Integral Consciousness – Part 1
Read MorePart Four – The Magic and Mystery of Spiritual Healing
Read MorePart Three – The Magic and Mystery of Spiritual Healing
Read MorePart Two — The Magic and Mystery of Spiritual Healing
Read MorePart One — Reclaiming Enchanted Mysticism
Read MoreMystical Activism
Part One
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Integral 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 MoreIntegral Prayer – Part 5: Enacting God in our Being
In Integral Christianity, we boldly claim and own the 1st-person reality of God-Being-Us, that we can identify as divine expressions of God. This is not us trying to become God through any kind of ego movement. It is a movement of awakening into the already present reality of God being us, into Christ consciousness.
In Integral Prayer with the Three Faces of God, we even seek to enact and speak from this divine consciousness. This is learning to take the step from divine identity to divine participation (2 Peter 1:4).
Learning to pray from God-Being-Us is something of a big step for a lot of us. And we may have a few mental hurdles that we need to leap before we can begin to attempt praying from God in our very own embodied being, from our own awakened Christ consciousness.
So this week, we’ll go through a little Q&A around some of those pesky skeptical thoughts we might find arising in our minds when we begin to speak about living out our divine participation in our knowing. And then next week we’ll look more specifically at how we experience this from within our own bodies.
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