The Importance of Prayer
Margaret Schenkman, June 15, 2021
The second Heartfulness Principle states: Begin your meditation with a prayer for spiritual elevation. Offer your prayer in such a way that the heart is filled with love. Despite its simplicity, I found some challenges trying to apply this principle.
My first challenge was the idea of prayer. I was brought up in a family that was atheistic going back generations. Prayer simply wasn’t part of our life experience. I had no idea of how to pray nor did I have an affinity for the idea of praying. I had to grapple with what was the purpose and way to pray before I could embrace this principle.
The second challenge was that I didn’t understand what was meant by ‘spiritual elevation.’ The reason I began to meditate was to reduce pain and fatigue; I certainly wasn’t looking for ‘spiritual elevation’. Thus, initially I shied away from this principle, feeling that it simply didn’t apply to me.
A third challenge was my understanding of the idea of a ‘heart full of love’. What love? For what? For whom? I recognized very early in my journey that love in a spiritual sense is different from the usual ‘transactional love’ of daily life, but I didn’t know exactly how that would be experienced in a spiritual context. Gradually I began to experience that love is without distinction. Either one loves all – and everything that comes one’s way – with a sense of cheerful acceptance, or one doesn’t love in a spiritual context. This is not an easy state to master, because we all have a lifetime of ‘likes and dislikes’ that precondition how we see the world and how we love. Further, love typically is transactional, whether toward a partner, a child, another family member, or a friend. Typically, love is backed by a subtle and silent expectation that if I do ‘this’ for you, you will reciprocate now or in the future with ‘that’ (some particular behavior). In a spiritual context, love is without expectation – again a challenging state to master.
And then there was a fourth challenge. Throughout my upbringing, my siblings and I were taught that we alone are responsible for our actions. ‘The buck stopped with me’. That had some real advantages. I learned responsibility, accountability, a strong work ethic; I developed a stiff backbone. But that upbringing made asking for help from another quite difficult.
Over time, through the experience of meditating, I recognized that there was something beyond health benefits of meditation that I needed to understand. With a lot of deep cleaning of old impressions, I was able to begin to understand what a spiritual journey is all about, to understand what prayer means in this context, and why it was a critical piece of the spiritual journey. This understanding unfolded without direct effort to change my perception, but rather in a natural manner.
My first ‘aha moment’ as relates to prayer was when I began to appreciate that everything I experience in life creates impressions that encapsulate the heart. These impressions form the filter through which I see the world and interpret experiences. This understanding brought some important transitions to my consciousness: The idea of spiritual elevation meant there was something beyond myself and beyond the health benefits that originally brought me to the meditation practice. They were keeping me from the essence of what really is – from ‘Reality’. I began to appreciate that there was something fundamental that could change and I wanted to understand this better through my own experience.
As I traveled further on my spiritual journey, I recognized that the only way that I could ‘meet Reality’ was to become ‘one with all’. That was a surprising concept to me, given my upbringing in a family of longstanding atheism and a strong emphasis on my unique identity. It was particularly surprising as I came to recognize that the only way to become one with all would be to let go of my own identity. After all, I can only reconnect with the ‘whole’ if I am part of the whole, not separate, not ‘me’. My first inkling of this came early in my practice while meditating. It occurred to me how silly it would be for my toes to think that they were separate from the rest of my foot – a metaphor for me thinking I am separate from a ‘whole’ of which I couldn’t yet conceive.
These realizations ultimately led me to a deeper appreciation of prayer in the context of the Heartfulness practice. The prayer doesn’t ask for anything, but rather makes three statements: The first statement is about the goal to connect completely with my inner self, with the purest aspect of my ‘self’ that is part of the ‘whole’. The second statement is about where I focus my attention. If I keep my focus on the smallest and least expansive part of my ‘self’, if I am distracted by all the things that I wish I had and think I need – it will be hard to make the connection with the ‘whole’. The third statement is about needing help to get past my wishes and desires that keep me entangled in my ‘lower self’ so that consciousness can expand to experience my highest self.
As I began to understand the meaning of the prayer, I also began to grasp why I needed to begin with prayer – to connect with something within myself but beyond the ‘self’ that I had always relied on. I began a quest to understand that greater embodiment of ‘self’. Gradually, through connecting with my heart and learning my heart’s lessons, along with the clearing away of old impressions, I began to appreciate the need to let go of ‘i-ness’ if I wanted to really embody the most expansive Self within my ‘self’. Some people call it the ‘divine’, some the universal self. It finally dawned on me that the only way that I can ever connect with this ‘Self’ is to be ‘not there’. To do this, I need to transcend this early training about being in charge of myself and the only person responsible for myself.
It is through meditating on my heart, and learning the lessons of the heart that I began to appreciate where I was trying to go and how prayer could help me to get there. As I continued on this spiritual journey, I began to recognize that I could not complete this journey alone; that I would need help from a capable teacher or guide. Finding the right guide (spiritual teacher) is by no means trivial. It’s best to have no guide at all rather than the wrong guide. But once one is convinced in the deepest recesses of the heart that they have found the right guide, it is necessary to let that guide lead. I was fortunate to find such a guide. Through very careful observation and assessment I was clear that this spiritual teacher had the capacity to lead me on the path to which I was committed. This conviction came from observing the changes in myself, the way I lived my life, and my expanding perception (consciousness) of myself and everything around me. This conviction also was bolstered by observations of friends who were changing through their journey and observations of my teacher and how he led his life.
The further I travel on my path the more clearly I understand why I need this guide. The only way to master this path is to lessen the impact of my ego. Ego is a natural part of daily life. Whether ones ego makes a person feel like the most important person in the world, or the least important, it’s still ego in action. To lose one’s ‘self-identification’, one needs to tamp down ego. But this is a tricky thing, because ego – by its very nature – does not want to go and furthermore, ego is a necessary condition to remain in the human life. Thus, ego is necessary, but only in the right ‘dose’. I was fortunate to understand the need for a capable guide at some primordial level so that, even when my head kept arguing with me about the need for a guide, my heart kept me on the path of learning from my teacher and cooperating to the extent possible.
My experience of prayer has transitioned over the course of my spiritual journey. First was the realization of what prayer means in the context of Heartfulness; next was a willingness to try to pray in this way; and finally came an understanding that embracing prayer in its fullest meaning is an essential part of my journey. I have come to appreciate the necessity of acknowledging where I am trying to go and what is keeping me from reaching that destination. Even more critical is the willingness to acknowledge the insignificance of ‘self’ and the need of capable guidance to overcome my ego in order to find my ‘Self’. As each of these realizations unfolded in a natural way through the Heartfulness practice, I began to appreciate that prayer can be an expression of gratitude and of one’s humbleness in the face of something so large and profound as to be inexpressible.