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.
Embodiment
To move into a fuller consciousness of knowing we must move beyond the confines of limiting ourselves to only our mental, cognitive processes. Research from the California Institute of Integral Studies has suggested that humans have multiple centers of knowing. Our practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening adapts this research (as well as many other sources) into a process of moving into a state of embody-full-ment, of tuning into an energetic knowing state from our centers of spiritual knowing in our body—heart, spiritual womb, feet, and head.
When we pray from each of these spaces, we are tuning into and participating with our divine being in new and profound ways. This also opens us up to new growing edges of learning from within our own bodies, learning new “mystical languages” as ways of speaking and transmitting from this Christ consciousness—the meeting point of divine and material reality as expressed in how “we live, move, and have our being.”
More about this next week.
Collective
Integrating the relational field into our spiritual practice has the potential to actually expand our capacity and enhance the quality of our experience. Other people are not a distraction. The shared energy of focused engagement in the WeSpace has a heightening effect. It moves us into a flow that transmits and energizes us in our practice. We are deeply supported by one another.
Entering into WeSpace helps move us into a new way of being that actively participates in the spiritual reality that we are not separate from one another. We can wake up to this reality much more readily and directly if our spiritual practice purposefully and directly invites us into the felt sense of this unity, the participatory experience of our deep engagement and spiritual interbeing with all others.
When we pray with others who are also intentionally participating in their Christ consciousness, we share with one another in the reality of the human-divine connection. We offer strength, encouragement, and comfort to one another from this integrated and awakened state imbued with love. That love among us is deeply enriching, and it invites us to a more expansive field. Our embrace widens as we deepen and have greater openness to the source of more love to give to others.
In this relational field, we also are open to connecting deeper with spiritual guides who can offer wisdom, encouragement, comfort, and love. And they delight in inviting us onward into the terrain of emergent possibility, into further growth and greater reality.
Emergent
Waking up in our spiritual practice is not a one-time, momentary event. It is a series of awakenings, an unfolding process that happens in a myriad of ways, touching each of our facets of reality.
This is why we it’s so vital to cultivate a space and practice that is regularly opening us up to what is new, what is arising. We are learning an attunement to not what we already know, but what we are about to know.
This openness to receive empowers us to actively participate in our spiritual unfolding, and it’s amazing to experience what can arise. When we open this space in a shared field, in a collective context, we can move in the cocreation of the unfolding offerings. We can discover wisdom and guidance we wouldn’t have heard otherwise, deep care and spontaneous expressions of love, and other gifts from spirit/awakened consciousness. And of course, this knowing is not just in our minds, but in all of our body centers.
When we pray into the expansive invitation to participation in the mystery, we are moving into the posture of receiving the words of spirit, the voices of higher and deeper consciousness ever-offering and ever-giving. Spirit is beckoning onward, into the evolution of the world, together with the groanings of creation into greater liberation and freedom, into the new ways of being on this earth.
The Effects of Integral Prayer
When we choose to pray or meditate, we do so for a variety of reasons. Many forms of prayer and practice tend to focus on one or two of these aims. In this way, they assume that most people have time for a wide variety of different practices and times of prayer.
This might be true in a monastic context, but in our current world this just simply is not the case for the majority of people. Most are already overburdened with the demands of responsibilities and the cares of life. We so often only have the time and energy for one practice, if even that.
Taking an integrative approach, Integral Prayer seeks to create an intention that can move into and incorporate many more benefits and possibilities into a single spiritual practice.
While many of the effects and outcomes of this practice are still unfolding, here are some of the results that we’re already seeing:
We are becoming more integrated, holistic, and complete humans. We are awakening the radiant love and bliss in our heart, coming home to presence our bodies, and tapping into the fullness of our being and the wellspring of our divine identity. We are beginning to learn to participate in that divine nature. We are living more deeply into the experience of not being separate from God.
We are becoming more deeply connected to one another in the reality of our interbeing, expanding our capacity for experience, love, and holding. We are awakening to the “We,” the intersubjective, interpersonal reality between us and all things, beyond the confining boundaries of our small selves. We are beginning to learn how to lovingly transmit and move among the interconnected space. We are living more deeply into the experience of not being separate from one another.
We are becoming more open to the emergent and nascent reality that is pushing forth with great intensity in response to the dire need we find ourselves in at this time. We are awakening to the arising of the whispers of spirit within, among, and beyond us, calling us into greater wholeness and joy. We are beginning to learn how to recognize the beckoning of Omega into the birthing labor of what lies ahead. We are living more deeply into the experience of not being separate from the earth and all of expanding creation.
In these ways and more, we are discovering new ways of being that are more holistic, inclusive, expansive, and loving. One step at a time, we are participating in our awakening.
Integrated Practice
Integral Prayer is a spiritual practice that can significantly expand our possibilities for growth and participation in the development of our consciousness. The wider embrace allows for a greater range of growth, in addition to the breadth of engagement in how we encounter the divine in each of the Three Faces of God.
While it may sound like a lot, we don’t need to feel burdened by doing it all at once. With the bigger field, at any time, we can gravitate toward the space we need to move in more deeply. We quite often will even be guided there by spirit. Through including the many facets of our being and reality, it also gives us a greater capacity to respond to our current state—individually and collectively—and meet it with the dynamic necessary for the present moment.
Crucially, this whole process of developing our consciousness is not for our own personal betterment or bolstering our egoic sense of self. All this we do in loving service to one another and the earth.
Waking up in this way allows us to be mystics in the world, living, breathing, knowing, giving from a deeper, more holistic consciousness. Transmitting love and offering healing to the earth. Living into the participation in divine nature, becoming the body of Christ, given for all.
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