Prayer

I originally posted this as a comment elsewhere and thought it was worth posting here as well since it probably fell on deaf ears where it was originally posted:

“I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him."

~Eric Clapton

I grew up in an extremely religious household so prayer was a forced part of my every day life growing up. I wasn't so keen on the prayer at meals or the prayer on our knees, but I did actually enjoy my conversations with God before I fell asleep at night. They were quiet whispers in my head. Even though I had been taught I needed Jesus as a go-between to talk to God, I just dialed up God directly every night anyway. lol My prayer to God gave me a place to talk about things I didn't think I could talk about with anyone else and it carried on well into my 20s.

I'm not sure when it was I stopped praying. I can't tell you when I started to think that maybe there was nothing at all out there. I just know that at a certain point I stopped believing in anything and called myself an atheist.

I think we sometimes have to tear down all of our beliefs so that we can rebuild with a new foundation. I had to get to a point where I believed in nothing so that I could slowly start to discover what my spiritual truths actually are now.

Trauma from my childhood left me disdainful of Christianity. My knee-jerk reaction was to roll my eyes and completely disregard anything remotely christian based.

Fast forward to now and I have come to a new understanding of many things. I see prayer as being a three-fold thing:

1. It can focus intentions and intention is what creates the world around us.
2. It can be that time to talk to our people on the other side...our guides, our loved ones.
3. It can be a time to plug into our God-selves and have a direct line to much needed insights.

I have come to a place where I believe what we call "God" and what we connect to is actually a spark within ourselves since we are all an aspect of Source/God. I sometimes call my God self "my higher self" because I truly believe when we connect to God, it is simply a much bigger part of our spiritual selves.

Photo By Cory Richards

I can now see how certain traditions in Christianity got started...like praying before meals. Again, it is about intention and when you infuse your food with gratitude and give thanks, it actually gives it a boost and makes it higher vibrational. Think of Dr. Masaru Emoto and his work with water and how using different words and phrases actually changed the shape of the water crystals. Gratitude is powerful. I think Yeshua/Jesus understood this and tried to share it with his followers and somewhere along the way the reason behind it got lost. Yeshua was a lot more new age than people realize. I wrote a blog about him recently and what his message actually was should you want to read it.