Part 1
Our Four Centers of Spiritual Knowing
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Integral Consciousness – Part 3
Read MoreIntegral Consciousness – Part 2
Read MoreIntegral Prayer Part 9: The Flowing Dance of Integral Prayer
There was a time where I pretty much stopped praying altogether. The old ways and forms of prayer that I had done in my life just didn’t seem to fit anymore. I turned to meditation as my more primary form of spiritual practice and took refuge in the silence.
It’s not as if God was absent in this form. Nor were the exercises without their effects and value. In fact, I loved the silence. I found it so refreshing.
But part of me missed something, or perhaps, someone. I knew that God was in the silence, but was that the only place? Was this the only path to divine participation? Was it all about development of awareness and perception in my own individual spiritual training? And was God still an accessible, personal presence?
Both prayer and meditation are vital to our spiritual path, but like most conceptions that serve us, they really blossom when they open up to the wider expanse of possibility in the evolving unfolding of inclusivity and complexity. This is the integrative path, welcoming a freedom of movements through a broad range of potential expression.
This is prayer as a mystical dance with the divine.
You can dance with a few fundamental, basic steps, but you’ll flourish into the flair and flow of a beautiful, joyful dance when the whole repertoire of movement is available to you, even including a few surprising turns and improvisations.
Read MoreIntegral Prayer – Part 6: Embodied Awakened Consciousness
In traditional prayer, we are generally trying to “reach out” to God from our ordinary self. In Integral Prayer from our 1st person inner divinity, we are instead coming from our awakened consciousness within in order to reach out to others.
This flips the script of prayer, empowering us to own our divine self, our part in the body of God, our participation in divine nature. In this movement, God is not a separate being that we have to seek out, but rather we become God’s movement to others in love.
We do this best by moving into a state of consciousness that opens us up to embodied awareness in an energetic way, moving into our Christ consciousness (the divine and material incarnation—“in whom we live, move and have our being”). We call this state awakened consciousness.
It’s usually helpful at first to access this consciousness through a meditation that moves us into this energetic, embodied state, such as our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. With more practice, we can move into this awakened state at any time throughout our day—or even all the time! We can then not only pray from but live out of this inner divinity as well.
Read MoreIt is dusk in the information age. The sun has already set. Its time has passed. With the amount of information generated increasing to an unprecedented degree, it is not the end of information, but the flooding of its darkness. It’s become increasingly clearer and clearer that the answers to our problems do not come with more information. And yet we keep going, passing far beyond the point of information “overload” and into a reality of information enslavement.
Information is frequently referred to as the food of the brain. We believe that we need a continual influx of stimulation, often in the form of new facts and findings, ways to perform better or know more, as if these new learnings will give us the edge we need to succeed, or the sense we crave to make meaning of our lives, or simply to feel like a more productive or better person. We buy another book, listen to another podcast, read yet another article, excited about the prospect of learning something we didn’t know before.
The trouble is, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more we don’t know. And on further down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible we are feeding the monster who holds us captive? The mind that always seeks to acquire more and more? Have we become addicted to the stimulation, without asking where it’s taking us?
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