How Do Mystics Pray?

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.

Mysticism, PracticeLuke HealyAugust 29, 2020Integral Prayer, embodiment Comments

Praying Into All of Unified Reality

Integral Prayer – Part 8: Whole-Body Transcendence into God-Beyond-Us

In the third movement of Integral Prayer, we are addressing the 3rd person, infinite face of God-Beyond-Us. This is not the remote “God in the sky” who is unreachable and inaccessible, but rather the great Mystery who is always beckoning us onward, who is inviting us into the participation beyond the usual boundaries that we experience within the confines of our small self.

We don’t pray at this distant God, but rather we move into the Mystery in all its facets of reality. This is not an act of moving out of ourselves, because we are a part of that reality. Rather, it is to expand beyond while still being rooted to our own fullness. It is not separate from our being.

Praying into unified reality is a movement of holistic transcendence. We can experience it in each of the four centers, each in its own unique form—and each providing a crucial element to the fullness of an embodied expansion into the all.

Sometimes transcendence gets a bad rap because it is seen as an act of escapism and disassociation. While this can be true of less healthy forms, holistic transcendence into all reality will actually be a movement of much greater connection, much greater presence, and much deeper being. It is, in many ways, an immanent transcendence.

As much or more than ever, today we are so often experiencing constriction and enclosure in our lives. You may even feel this contraction in your body, perhaps in your chest or gut.

Praying into unified reality opens us from our constricted self-sense and into the freedom and joy of the expanse of the mystery beyond ourselves. The mystery of embracing all, embodying all, being all, and going beyond all.

So let’s go on that journey, let’s explore a movement together into all of unified reality.

PracticeLuke HealyAugust 22, 2020Integral Prayer, transcendence Comments

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.

WeSpace, PracticeLuke HealyAugust 15, 2020Integral Prayer, PrayerComment

Praying From Your Inner Divinity

Integral 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.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyAugust 8, 2020Integral Prayer, Prayer, embodiment, ConsciousnessComment

Do You Believe in God Being You?

Integral 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.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyAugust 1, 2020Integral Prayer Comments

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.

Practice, MysticismLuke HealyJuly 25, 2020Integral PrayerComment

Evolving Prayer with an Evolving God

Integral Prayer Part 3: Praying into, with, and from the Three Faces of God

Prayer is communication and communion. It is the WeSpace between God and us. This divine meeting place usually changes throughout our lives as we grow and develop. We change, and so does our understanding and experience of God. Often we don’t quite know how to pray in a way that seems to resonate fully with these changes.

Can we still find an evolving God in prayer? Can we still meet God in the dynamic unfolding of our relationship with the divine?

While at times we may need to demythologize, deconstruct, and differentiate through our ideas of God, hopefully, we can continue on our journey without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We can find our way to more liberating ways to meet with the divine, which can include and reintegrate the healthy gifts of traditional prayer.

This becomes possible through recognizing The Three Faces of God <link>, which gives us the freedom to hold an understanding of God that encompasses the breadth of divine presence and manifestation. Moving then from this understanding into the WeSpace, into the participatory experience of communing with each of these faces is what we call Integral Prayer.

Our prayer can evolve with each of these three faces, meeting God in transcendence, relationship, and participation.

Let’s look at these evolutions in prayer with each of our faces of God.

Practice, EvolutionLuke HealyJuly 18, 2020Integral Prayer, development Comment

Can the Trinity Evolve?

The Three Faces of God - The Foundation of Integral Prayer

If prayer is communicating and communing with God, we must know who this God is that we are spending time with. Am I praying to a distant cosmic force? A white dove? Do I still talk to Jesus? Do I simply dwell in my own divine being, silently and individually?

Most Christians have been taught a Trinitarian view of God, and the biblical, theological foundation of Integral Prayer is based on the Trinity, but an evolved form. Can the classical Trinity evolve while keeping its foundational truth for Christianity?

EvolutionPaul SmithJuly 11, 2020Integral PrayerComment

Is There a Better Way to Pray?

The difference between traditional prayer, Centering Prayer, and Integral Prayer

Prayer may be one of the oldest and longstanding traditions in all of humanity. Long before written history, humans were praying to the divine for help, guidance, and a change in the present circumstances in their lives.

But what does prayer look like for Christians today? As our views of God evolve, do we still feel comfortable asking for help and talking to God? Some do, some don’t. Some are confused or maybe even embarrassed about what they find themselves uttering below their breath in prayer—or maybe they’ve given all that up as childish or mythical.

Is there more? Is there a better way to pray?

Let’s look at a few common forms of prayer for Christians today to set the stage for how our understanding and practice of prayer might continue to evolve.

PracticePaul SmithJune 28, 2020Integral Prayer, Contemplation Comments

Erotic Spirituality

Part Six: Christianity and Sexuality

She exclaimed, “Kiss me—full on the mouth!
For your love is better than wine.”
He replied, “You are tall and supple, like the palm tree,
and your full breasts are like sweet clusters of dates.I’m going to climb that palm tree! I’m going to caress its fruit!”
She murmured back, “Breathe on my garden, fill the air with spice fragrance.
Oh, let my lover enter his garden! Yes, let him eat the fine, ripe fruits.”
So, he took me home with him for a festive meal, but his eyes feasted on me!
—Song of Solomon

Imagine an R rated book in the Bible! Scholars agree that the Song of Songs (or Solomon) is, first of all, an erotic love poem. It is passionate poetry about human relationships and sexuality. After all, there isn’t even a single mention of God in the entire book.

Mystics and saints down through the ages also tell us that it is an image of the passionate love God has for us. A beautiful and relatable metaphor for the passion and intimacy the depth of divine-human connection that we should strive after.

So which is it? Both of course! The energy of Eros—one of the strongest forces in the human body—is a powerful and sacred force of attraction that draws us forward, beyond ourselves into a union with another human and with God.

Paul SmithJune 21, 2020Ecstasy, Eros Comments