Six Ways to Be Present to God
Loving with All of Our Everything
I love you
Jesus made it magnificently clear that the goal of life is love – personal, global, cosmic love. According to him, this love has three undivided directions – our loving God, one another, and God loving us. He pointed to the first two by echoing his Jewish tradition, reciting “love God with all your heart, all of your mind, all of your soul, and all of your strength, and your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:37-38; Mark 12: 30-31; Luke 10:27). In other words, love God with all of your everything!
Jesus expanded this quote from the Torah by making sure we understood its word “neighbor” as everybody! His life demonstrated how this looked in his mystical prayer life, relationships, and actions. There are many expressions of loving God and others, such as serving God and others with compassionate actions.
Most importantly, Jesus made loving God and others realistically possible for us by inviting us to the felt experience of being loved by God in a direct, transforming way. In his Jewish scripture, God was both vengeful and loving. With Jesus, God is only love. And that love is meant to be experienced in an intensely personal way. “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). God loves us with all of God’s Everything!
At ICN, we have developed a mystical, meditative prayer practice of directly experiencing the presence of God and God’s transforming love God has for us, while experiencing and expressing our devotion and love for God and others at the same time. We call it Whole-Body Mystical Awakening.
Here is the most recent evolution of our basic Individual Whole-Body Mystical Awakening meditative prayer practice. Some of it will be familiar to our readers, and some of it will be new. This new framing deepens our direct experience of God by identifying it more clearly in six distinct ways. It is one thing to have a sensation. It is another to intensify that sensation by identifying it as being how God’s loving presence feels!
We call this an introduction to the “individual” Whole-Body Mystical Awakening Practice since it can be done alone. However, this practice is inherently communal, involving others whether they physically present or not.
WBMA is a unique, integrated practice that is personal, communal, and cosmic — all at the same time! It integrates the three different faces of God — the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us, the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us, and the Inner Face of God-Being-Us. It accesses the four embodied centers of spiritual knowing (head, heart, womb/gut, and feet). It recognizes Christ as the Christian symbol for all of reality— divine, human, and material — in seamless oneness.
In this integral approach, we can better come into an embodied expression of loving God and others with our whole being, with all of our everything!
This individual meditative prayer practice can take from a few minutes to an hour or more. You can do it anywhere at any time. You can include one part, several, or all of it. I often take 20-30 minutes. Here is how it goes:
Six Ways to be present to God in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening
1. The feeling of God-Being-Us reveals itself in our awakened heart center
In WBMA, we always start with our hearts.
We are used to saying “our heart” or “my heart” when speaking of the heart as a metaphor for becoming more loving, compassionate, and kind to oneself and others. The problem is that speaking and thinking of “my heart” in the reconstructed Christian tradition tends to be spiritually reductionist. Let me explain.
The Christian understanding of God is that “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4: 16). Therefore, living in love is the experience of God’s heart of love living in us. This cocreates a flow of divine-human love from within you. The love you feel in your heart space is not only your human love but also God’s divine love. This is how God feels in your heart!
To be even more pointed, this is the experience of how God-Being-You feels in your heart center of spiritual knowing! It is both your heart and God’s heart beating in your chest, radiating out both your love and God’s love – without differentiation. It is cocreated love by both us and God. We might learn to think, if not say, that it is your-God-heart.
With that in mind, in WBMA, we always start with the heart. By heart, we mean not only our spiritual God-heart but also our physical heart. The physical heart communicates to the brain and body in four principal ways: neurologically through the transmission of nerve impulses, biochemically via hormones and neurotransmitters, biophysically through pressure waves, and energetically through electromagnetic field interactions. Interestingly, the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
To help you move into “your-God-heart,” first move your awareness from your head down into your physical heart. You can tap on your head, then tap on down your temple, jaw, neck, and chest. Continue tapping on your chest until you sense you have moved to your heart space. You can also place your hands on your-God-heart which can increase the energy there. Your-God-heart space includes your chest, back, arms, and hands. You may also think of someone you love to help activate the love flowing from your-God-heart. You may feel warmth flowing from your heart and bliss flooding your whole being.
Are you getting the idea of “your-cocreated-God-heart” now? Once “our-God-heart” understanding becomes embedded in us, we may no longer necessarily need to use those particular words. But we can know them deep within.
2. The sensation of Christic energy pulses as our feet access the grounding energy of the earth
Move your attention to your feet, making sure your feet are planted firmly on the floor. You may want to move your feet around or wiggle your toes to help your consciousness move there. Think of roots growing from your feet deep into the earth, anchoring you in your body and your body to the earth and nature itself, even the material cosmos.
Draw up this cocreated Christ energy from the grounding and centering of these spiritual roots that connects you with the oneness of all divine material reality. Christ is the Christian symbol for all of reality – divine, human, and material reality. That reality was dramatically manifested in and as Jesus and includes all creatures, great and small, the glory of nature, and the cosmos itself. As Richard Rohr says, “God loves things by becoming them!”
3. The intuition of God-Being-Us rises from deep within our spiritual womb
Draw that grounding energy up to your gut, your spiritual womb. We all have a spiritual womb, whether we have a physical one or not.
Neuroscience now speaks of our mind-brain, heart-brain, and gut-brain. We often call the gut a “spiritual womb.” Mindfulness, heartfulness, wombfulness, and grounding are all partners in our spiritual knowing.
Your spiritual womb is the home of your core self, your divine identity, which is God-Being-You. Let yourself sink into God’s being you in the deep presence of your spiritual womb. This is not accessed by conceptualizing or thinking but by intuition which is knowing something without conscious reasoning. Rest in your spiritual womb by simply Being.
God defined God’s Self to Moses as I AM, Being itself. The term “I Am” relating to God appears over 300 times in the Bible. This has led to the biblical God being referred to as “the great I AM.” Jesus defined himself in divine terminology by saying, “I Am” eight significant times. Most revealingly, in “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Created in the image of God, we are also I AM — pure, beyond time, infinite Being — as your True Self. Paul echoed this when he said that we have our being in God (Acts 17:28). Be aware of any impressions or sensations that emerge from this center of deep spiritual being.
Intuition, creativity, and “gutsy” courage, cocreated by you and God, also arise from the generativity of wombfulness.
Jesus said that from here flow rivers of living water, the awakened consciousness of our divine identity (John 7:37-38). The spiritual knowing of the gut deepens into a unified field as we experience not only our own divine essence but that this identity is the one source, the one divine essence of everyone.
4. The awareness of God-Being-Us is both in the stillness of our awakened mind and in the images, words, sensations, and impressions that may emerge
Move into your headspace, noticing that your mind is unusually calm as you carry the grounding energy of your feet, womb, and the radiant love of your heart with you into your headspace. Rest in the cleared stillness there are long as you wish.
The psalmist writes of God saying, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Saint Issac, 7th century mystic and Doctor of the Church writes, “Silence, like the sunlight will illuminate you in God.”
At any time, you may intentionally open to images, words, and impressions that may emerge from the quiet of your mind. These are not your usual, ordinary thoughts, but instead, they come from your deeper, awakened mind.
This is God-Being-You, and through divine-human cocreation, transmitting words and images of beauty, healing, guidance, and encouragement for both yourself and others.
5. The experience of God-Beyond-Us emerges in transcendent, formless awareness beyond our mind
Whenever you are ready, you can move up beyond your headspace into the formless transcendence that is pure consciousness that emerges beyond your mind. The metaphor of infinite, cosmic space can describe this. This is the mystical experience of God-Beyond-Us.
This vast, infinite dimension is beyond words, images, or forms of any kind. It is pure I AMness, pure consciousness, sheer Being.
6. The sense of God-Beside-Us manifests in and as the spiritual beings present with us in our God heart center.
Move back down into your God heart space, this time becoming aware of the spiritual presences that are with you. These are sourced from God and shaped and interpreted by you. First of all, this can be the motherly-fatherly presence of God, the Living Jesus, and other spiritual companions such as Mary or other saintly presences who are there to comfort, guide, and encourage you.
Let them hold you and touch you. You can sense their presence, talk with them, and receive from them. This is God-Beside-You.
You can also let your-God-heart flow out to loved ones, friends, and others who are also spiritual beings – but have been or are now in the physical realm. As they come to your mind, send the radiant energy of love out to them in connection, healing, light, and blessing. Let your heart expand as it holds all sentient beings in the blissful, loving embrace of heartfulness.
