies, like finding a new refrigerator before all my food thaws on a gorgeous fall day when I would prefer to go for a long walk in the woods. Always there seems to be something urgent that cuts into my time. Yet if I want my life to reflect the focus of my intentions, I must act accordingly.

I truly don't have an answer for the refrigerator-versus-the-fall-walk dilemma but somehow I know in my heart that if I spend more time in prayer and exercise, how to bring life to my intentions will become clear to me.  Right now, I am savoring the extra hour to focus on prayer and exercise and feeling comfortable pushing back the urgent for just a little longer.

My Prayers Praying Me

When I conducted one-on-one Intentional Living Intensives with clients, we would start our days with prayer.  As we sat quietly, I would tell them that I'd like for them to consider praying differently this time.  "Let your prayers pray you," I would say.

I would continue to say that most of us were taught to ask for things or to invite guidance on decisions.  Sometimes we said memorized prayers, such as the Lord's Prayer which Christians often recite or the childhood prayer of "Now I lay me down to sleep...."  Generally, prayer has been something that came from our brains.

Yet when we read about prayer, often it suggests communion or communication.  As my client and I reflected on how prayer might be different, I would often share some different definitions of prayer for us to ponder. Today I looked up communion on dictionary.com.  After the Christian sacrament of communion were the definitions "an interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions, intimate communication; the act of sharing, or holding in common."   That was the kind of prayer I was suggesting.

We would often talk about the nature of communication and especially intimate communication.  "Two way," my clients would often say. "Listening deeply...taking time to let things sink in...more silence."  Rather than us talking to God from our heads, I would say, "Let try intimate communication."

When my clients stopped thinking about what they were going to "say" in prayer, and instead they concentrated more on "listening," "letting things sink in," and "silence," a commonality across my clients from different religions and even the occasional atheist or agnostic who came for this spiritual retreat emerged.

There was much more silence.  Sometimes we'd sit for several minutes.  What followed was often several minutes of gratitude but rarely gratitude for the things that my financially successful clients spent considerable energy pursuing.  I lived in a house in the woods on a lake.  "Thank you for the song of the birds," might come.  "Thank you for the rain." "Thanks for the cycle of nature." "Guide us in our work today," I would usually say.

Almost always, my clients would say what a profound experience it had been to let their prayers pray them.  I would always agree.

This morning I leave on a business trip, and I couldn't figure out the logistics of going to church and then making my travel schedule.  I decided to take my worship time to meditate.  Shortly after sitting, I heard, "Let your prayers pray you."  I smiled.  It had been a long time.  There it was again.  I live in different woods now, but the song of two birds, obviously communicating, was the first thing I was thankful for.  Then what grabbed my attention was a site of chronic pain, so I was thankful for the parts of my body that worked well.  In an instant, the pain source calmed and melted discomfort away.

For 25 minutes I let my prayers pray me.  I don't remember any others now, but I didn't ask for anything.  I sat in deep gratitude.  I was in intimate communication with God. The profound stillness continues in me now. It was perfect.