Fourth Week of January: Prayer

Click to view Video Recording 2021

As a fitting follow-up to last week’s meeting with God, this week’s spiritual journey takes us into the practice of prayer. This isn’t the only lesson in this curriculum on prayer. In the lighter seasons, when we’re immersed in the physicality of growing and manifesting our winter dreams, we work with directed prayer where we seek out the assistance of God to make something happen. When abundance is all around us in the natural world, we embrace prayers of gratitude. In the fall, we work with healing prayer, and in the spring, miracle-making prayer. Many of the themes touched upon this week appear at other times in the year, yet the way into prayer suggested by this point in our seasonal cycle of wholeness is different from any other. Our work with prayer now in this internal void time of year isn’t about asking for something or creating anything in the physical realm. Here, it’s much more about being in relationship with God and knowing God as our Beloved. After all, in any other relationship, would we go to a stranger with our most intimate fears, hopes, wants, and needs? More likely, those we turn to for help in times of need and celebrate with in times of accomplishment are the intimates with whom we give, receive, and share in ongoing relationship. So our focus this week is on becoming intimate with God.

A key element in any relationship is trust. When we’re afraid to trust other people, we create a prison of self-sufficiency that leaves no opening for people to prove themselves worthy of our trust. Our distrust becomes self-perpetuating because we’re too afraid and disillusioned to ask for help and aren’t willing to live in the uncertainty that exists between the asking and the receiving. As we try to protect ourselves from let-downs and unpredictable outcomes, we also deny ourselves the possibility of unexpected gifts.

This principle holds true as we relate to God. If we control every step and refuse to make a move until we can see the next ten steps down the path, if we refuse to ever live in uncertainty, we leave little opening for Spirit to move and guide us.

An Intimate Conversation

Just as we needed to let go of old preconceptions about God last week, we may also need to release limiting stereotypes of prayer which, at its worst, can devolve into a hollow recitation of religious prose or reading God our grocery list of requests. Prayer is a conversation, personal and intimate, the very act of which reminds us that we’re not alone.

As we touched upon last week, there are countless ways to conceive of God. It needn’t wear the face of a personalized deity to be a potent force in our lives. It can be perceived as energy, or found within as a transpersonal aspect of ourselves. It doesn’t need to be called God at all. We can call it the Universe, Spirit, the Collective Unconscious, our Higher Self, our Guardian Angel. We can call it a state of consciousness. What’s important is to envision ourselves connected to something greater than the collection of thoughts, feelings, physical characteristics and vulnerabilities that we think of as our “self.”

Of course, as with everything, our expectations of God will affect our experience. If we expect a harsh, unforgiving God, we’ll feel guilt, shame, and judgment. If we imagine the nonexistence of God, we’ll live in a reality of separateness where we have only those limited resources that we believe a single, vulnerable individual can have. Yet as we envision and begin to expect the reality of God as a limitless, benevolent source, we tap into grace beyond anything we can access through linear reasoning and physical power. And it’s with this God that I invite us all to fall in love this week.

A Four-fold Path into Prayer

For many years I had difficulty understanding prayer. Having had no religious upbringing in my family, I had no childhood prayer ritual to draw upon. When I discovered spirituality on my own, I had more exposure to meditation than to prayer. Prayer was something I just didn’t get until I slowly developed an appreciation for it through a longtime friendship with a deeply spiritual woman I knew in Baltimore, named Deb Teramani.

Deb was raised in an Italian American family complete with an Italian immigrant grandmother who spent hours a day on her knees in prayer in a special room of her house dedicated to God. Deb began a life of prayer by her grandmother’s side and continued the practice all her life, even as her spiritual beliefs broadened and took a more metaphysical bent. When I asked her once to explain prayer to me, she taught me a four-fold path, the structure of which she drew from her Catholic upbringing and the meaning evolving from the more eclectic understanding of her adulthood.

I’ve used it ever since, adding a bit of my own slant to each path. Forming the acronym ACTS, each step offers a deepening of our relationship with God. Of course, there are countless paths into prayer and this is just one way to start the conversation. I invite any of you to share in the forum or on the Facebook page forms of prayer that are particularly meaningful to you.

The Four Paths

Adoration

The path of adoration is all about opening our hearts to loving and being loved by God. A prayer may, but doesn’t have to, contain words. The act of adoration is 100% feeling. The adoration of God also includes adoring the God in each person. Mother Theresa made a life’s work of adoration. Offering love to the poorest of the poor, she lived by the words of Jesus, “Whatever you did to the least of my brethren, you did it to me,” and so saw the face of God in each person she served. She put it succinctly when she said, “When you know how much God is in love with you, then you can only live your life radiating that love.”

A man who had been part of my weekly class for several years once offered a touching demonstration of adoration one evening when, after leading the group in a meditation, he silently came to each of us and washed our feet. Such a simple act left everyone profoundly moved.

Anything that touches and lifts the heart can be a path into the spiritual state of adoration. Music is a powerful vehicle for this, as can be any words, thoughts, places, or images that inspire your deepest heart-felt feelings of inspiration and love for God. Some find it easier to adore God in nature or a spiritual sanctuary. Song, chanting, dancing, or drumming are other ways of lifting the spirit to a place of adoration. And, of course, any form of loving kindness to other living beings easily becomes a path of prayerful devotion to God.

If the experience of adoration eludes you, instead of doing the adoring, imagine God adoring you. Feel yourself completely surrounded by the deepest, most unconditional love you can imagine.

Contrition

Contrition is the act of acknowledging any aspect of your perception that has become separate from God, for the purpose of releasing that separateness. Contrition is a heart-felt apology to self and others for seeing faults and failings rather than the perfection God sees in us. It’s about acknowledging the ways we’ve acted from fear instead of love and the hurtfulness of these acts. Contrition is not about self-blame and guilt. It is about rectifying hurtful perceptions and actions. It’s a path of compassion and healing, not punishment.

It’s also an opportunity to let go of being right. In the fall we dedicate a whole lesson to releasing separateness and the miracles that follow when we relax our position of self-righteousness to simply say, “I’m sorry.” The act of contrition suggested here is raised to an even higher octave as we release our stand, not just against each other, but against God.

The following practices are some examples of prayerful contrition:

Take a daily, monthly, or life inventory of fearful perceptions and actions and then turn them over to God to be healed.
Look in a mirror, apologize to yourself for self-critical thoughts and for seeing anything less than your own perfection. See yourself as God does: innocent and wholly worthy of love.
Talking in person (or in prayer, addressing the other’s Higher Self), apologize to others for judgmental thoughts, words, and hurtful actions. Take steps in whatever ways feel appropriate to rectify your hurtful actions toward other people.
Feel the complete, unconditional acceptance and forgiveness of God healing any lack of forgiveness that you’re holding toward yourself or another. Recognize your innocence in the eyes of God.

III. Thanksgiving

Gratitude is a highly magnetic state of mind. It promotes healing in our physical body; it leaves us feeling happy and at peace, and it naturally attracts our highest good. Because what we give attention to is what multiplies in our lives, the more we acknowledge our blessings, the more blessings we have. “Thanksgiving” gives energy and attention to what we’ve received instead of what we lack. As a prayer, it’s all about saying, “Thank you,” instead of, “I want….”

To practice thanksgiving, thank God often for everything you have now. Give thanks for all of your successes and joys from the past, and give thanks for what you want to create in your life as though it’s already happened. Begin to notice all the small moments in your day when circumstances conspire in your favor—a parking place opens up just as you need it, you almost slip on the ice but catch yourself just in time, an unexpected check shows up in the mail—and thank God for each of these small gifts. At the end of each day, take a moment to review the blessings you’ve received. Put yourself to sleep this way at night.

Some years ago Oprah Winfrey popularized the practice of keeping a gratitude journal by inviting her whole TV audience to write down at least five things every day to be grateful for. Not only is this a powerful daily prayer of gratitude, over time it becomes an interesting journal of your life story, told from the perspective of your abundance.

Give thanks even for the experiences and life lessons that feel painful. In another lesson I tell a story of a woman who healed her melanoma by repeatedly affirming, “Thank you, God, for cancer.” As we give thanks for situations that feel hurtful, we relax, let go of struggle and become more open to healing. We open to the lessons of these situations without needing the pain to catch our attention.

Surrender

This last step, surrender, is about humility. It is an ego-deflating step that requests to know and do God’s will instead of our own. It’s when we admit our own powerlessness in the face of God’s power. Humility is an integral part of the teachings of Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step recovery movement. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, a book published by Alcoholics Anonymous outlining the twelve-step philosophy, points to the lack of humility as being a crippling defect of our culture. The book describes how we attach much pride to our capacity to control our destiny solely through our own cleverness and hard work. The downfall to this is that “As long as we place self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power [is] out of the question. That basic ingredient of all humility, a desire to seek and do God’s will [is] missing.”

The absence of humility is synonymous with a belief in separateness. As we rigidly propel our lives forward solely on the power we have as separate “particles,” we invite the stress, emptiness, and desperation that lead to addiction. Not only is humility a step in the healing of addiction, addiction is an end product of its absence.

Just as Alcoholics Anonymous teaches the necessity of admitting powerlessness over alcohol before healing can begin, we all need at some point to admit our utter powerlessness over the fears and limited vision of our ego (our “particle” self as opposed to our “wave” self, to use a physics analogy). The minute we believe ourselves to be completely free of our ego is when we become stuck.

Surrender invites us to look at where our attachments lie. Wanting something, feeling desire to have, do, or be something, is powerful. Where we have passion and desire, we have creative energy. However, we lose our power when desire becomes attachment—that is, when the feeling of “I want this!” becomes the feeling of “I can’t live (be happy, feel good about myself, etc.) without this.” Instead of being fueled by the excitement of creating what we want, we become controlled by the fear of not getting it. Then we stop being open to the highest possible outcome because we’ve become fixated on the only outcome our fearful ego self can imagine.

To practice surrender, try working with the simple prayer, “Thy will, God, not mine.” Say this many times a day, especially when life is not going according to your ego’s plan. As you say this prayer, breathe deeply, let your body relax, and imagine that a better way is about to open up for you as you hand the reins over to God.

Mentally, or in writing, list all the things you’re attached to. Include those things you currently have as well as future outcomes. Remember, attachment isn’t just about what you love or what you want. Attachment exists wherever we feel, “I can’t be complete, happy, safe, fulfilled, etc. without this.” Your list might include people, jobs, material possessions, your health, or aspects of you identity and life circumstances, just to name a few. As you identify each of these things, picture yourself letting them go, imagining that life could still be meaningful and joyful without them. Imagine turning your life path completely over to God in absolute trust that whatever plan Spirit has in store for you is infinitely better than your own.

Working with the Four-fold Path

There are many ways to work with these four aspects of prayer. You could practice one step at a time, spending days, weeks, or months focusing on only adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, or surrender. You could see which one has the most appeal and start there. Or, you could start with the one that feels the most difficult, trusting that there will be important lessons in the step that offers the greatest challenge.

You even could incorporate all four steps into a daily prayer ritual, giving some attention to each. The elegantly simple prayer “I’m Sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” captures the spirit of the four steps using a bare minimum of words. This prayer, which is of Ho’oponopono origin (a Hawaiian practice of healing and forgiveness) was popularized in Joe Vitale’s book, The Awakening Course: The Secret to Solving All Problems and is directed to God. It’s hard not to feel peaceful and uplifted after repeating this prayer several times.

I invite you to find your own way to work with the four steps this week in whatever way feels right for you. I’ll leave you with a suggestion, to use or not, which is the way I work with these four paths in my group sessions. Print out the following four messages and cut them into separate slips, or write them on separated 3×5 cards. Without looking, pick one, letting the random power of synchronicity guide you to the path you most need right now.

Adoration

Know how much you are loved!

Know how much love you have to give!

Let your heart break open with joy!

Contrition

Your blame, shame, guilt, and separateness

are all an illusion that you now release.

You are forgiven and you radiate compassion

and forgiveness toward others!

Thanksgiving

Count the many blessings you have now!

All the circumstances of your life conspire to

assist you toward your highest good.

The more you recognize this, the more

you heal, prosper, and thrive.

Surrender

Let go, let go, and let go some more.

Trust in God’s plan for you.

There is nothing more you need to do.

Trust that whichever path “picked you” is somehow important for you right now. Spend the week immersing yourself is this path. Create some form of practice that allows you to give it up as an offering to God, to give it forward as an offering to other people, and to receive it as a gift from God.

If you have any doubt as to the efficacy of this method of picking a path, here’s how it worked for a woman in my group who also had doubts. When she first did this exercise, she picked the path of Thanksgiving. She didn’t particularly resonate with it and couldn’t apply it to her life very meaningfully. Then, she attended another event with me several weeks later where I happened to be using the same hand-outs and, once again, picked “Thanksgiving.” The coincidence of receiving the same message twice caused her to give it a bit more attention this time, but it still didn’t seem to penetrate very deeply. She did, however, post one of the messages on her refrigerator and kept the other tucked in her wallet.

More weeks passed and, as she was leaving her urban apartment, she saw a little purple slip of paper on the pavement. It so reminded her of the purple hand-outs I used in my class on prayer that she felt compelled to go over and see what it was. To her amazement, it was one of those same hand-outs—the one with the message, “Thanksgiving!” She was startled to see it there as she lived nowhere near where the classes had taken place, but then she imagined she must have somehow dropped the one she carried with her. She checked in her wallet, but found the slip still there. So she went inside, thinking it must surely be the one from her refrigerator. But it, too, was still there. This time she knew the message of thanksgiving was truly a miracle meant for her, not just a meaningless coincidence, and she embraced it with all of her being.

I met with her months after this experience and was struck by how different she was. She seemed happier than I had ever seen her. She kept saying over and over how blessed she felt for so many things in her life. She didn’t even realize how much she was gushing gratitude until I brought it to her attention and then she attributed it to the miracle of “Thanksgiving.”

Knowing our Oneness with God

Prayer is an ongoing conversation with the Divine, and what begins as a bridge between our small sense of self and the greatness of Spirit, ultimately leads us to know our Oneness with God. What begins as communication becomes communion. Paradoxically, when prayer is successful, the need for it becomes obsolete. A Course in Miracles addresses this in the third chapter of the first volume in a section entitled, “Innocent Perception.” It says, “As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place…. Perception is based on a separate state, so that anyone who perceives at all needs healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state….”

In other words, as long as we perceive ourselves in relationship with God instead of simply being One with God, we’re in a state of separation and in need of prayer. It also says, “…the only meaningful prayer is forgiveness, because those who have been forgiven have everything…. The prayer for forgiveness is nothing more than a request that you may be able to recognize what you already have.” It says that what we already have and have lost knowledge of is that “you yourself are a miracle of God,” and that “God and His miracle are inseparable.”

So, to conclude this month’s immersion in paradox, where emptiness becomes fullness, not knowing leads to the truth, and turning our attention deeply inward ultimately connects us to All That Is, we need to recognize that prayer is both a path to God and a way of separating ourselves as well. The most successful prayer makes itself obsolete as our conversation with God leads us to the experience of being the God to whom we pray. In moments of such pure being, we heal the duality of “self” and “Self.” This isn’t a goal to be reached after we’ve prayed enough or a state where, once achieved, we remain. Rather, it’s experienced in wordless moments, again and again. It’s a choice we make in each instant and every time we choose it, it becomes easier to choose it again.

We’re now ending the fifth month of our journey through darkness that began at the fall equinox. In that time we’ve experienced death, loss of control, and a wrestling with the submerged demons of our own shadow. In the empty space made by physical death, we found spiritual renewal and a new sense of comfort with a never-ending stream of paradoxical, opposing realities. Now, in this season of midwinter, light is gaining momentum, building to overtake the dark. The season of darkness is giving way to a season of dark and light in equal measure—and a time to resolve the paradoxes they create.

On this, A Course in Miracles says, “What do you want? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together, not kept apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, as you are. In union, everything that is not real must disappear, for truth is union.” The path to this reconciliation, it goes on to say, is to “bring to [God] every secret you have locked away…. Open every door… and bid [God] enter the darkness and lighten it away.” (Text, Chapter 14, “Sharing Perception with the Holy Spirit.”)

This has been our work of the last five months and with the foundation laid, the time for communion is here. No matter what you consciously believe to be happening in the following meditation, consider that something unfathomable is taking place. Each step we’ve taken along the way has readied us for this restorative communion with Truth. It’s this Oneness that restores our hearts to love one another, which will be our focus next month, or to manifest our Godliness through abundant joy, success, prosperity, and healing in the coming seasons. Even if you doubt this magnitude of blessing is possible for you, or perhaps don’t feel you’ve spent enough time on preceding lessons to be ready for it, know that communion only takes an instant of willingness and, in that instant, everything changes.

Wait until you have some quiet, uninterrupted time before going into the following meditation.

Meditation: Communion

Relax your body and quiet your mind with some deep, slow breaths….

Softly, let your awareness expand to include your Higher Self—the beautiful, radiant being of light that is your true Self…. See the Higher Selves of other students in this program now joining you…. We’ve all gathered together, beyond the illusionary limits of space and time, to realize our Oneness with God. Picture those who are currently in this program and then, because in the spiritual realm time is an illusion, imagine the lights of all the souls who have in the past and will in the future gather in this circle created by our intent. Know each soul in this circle to be a divine expression of God and feel the presence of God all around you in the form of these divine beings. Recognize how much more powerful we are together than separately. Our joined intentions quicken our growth so that what has seemed difficult in the past will come more easily now. Take a moment to feel the energy of our circle building….

Allow your own image of God to come to you—the one that is most powerful and personal to you. Open your heart in adoration to this spiritual presence. Feel God’s love embracing you, reminding you that you’re never alone and that you’re deeply cherished. The force of God’s love reminds you that you, too, are a force of love and that you have so much to give. Let your heart break open to this flood of love. Take it in, letting it melt away walls of fear… and then send it on to all those you wish to heal with the power of God’s love.

In this overwhelming wash of love you know yourself to be innocent and lovable. You forgive yourself unconditionally and are able to see the innocence of all those who you thought had hurt you. You understand that the True part of yourself has never been harmed or committed harm. You radiate forgiveness and compassion to those you love as well as those from whom you’ve withheld love in the past.

In the light of Divine Love you see how blessed you are and how all the circumstances of your life have served you in some way. Everything has worked toward your highest good. You give thanks for what is, for what has been, and for what is to be. Your heart offers up to God the gift of overflowing gratitude.

And knowing that God is here with you always, that you are never alone, you relax and surrender to Spirit’s plan for you. You trust that all is well and you’re in good hands, so you release all fear. You let go and let God carry you forward. Your trust in the process of life, your trust in yourself, and your loving trust of others calls forth the best in everyone you encounter.

You no longer resist the emptiness of the void or the uncertainty of Mystery. You embrace the adventure of it and relax into the paradox of knowing and not knowing. With the most profound trust there is, you now open every door of your being to God, allowing Spirit to fill every dark corner with Light. In absolute surrender, God fills you until there is nothing left of “you,” only God. Everywhere “you” are is God. Everything you see is God. Every thought is God. Every act is God. There is nowhere and nothing that God isn’t and there is no separation in God. There is no paradox in God, only resolution. There is no prayer, only communion, and no words, only Now….

When you’re ready to come back, do so gently. As you close your experience, thank all the souls in our circle with whom you’ve shared this experience of communion. Know that something has changed and there’s no need to grasp for an understanding of what it is. Simply feel the peace of it and take it with you into your day. Feel that your mind has been cleared and your body rejuvenated. Come all the way back with some deep breaths and return to a normal waking state feeling refreshed, alert, and awake.