Tara Brach - Three Dimensions of Conscious Prayer

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Three Dimensions of Conscious Prayer - Prayer can be a creative, vibrant and infinitely tender part of our spiritual awakening. This talk explores the dimensions of embodied presence, sincere expression and silence that bring transformational power to our prayers.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends and welcome. This evening's reflection is entitled Three Dimensions of Conscious Prayer. And I'll begin with a bit of personal background that I grew up. My family was Unitarian. So I attended the liberal religious youth, which is the church school where we, as teens, we'd gather. And we had spirited discussions about comparative religion and social issues.

It's intellectual, not focused on a deity, and very explicitly respectful of different views. Of course, there are many Unitarian, that's Yu-U as Unitarian jokes, that were circled. such as how Moses received the ten suggestions. And one true story I heard one person shared, I was brought up Unitarian. I heard the minister say God one time. He'd come to our house and he said, oh God, I forgot my pipe.

So in my family, no formal religious rituals, we had moments of silence for gratitude at meals. and holidays. And my parents were most reverential in nature, really. They'd come into true stillness and silence when they were bird watching. My father liked to take pictures of birds. And his most fervent prayer probably was,

please hold still so I can get this shot, you know. But beyond that, prayer was not a part of our family. And there's that question, do you use, ever pray and the answer is only when they think their candidate or political party is going to lose the election. So that too is somewhat relevant to my background as my family had very strong passions around the state of the world. But as you can imagine, it wasn't the kind of quietness of, you know, a prayer, dear God

and so on. They say that Unitarian's addressed their prayer to whom it may be. concern. So I'm sharing a bit of this background because in the subsequent half century that's been since those years, those early teen years, prayers emerged as quite a central and very rich and still evolving part of my journey. So our reflection together, what I call conscious prayer, prayer that arises from presence. We're going to really look at how prayer can serve a path of spiritual awakening. And I want to just pause and say thank you to all of you who on Facebook shared your own experience as a gift of prayers. It was quite inspiring to read. So yeah,

I really appreciated that. So as most of you know, there are many kinds of prayers. It can be prayers of longing and aspiration and devotional prayer, prayers of praise, intercession for others, gratitude, petition. There's a story highlighting the difference between the last two, gratitude and petition where missionaries in Africa and he's walking and he can hear the padding of a lion behind him and the missionary praise. He goes, oh Lord, Grant and that goodness that the lion walking behind me is a good Christian lion. And apparently his prayer gets some response in the silence that follows the missionary, here's the lion praying, saying, Oh, Lord, I thank thee for the meal, which I'm about to enjoy. So different types of prayers.

and we're going to be focusing really on the kind of prayer that you might consider as aspirational, as longing. And I find it helpful to think of prayer in a developmental way. And we start in sensual, the root of prayer. And it's really our basic predicament and existence is that we incarnate and there's a love of being, a love of existing, we love life, we want to be. And this is for all creatures. All organisms want to live.

And there's insecurity because we perceive separation, we feel threatened. And so along with that loving life is a yearning for connection, a learning to be able to really trust that we're part of something larger. And we express that in many different ways. It would be a longing to belong to the universe or the web of life or nature or God or great spirit, great mother. So that's the essence of prayers, this loving being alive and this sense that there's some separation and a longing for connection.

in its most primitive form, the yearning for connections expressed through our limbic brain and our ego is kind of a grasping around both our physical and emotional security. So we're trying to secure our connection to life. There's a grasping. William James described the beginning of all religion as the cry help. And you can feel it's just this humans perceiving their mortality, perceiving their insecurity, and in some level saying help, you know. And most of us know this, even if we don't believe in prayer, when we feel endangered, when

we're threatened, there's some reflex, oh please, oh please, help me, you know. So we do reach out. Now, as we become more conscious and awake, the yearning for connection matures and the sense of what it's about matures. And we become aware, okay, I'm caught in some sense of separateness, I'm identified in an emotional state in my ego. There's some sense of the pain of that and a longing to belong to the whole, to love. of a longing to belong to truth, to realization, really to experience oneness.

Now if you're inspired if the way the framing of evolution and brain and consciousness is helpful, you might consider prayer as enhancing the communication between the survival and limbic parts of our brain and an integrated whole. whole brain, that there's a degree of communication going on all the time, but when we're really stuck, we're hijacked by the limbic system. And prayer reconnects us with an integrated brain and in that way a wholeheartedness and whole beingness. So prayer is developmental and it's useful to recognize the less mature expressions.

In fact, a lot of people say they don't believe in prayer, or they think of it as dualistic, or really focusing on the less mature kinds of prayer. There's a kind of fixation on substitutes for security, you know, oh, please, may I find a mate, or may I get this job or this raise, or may my teen get into this, this college. I sometimes have a book called Children's Letters to God. I'll read you from one of them. Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy. Here's one more. Dear God, forgive me for hiding my sister's favorite doll, and please don't tell her where it is.

So we're talking about really the signs of kind of the limbic system or ego prayer. And it's trying to avoid something, you know, avoid a threat or get something. And it's often immature prayers directed towards what seems to be a very far-off external force in the universe that's outside of ourself and some being out there with power. There's a story of a young boy who repeatedly calls out to his father during a summer storm. And his father keeps coming into his room and he tries to comfort his son by saying, don't be scared. God is with you.

And the third time it happens, the son says to his dad, you know, I know God's with me, but I need someone with skin on. So we're going to shift our attention now to what we, really mean by conscious prayer and how we cultivate it. And here I'll share a story some of you might remember. This is one of my favorite kind of mythic stories from the Buddhist tradition. And in it, Siddhartha has famously sat through the night under the Bodhi tree. And he's been Abode means awakening. It's the tree of awakening. And through the night he's encountered all the human challenges that we experience.

They're described in terms of the God Mara, which is the god of the shadow side, which is just all the human fears and sorrows and agitation, restlessness, craving, jealousy, hatred, all of it comes at the Buddha or he experiences it. armies of Mara come in the form of swords and slings and arrows and so on. And Siddhartha practices under the tree meeting what arises with mindfulness, with presence, with compassion. And as the myth goes, each time something would come at him and he'd meet with that quality of presence, it would turn into a flower blossom. and land at his feet and tell by the, as the morning star rose, there's this beautiful pile

of blossoms at his feet. But then Mara comes up with his final challenge. And it's expressed as who do you think you are to have the mantle of awakening? You know, it's self-doubt, basically. And self-doubt is considered to be of all our human challenges, perhaps the great us because when we're caught in self-doubt, it totally obscures our goodness. There's just no real remembrance or trust or access to who we really are, our true nature. So this was the final challenge for Siddhartha, was self-doubt. And he had already been present through the nights, who was already in a state of presence, but he did something a little different when self-dough came. And he reached out his right hand. He reached it down and he touched the earth,

called on Mother Earth. He called on a larger reality to really bear witness to his goodness, to affirm the truth of his awake heart and mind. So this was prayer. The Buddha reached out and called on a larger energy, something that felt larger than himself, to bear witness to who he was. And as the myth goes, the earth trembles in support after he reaches out, there's resonance with him, and finally the armies of Mara withdraw. And Siddhartha becomes the Buddha, the awakened being. And he really becomes one with the earth goddess and with all of life in those moments. So what happened here if we want to unpack it some?

And it's completely relevant to each one of us. That like each of us, Siddhartha was struggling with the pain of separation, feeling like he was a separate self-limited. He was caught in self-doubt. And he had established a lot of presence, there was presence with it, And he then went for something more.

In addition to that presence with the experience, he actually invoked, he brought to mind a larger belonging. In this case, the earth goddess, the whole web of the natural world. He brought that to mind. He reached out. He called on that to help him. And in that reaching out, there was a realization of the truth. that that's really what he was. He reached out to the web of life and realized that's what he belonged to, realized his true nature.

So he went from an identity of a separate, limited, flawed self to that oneness. I sometimes think we could say it differently and say that Siddhartha, when he was stuck in feelings of separation, he prayed to his own Buddha nature to remind him. mind him of his Buddha nature. So the power of prayer is that when we communicate our longing, when we reach out, when we turn to what we love, it reconnects us. John O'Donohue, the poet philosopher, writer, he puts it this way. He says prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.

is the bridge between longing and belonging. And I really love that. I think it just says it so powerfully because you can't long for something. Let's say you can't long for love or for freedom unless a part of you already knows about that, unless it's in some way already embedded in you, the seeds already there. You can't pray unless there's some sense of what you're longing for. prayer activates the connection. It transforms the longing into belonging. And here's what is so powerful when I consider it is that even when nothing else is helping, because the longing's there, you can pray.

This is Clarissa Estes. You might know her as the author of Women Who Run with the Wolves. She says, refuse to fall down. If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. And if you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven and ask that it be filled. You may be pushed down, you may be kept from rising, but no one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven. No one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven. No one can keep you from lifting. your heart towards heaven.

I'm thinking right now of a woman I've worked with over many, many years. And her mind's like a steel trap in the sense that she just, her mind just keeps making comparisons and convincing her that she's a failure, convincing her of personal badness. And no matter what meditative process, you know, efforts at naming things and self-compassion, keeps on pushing her down, that way of thinking, keeps her from rising. And during the pandemic, we had a Zoom call that really struck me.

She was very much in the cocoon of her own patterning, you know. And I think the pandemic exacerbated, especially for people that live alone, are patterning. So she was very aversive, down on herself, despairing, really. And I asked her at one point, what's your prayer? I mean, what does your heart really, really want right now? And that's when the tears started. She said, oh, I just want to be able to be kinder to myself. And I said, can you feel how much you wish that?

And she nodded. And I said, you can't will it, but you can pray. Just with all your heart. Just pray for that. You can't change yourself, you can pray. And some wisdom in her understood, and she started weeping, and I could feel her in that prayer. And the armor around her heart dissolving, just more tenderness. I've seen this in so many, when that sense of the small self, when we hit that wall and the small self really gets it, I can't do this.

I am stuck. I can't get out of this. I can't change it. I can't fix it. I can't nothing. I can't do anything to feel better. In a way, that wall and really getting powerlessness allows for a kind of surrendering, a turning towards, a lifting a heart.

It can allow for transformational prayer. So this process in my life, it really came alive for me when I was during the period of really severe illness that I've spoken of many times. I had tried so many strategies to deal with what was going on, you know, medical, of course, but all sorts of meditative practices, you know, mindfulness and presence and self- kindness. And on some level I had a limbic prayer, an immature prayer, constantly going, saying, please may this go away, please may I figure this out, please may I have my body back. Because it went on for about five years, maybe longer. So there was a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of grieving,

a lot of identification with an oppressed kind of self. And prayer deepened in a huge way when I felt completely dead-ended, defeated. I remember one particular time when family and friends went to the beach, it was summer, and I had to stay home because by that point I couldn't walk on sand and I couldn't swim. And I really, I realized I have no reason to hope for getting better. And I'll share with you one of the things that went through my mind at that time was that I could imagine having grandchildren and being with them but not being able to lift them or play with them. So it just, my mind just went to the future and it just looked so barren. And at root I felt like I was right in that pure pain of separation from life that what I loved

was being taken from me and had been taken from me. And so I went to a lot of grieving and I stayed. There was a lot of presence with that. And it turned into like a kind of a heartbreak, you know, just losing, losing life. And in that heartbreak was longing. There was just this longing because it had to do with just loving life that please may I love life no matter what. May I make peace with what is so I can just feel connection? And in a very deep way, it was, can I connect with a loving awareness that really has room for whatever happens?

Who was I praying to? You know, in a way it's to whom it may concern. It was a sense of longing that was expressed to this, a sentient loving universe is the best way I can put it. there was just some sense that I was praying to an awake universe, some caring in the universe. And this is my version of lifting my heart towards heaven. And it opened me. My heart became really, really tender. And it was like a quiet, spacious tenderness and stillness. And for the first time in quite a while, just at home in this. It's like, yes, I couldn't go do this, this, and this, but I could be, I could just be,

and feel open-hearted and tender. So this was refuge. This was true refuge, and that's the book True Refuge that I wrote, came from that experience and working with many people when we hit the hardest stuff. How do we find that piece? So I often, when I share the story, forget to bring us up into the current times. I am much, much better. I managed to evolve out of that through the help of both medicine and taking true refuge.

And my prayer has kept on going deeper and deeper. So it's not just when I feel sick. That still happens in an aging body. But any moment that I am, when I get emotionally stuck, when I'm facing anxiety or loss, or just feeling disconnected, there's both bringing presence to it, our practice of mindfulness, bringing compassion, and also a sense of touching the ground, a sense of turning towards loving awareness, calling in loving awareness in those. moments and the more I practice conscious prayer, the more the pathway is quick, strong,

more everything's more accessible. And we're going to come back to that. But I want to pause here and just ask you to let your attention go inward. You've been listening, so now listen inwardly. with some curiosity, you might say, well, what's the role of prayer or my relationship to prayer? And perhaps, you know, you were brought up in a kind of religious family where, that actually turned you against prayer. And just to notice that, you know, whatever your relationship is with it. Or if you pray and it's in your own, very much your own.

way. How do you pray? What do you pray for? Do you have a sense of what you're praying to? Prayer feels transformational. What's going on? What makes it transformational for you? I found for myself and others that like all parts of spiritual practice, it can only go deeper. It's always possible. So we'll just continue together and look now at, well, how does, conscious prayer, how does aspirational prayer work? How do we touch the ground? And again I'd like to quote from John O'Donohue and this is from his book Eternal Echoes. So if you resonate with John O'Donohue and you haven't read Eternal Echoes, it's

quite a beautiful book. He writes, Prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches out of outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. Prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. So I'll offer a metaphor that I find helpful that really bring alive the three dimensions that feel very right at the heart of prayer. And so you might imagine a tree

and the first dimension is the deep roots going inward to touch the pain of separation and the essence of longing. So for prayer to be strong, we have to have that courage, really, that willingness to feel right into the pain where the pain is. You know, the poet Hafeus says, let the loneliness cut more deep. And then he goes on to describe, because it's only where when we really touch in that we can experience our longing and our love and who we really are. So the roots go deep into the pain of separation, into, like for me, it was touching into that grief about loss and the longing for connection. And then the second dimension, again, we're on the tree, is sensing the branches that are

reaching out from that longing. So we just sense that in some way reaching out for light, warmth, wetness, life. For me, the prayer was towards loving awareness, reaching out towards wholeness. And then the third dimension is the leaves that are receiving and listening and taking in. So that once we've reached out, then we come and we just begin. become that presence. We take it in. Mother Teresa says it's so beautifully. She says, God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning and ending of prayer. Listening is the beginning and ending of prayer. So we let the roots go deep in and we really listen and touch into what's there.

We reach out in prayer. We communicate our longing and then we listen and receive. That metaphor helps me. So again, the first dimension is that we really have to connect with what we're experiencing. It's our practice. It's the whole practice of mindfulness. Connect with what we're longing for, the love or the protection or the peace. And then the second, the reaching out, I'm going to spend a little more time with this one because it is an experiment. We all have to find the ways of reaching out, the ways of expressing what's going on inside us, so that it feels sincere. It just has to feel sincere. The more the roots are deep into the earth of our being and the more we're reaching out

from that sincerity, the more we will be available. So it needs to stay fresh. You know, that's the reason prayer can't be mechanical. It really, because we quickly habituate each time we have to inhabit it. So let's say the longing is to feel loved, because that's in all of us. We all want to feel loved. What are we communicating that to? Who are we reaching out to?

For the Buddha, he touched the ground, it was the earth goddess, it was the web of life. For each of us, it's whatever we perceive to be as the source of loving. We have different senses of that. For some, there may be some felt sense experience of God or spirit or the earth goddess. For others, there may be just some sense of light and space. Rumi says no matter who you think you put your hope in hand out towards, it's that which gives. So we just sense what might be the source of this loving.

We just are reaching out to that. We might not have any idea in our mind, but there's something in us that senses there's some source out there somewhere. So how do we communicate? For most of us, words are really helpful because they activate the relational networks. We engage in the communicating. I find it's either a mental whisper or whispering out loud

is so, it is so alive to have that happen. For me, often it's, you know, that sense of beloved, please love me, you know, hold us life. May I be whispering, you know, may I be filled and held in loving presence and loving awareness. May I feel your presence? May I trust myself? Whatever it is, please guide me. We whisper it in some way, either mentally or out loud. Now, you've probably had the experience.

Let's say you feel your love for somebody in your life, but then the difference between just feeling that love and even being with them and feeling your love, and if you actually are embodied and you look them in the eye and you say their name, you say, I love you. And all of a sudden it's like, whoosh, you can feel energetically that something got activated. there's a power to expressing it. That's the power of prayer. Maybe you've spoken to someone who's died, a loved one, and you've actually said to them how much you miss them and wish they were here.

And something happens. Something happens when you express that. There's tears and a connection to some mysterious field of consciousness. connects us. So we sense to some source that we're speaking into and we express in words. Also, there may be image and a felt sense. It's really powerful to activate prayer to sense what you are wanting in a very intimate way. So by example, I was working with one man and he really wanted to feel romantic, intimate love. And he had just come out of a relationship that failed, and he was fixating on the person that it hadn't worked with. But he said, no, what I'm really

wanting is that romantic love. But I kept asking him questions. I said, well, what's the experience you're wanting? What do you want to feel on the inside? And he started describing, he said, well, it's warm. You know, it's got a lot of light, the light just filling me and it's all around me. And I can just relax into it. I can just melt so it's warmth and melting and light and just oneness, completely peaceful in one. And as he was describing it, it's like his longing was carrying him into belonging because he was imagining what he was longing for. And then I basically said, it's right here, isn't it? He goes, yeah.

And it's not that he didn't still want to experience how that comes alive with another person, but it deepened his trust that what he was longing for was already here. It was in him. And that actually assisted him in the months to come when he actually got involved with someone else. So we're still talking about this second dimension of expressing. And part of expressing is to sense what we're really longing for and really ask for it from that place of sensing it. Now, there are other aspects I'll mention that strengthen prayer and the attitude. is the main one, which is reverential.

I like that word. Again, John O'Donnie, who is a wonderful line. He says, reverential thought breaks down the thought cages that domesticate mystery. I'm going to say that one again. Reverential thought breaks down the thought cages that domesticate mystery. When we become reverential, when there's something in us that senses, oh, this really matters, this is right at the center of what matters in life. There's something in us that becomes really porous and open to what's beyond our ideas about

things. You might be thinking, well, I'm just not that type of person. And I want to say that that was never my self-concept of being reverential, of being a devotional type. But then when I look back, I can see all the grounds for it. You know, you've probably experienced being a sense of reverence or wonder, awe, you know, looking at the night sky perhaps, or at a newborn, or witnessing a dear one dying, or moments of loving, loving a child. It's there. It's a real sincerity. and openness to the mystery.

And it happens when we're just sensing what most matters to us. So a reverential attitude is supported for me, and you can see this in so many spiritual traditions, palms together, it brings together like the whole being gets collected right, to the heart. And there's some sincerity and purity with that. Sometimes this hands on the heart, both palms on the heart, same feeling. For me, when I'm meditating and then I'm praying, I'll often feel a sense of bowing my head or in some way lifting my heart to the heavens.

What bowing does, and bowing is interesting because, again, there can be a sense of, are we subjectating ourselves to some bearded God out there in the heavens? But it's not the actual felt experience. For me, when I'm bowing, it's a sense of offering this kind of limited sense of a self, the thoughts and feelings that I can get identified with that are smaller than I am. It's like offering that into a larger belonging. It's like letting all that's in my head kind of be absorbed in this vast earth and then space and then what's left is an openness.

There's room for the love and truth of the universe to flow through when in some way I've bowed and offered the ego outward. That's just my explanation. And if it's not, if it's confusing or sounds convoluted, put it a disson. side and it's an experiment. Everything's an experiment. And if you haven't experimented with putting your palms together and bowing and offering yourself to something larger, you might check it out.

It's humbling in the most beautiful way. That humbling actually frees us to belong to something larger. It releases a kind of arrogance or a delusion of the importance of self. and it allows for a kind of porousness and an openness to something more. I'd like to read again from John O'Donoghue. He writes this. He says, one of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the divine, a stillness deepens.

for a while people coming together for prayer have become unmoored from the grip of society, work, role. It is as if they have chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul. So we've been looking at the three dimensions of mindfully opening to what's here, feeling our roots in the earth of our body and being, the pain of separation, the long to connect. And then the second dimension of that sincere reaching out with reverence, with yearning, with love. And then the third dimension of stillness, where there's that quietness, that silence. Again, Mother Teresa says, you can only hear the whisper of the divine in silence. I want to mention one last way that you can enhance the experience.

of prayer, explore it some, and that's through journaling. And the way that you can move through this is first go into silence and feel into the place of vulnerability or separation, whatever is really difficult calling for attention. And right from that part of yourself, right from the fear, what the experience is. And then get quiet and just listen, just rest in that silence. And then respond from whatever the source of love or presence is that you're most aware of from your high self, or you might call it your future self, or from your true nature, your Buddha nature, from the way God or the divine lives through you.

Just right from that to your small self. And it's really powerful. It deepens trust that Buddha nature is already here. What you're reaching toward is within you. Remember, you couldn't feel longing. You couldn't feel prayer if you didn't intuit some experience of what you're longing for. So the Buddha touched the ground because of some inner knowing, sensing his belonging to the larger web of life.

And in the deepest way, your prayer is the voice of love calling you home. Your prayer, you know, we think of it as the small self as praying, but your prayer is the voice of universal love chamelling through you, reminding you of your longing and carrying you to belonging. I found that the more we touched the ground, the more remembering there is, the more trusting in that belonging. I call it trusting the gold, you know, really, really having faith or trust that that awareness, that love is here. And the prayer, moments of prayer, don't have to be long for myself many times during the day. I'll feel a sense of disconnection or kind of caught

in something smaller and in some way I'll hand that over. I'll sense that kind of sincere bowing and offering that ego, the thoughts, the emotions into something larger, remembering that something larger that I belong to. And then I have a more formal practice that they'd be beginning and the end of each day where there's a real prayer that, you know, may this life, may this life be lived from loving awareness. And they're still forgetting through the day but not as much. And a friend of mine, a poet Dana Falls, I think puts this so beautifully in a poem called A Hair's Breathmore. Long after sunrise, when the shadows have retreated to the woods and the yard is bathed in light,

I lift my eyes up to the sky and pray, let me stay awake today. May I not forget the one that underlies the many? are the love that unifies this world of opposites. Help me remain connected to the sacred source and center, no matter what tempests might swirl around me. And having prayed, I go about my day, remembering just a hair's breath more than I forget. Okay, friends, let's do a little practice together

and consider this as one of those life processes and practices so that you can bring just an attitude of curiosity, experimenting. You might let the attention go inward, take a few full breaths, listening inward, for anything that's asking for your attention right now. It may be some fear or anxiety going on, some place where you don't feel at home with yourself, someplace there's judgment or blame, something you're upset about in the world, wherever there's that sense of maybe help, you know, that you just really want or long for something. And wherever you find that vulnerability in you, maybe a fear about your fear,

physical health or something to do with a relationship that's upsetting, tension, fear. Wherever you find it, let yourself deepen the roots now so you can open into what's really upsetting to you, what's the worst part of this for you. And since within that, what it is you're really wanting, what you're longing for, and with whatever you notice, just even ask more, what is it I really want? What do I really want to know or feel or trust or experience? And how would I know if I was having that? What would it be like?

You feel into your body as you ask. Sense energetically. What is it you're really wanting to experience? What are you really aspiring towards? And you might experiment if you haven't already, putting your palms together, putting your hands on your heart. If you find it, it calls you to slightly bow the head. So you just sense that you're really calling on something larger.

And feel what you're longing for, feel yourself calling on, whether it's the intelligence and love of the universe, the natural world, God, spirit, Buddha, loving awareness. For me it's kind of a field of light, sentient, slow. To sense what you're calling on, feel your longing, and just whisper mentally or out loud, whisper your longing from the most sincere place in you. I might repeat it and see if you can repeat it from that deepened, pure, sincere place. place, repeating what you long for, sensing and imagining what it is you're wanting to experience,

opening to it, porous, receptive. Very, very still now. The silence in the stillness. Just being available. The poet Hafez writes, ask the friend for love. Ask again. for I have found that every heart will get what it prays for most in this quietness. Just a sense your being, the beingness that's here, the love that's at the very source of prayer.

As you're ready, you might take a few full breaths and we'll close together just to feel our shared prayer for a moment. that all beings everywhere might touch the freedom and peace and happiness that comes from knowing their belonging, that all beings everywhere might live from love, from awareness. Thank you, friends. A deep namaste as we end this. and my prayer is that you'll find some value in this and that it can serve your lives in a way that makes the difference. Blessings.

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