Praying With God Being All of Us

Integral Prayer Part 7: WeSpace Prayer

The second movement of Integral prayer is the shift from praying to God to praying with God. This is moving into the relationship of prayer, not just talking to someone, but enjoying the silence of one another’s presence, and also speaking with one another. 

Learning to pray with God-Beside-Us is the process of engagement with the personal face of God. This looks like learning to listen and interact with those in the invisible realm, like The Living Jesus, God’s motherly/fatherly presence, Mary, or other spiritual guides.

And it can also look like praying with the face of God-Beside-Us in all of us.

Prayer is a movement of connection between God and us. But when we realize that God is not just “out there” and discover the divine face within, we also begin to recognize that this inner face of God is not just in us, but is in other people as well. Of course it is! And not just as a nice thought or way of looking at others, but even a consciousness from which we can share and pray with together—the personal face of God-Beside-Us in and among one another!

When we can intentionally share in this awakened consciousness together with others, we are joining in the awakened field of mystical communion. This is prayer as a communal participation, not as a performance or modeling, but as an inter-subjective participation in our divine interbeing.

We call this WeSpace Prayer. And here are some dynamics of how we pray in this way.

Strengthening, Encouraging, and Comforting One Another

Follow the way of love and eagerly desire the gifts of the spirit . . . to speak forth for building up, encouragement, and tender consolation.   (I Cor. 14: 1, 3)

The vision and expression of church in early Christian communities was a place of deep care for one another. While amazing and non-ordinary things would often happen in the spirit of awakened consciousness, at the center of their church gatherings was a collective sharing of gifts from the heart of love for strengthening, encouraging, and comforting one another.

While we can certainly receive encouragement and wisdom from a pastor or priest speaking to a group audience, the focused care of interpersonal engagement from a group participating in awakened consciousness is far more powerful and personal.

And we deeply need this loving encouragement. We may even be so removed from receiving that type of intentional support that we don’t even know how much we are carrying by ourselves. We don’t realize what we are missing. 

In WeSpace prayer, we practice moving into this direct care for one another from our embodied, awakened consciousness, seeking to sense from our centers of spiritual knowing (Part 6—last week’s article) and then offering what arises in this spirit of love.

From this space of sensing and knowing from, we move into the WeSpace, into the group field. We primarily begin with focusing on each person for concentrated attention and care. We express this in two ways: silently engaging in the flow, or speaking forth with words.

Engaging in the Flow

Learning to do this can sometimes be a little uncomfortable. We’re not used to engaging relationally with this sort of direct care, especially with people we don’t know very well. It can feel a little more intimate than what we’re used to. 

So we are free to give silently to one another through the energy of love in our hearts. This is called “heart transmission,” and it can have a very powerful effect. Even though we can’t necessarily put it into words, the felt experience of this flow giving or receiving in a group is profound and often just as powerful—if not more powerful—than the words spoken to one another.

The more we allow ourselves to engage in this flow, the more we discover that our hearts are filled with an inexhaustible source of loving energy coming from our radiant center. When we decide to become an intentional channel of this love, we switch from the common orientation in spiritual gatherings focused on receiving and into being active participants in the flow of divine love and care. 

And in the process, we discover too that our own hearts are more full from the giving and receiving, as we are coming more alive energetically in the awakening of our hearts.

Speaking Forth

Of course, it’s not just our hearts that are awakening. In the energy of the collective field, we also find it a little easier to sense arisings from our other centers of spiritual knowing, like we looked at last week. 

As we are able to find our voice, we can “speak forth” what it is we are sensing—always done with humility and held loosely. 

Sometimes it’s helpful to begin by simply naming what we are experiencing, especially coming from our body centers, which are naturally less expressive in words. Just simply saying something like, “I’m feeling a lot of warmth in my heart” or “I’m noticing energy in my hands as we focus on you.” We don’t even necessarily need to know what they mean, though sometimes we may have a sense. These offerings can go a long way to bringing forth the emergent quality of collective awakened consciousness.

To partake in the flow of this consciousness, we have to let go of what we already know and be open to what we are about to know. We are not sharing from our acquired knowledge or mental stories of understanding, but what is arising that needs to be spoken now in this moment, what God is offering to us through the knowing of our embodied awakened consciousness. 

In releasing the familiar and secure, we take the divine hand reaching to us, offering to lead us in the dance of the arising consciousness of emergent knowing. The inner hand of God inviting us into the movement of divine participation in shared space of the community of communion.

Mystical Communion

The more we move into and practice in this WeSpace, the more we begin to recognize and sense the deep nature of our mystical interbeing, the experiential knowledge of our interconnection.

“By their very nature, and at every level of complexity, the elements of the world are able to influence and mutually to penetrate each other by their within, so as to combine their ‘radial energies’ in ‘bundles’… this psychic interpenetrability grows and becomes directly perceptible . . . it is written all over the social phenomenon and is, of course, felt by us directly.”
–Teilhard de Chardin

What Teilhard is talking about here is the non-physical energetic fields that are constantly present in the spaces between and among people, even though we often aren’t mentally cognizant of them. Perhaps we have had the experience of perceiving this when we walk into a room of people that just has a certain feeling, or maybe we know a person who simply radiates love from their whole being.

This is a felt effect of the illusion of the finality of our physical boundaries that science has only further revealed since Teilhard wrote these words. Our hearts emit electromagnetic waves well beyond our bodies. On the quantum level, particles can be entangled across galaxies. We are not separate from one another.

We feel our “interpenetrability” on various levels, but can also grow in our perception and participation in this collective influence and permeation.

While we generally only notice the receptive effects of that energy on an instinctual or heart level, we can learn to more actively choose to engage in this mutual flow of energy and take ownership of what we are sending out. We can grow in our perception and participation in this collective space.

When we choose to enter into this space in the flow of love, we are cultivating the experience of our mystical communion.

This is actively embodying the body of Christ, partaking in communion in a mystical, participatory way. We are the body of God, all of us. And we can practice living into this reality through shared, communal engagement in what we call WeSpace.

If this experience sounds like something that you might want in your life, you are warmly invited to join a WeSpace group and begin practicing to give and receive in this way, to enter into the communion field. Enrollment is open now, and all are welcome to participate.

Of course “all of us” includes much more than just one group of people. It extends out to the unified field of everyone and everything. This is the third movement of Integral Prayer into God-Beyond-Us, into the transcendence and immanence of all things, which we’ll explore next week.