Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Guest Blogger-Gianna Kali

Reprinted with permission from my friend Gianna Kali, webmistress of "Beyond Meds".

My prayerful and meditative journey of late–beginning lessons of the soul
March 3, 2009 by giannakali
Every morning when I wake up now I start it first with a period of contemplative prayer, followed by a period of mindfulness meditation.

I only began to pray recently, in the last few months when my physical suffering at times became unbearable. Emotionally too I was struggling with questions about why in the hell I should be going through all this. Before that I had a pretty cynical and even anti view towards prayer for myself, though I always gladly accepted prayer from others.

I like the way Daniel Mackler refers to prayer in this post on being your own therapist here:

Prayer, a hateful word to many because it is so misused (by ultra-religious people) and so disrespected (by those traumatized by the ultra-religious), is a wonderful form of self-reflection. It is done best in silence and privacy, so that only you and your own heart can hear your deepest desires and needs. Prayer is a chance to go as deep as you can consciously go, and a chance to let your soul air its most beautiful truth. The most original and honest prayers open the deepest doors, and let us know who we really are and what it is that is most important to us in our lives. They say that prayer is talking to “God,” and when we remember that the Kingdom of God is within, and that “God” is really just the best of our truest inner self connected with the truth of the whole universe, we remember that when we pray we are talking with our best friend in the universe.


So anyway, I start each day in this manner. Prayer with word and thought in my mind, I speak my heart to the universe, and then meditation with the goal of being present with whatever is in my being and embracing it completely. This may include painful and unpleasant feelings as well as positive. I try to embrace it all and simply be with it.

To finish reading the article, continue here.

5 comments:

Ana said...

My grandma touch me to prayer.
I don't use to pray when I'm in trouble. I usually pray to thank when the problem is solved.
I'm glad you have posted today.
Hope you are fine ((((SUSAN))))
Ana

Anonymous said...

Susan, I truly hope that you will be feeling better soon. I'm thinking of you.

Anonymous said...

I'm an atheist so prayer kind of stops at the ceiling for me. But I do think doing something contemplative daily is essential to the human spirit. I am currently struggling to establish a discipline of hand writing three stream-of-(un)conscious pages a day, kind of like draining the rusty water out of your radiator. I don't use the word "struggle" lightly, either. I am a totally undisciplined person.

Um, speaking of which...I haven't done my three pages today. In fact, I totally forgot about it until I read this posting. Time to sign off now.
Thanks.
Sherry
PS: How goes it?

Monica Cassani said...

sherry athiest means no belief in theism...

technically I too am an athiest as I do not believe in a personal god or theist...

prayer, as Daniel explains it needn't be to a god but to the depth of our being.

Monica Cassani said...

it dawned on me that perhaps people don't even bother reading this piece because they think it's "spiritual" but what it is really is only about is healing anger and forgiveness....the spiritual language really means nothing and can be taken or not...

I am eclectic in how I understand my psyche...I use spirituality and psychology...I don't care what language is used...but some things about healing the psyche are universal and it doesn't matter if it's perceived spiritually or not...it can be seen as totally secular and from a psychological perspective as well..

I'm profoundly agnostic in that sense and like I said, I'm an athiest as far as not being a theist.

anyway...I majored in religion but I am not religious...I just borrow it's language sometimes because it makes sense in some contexts. Unfortunately anything vaguely religious turns some people off...which I completely understand....I have no tolerance for dogmatic religious stances...and can easily imagine it dragging over into anything that even begins to have a mere scent of religiosity...

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