A Method of Meditative Prayer

Prayer is a discipline (the other central discipline for following Christ is Scripturally-connected study, as noted in my previous blog post). Prayer doesn’t tend to work very well if you do it only when you feel like it or when you’re desperately in need. Regular prayer is an investment in your own spiritual maturity. It is the spiritual equivalent of physical exercise. Just as you need to make regular trips to the gym to build your physical strength and endurance, you need to make a habit of reorienting yourself toward God to strengthen yourself to endure times of spiritual trouble. If the most important task in following Christ is to establish a loving connection to God, that’s impossible to do without spending time. That’s as true for your relationship with God as it is with any loving relationship you have with others.

I use the word “regular” and not “daily” because we often get too hung up on the question of how often we should pray. If you’re like me, my resolutions to do things daily often fall apart. I promise myself that I’ll exercise or work on my blog every day, and then inevitably a horrible day derails my plans. Once I’ve violated the “daily” part of my commitment, it’s all too easy for me to throw the whole thing out. “Regular” is a much more realistic timing. If it’s been several days since you reconnected to God, then you need to do that. Yes, ideally it should be daily, but don’t let the ideal interfere with the practical.

My comparisons to bodily discipline aren’t coincidental because prayer for me has a lot to do with the body. My method of praying has changed significantly from the praying that has been modeled for me in Christian churches. Praying in church is concerned with words. My prayers are increasingly about silence and attention to the body. I have borrowed much from Eastern forms of meditation (we sometimes forget that Christianity too is an “Eastern” religion). As I noted in a previous blog entry, I think we have much to learn by sampling other religious practices to renew our own spiritual lives.

The traditions of Christian prayer in which I was raised continue this neglect of the body, and I have grown to realize that prayer can help us reconnect to our own bodies. Neglecting the flesh actually gives it unruly power. Prayer can unite the whole person – mind, spirit, and flesh.

In the rest of this blog, I lay out my own personal “how-to” guide to meditative prayer. Advice on how to pray is everywhere, and I don’t pretend that mine is better. It’s simply mine. I have cobbled together my own prayer routine out of various contemplative prayer routines (and singing instruction), and I suggest you do the same. Steal bits from me if you like, and leave my advice behind if it doesn’t connect to you. Find what works for you.

If you’re pretty satisfied with your own prayer discipline, then I suggest you skip the rest of this blog entry. If you’re looking to find an alternative to the all-words-all-the-time tradition of Christian prayer, then my how-to guide is as good a place to start as any. As you’ll see, I give a lot of details about how to get your body and mind into a position where you can receive God’s insight; I spend very little time talking about what words to say. This is the opposite of how I was taught to pray in church.

My form of prayer involves meditation, but it’s not about physical or mental relaxation (although calmness is a goal). The key words in my form of meditation are balance, breathing, and focus.

• If you are able to get into the lotus position, that’s great. If not, sit on a chair with minimal padding (no sofas) with your feet flat on the floor at shoulder’s width and with your legs at a 90-degree angle. If you can, sit forward without your back touching the back of the chair, but if you need the back support, go ahead.
• Sit tall. Sometimes it’s useful to picture a string coming out of the top of your head, pulling your spine straight.
• As a beginning way to learn about breathing, put one hand on your chest and the other hand on your stomach. Now breathe. Does your chest go up and your stomach go in? That’s the way most people breathe, but meditation requires a different form of breathing.
  • Inhale a bit, and stop the expansion of your ribs partway. Hold it.
  • Now breathe in by pushing your stomach outward and breathe out by pulling your ab muscles in, pressing the air out. This may take some getting used to. When you get comfortable with this form of breathing, you may remove your hands from your chest and stomach.
• Focus on a spot two inches below your navel as you breathe in and breathe out. You obviously can’t really breathe into a spot below your navel, but it’s useful to picture the breath going to that spot and then pushing the air out by starting at that spot.
• Place your hands lightly on your knees.
• Look straight ahead, raising your chin until it’s perpendicular to the ground. Keeping your chin in that position, look downward and focus your eyes on a fairly nondescript spot (on the floor, on a table, whatever is in front of you). This spot can be a slight irregularity in the grain of the floor, but you shouldn’t be looking at an object that would normally draw your attention. I try to keep the area directly in front of me free of visual clutter. It’s very tempting for your downward cast eyes to draw your chin downward, and then the rest of your body begins to slump. From time to time you’ll probably need to correct your posture (sitting tall, chin straight).
• Now you’re ready to focus on your breathing: steady regular breathing in to the spot below your navel, then push the air out using the muscles of your diaphragm.
• As you breathe, begin to become aware of your body and how its position is unbalanced in one plane or another. Are you putting more weight on one hip than the other? Are you leaning forward or leaning back a slight bit? Is your upper torso twisting a little clockwise or counterclockwise? Is your head twisted or tilted a little at the neck? Is your chin pointing upward or downward instead of straight ahead? Are your feet both pointing straight ahead? If so, correct those imbalances and try to find a position that’s perfectly balanced. Sometimes it’s helpful to overcorrect the imbalance so that I can better sense where the center point is. The goal is for your body to be a conduit for spiritual energy. Keeping your body open, balanced, and expanded helps this process. If there are kinks and twists and slouches in your body, the energy provided by proper breathing and balance will not flow through your body.
• This can take awhile. Keep breathing properly (slowly and regularly), and think about balance. Think about how much of your life you spend out of balance (physically, emotionally, spiritually). Think about how difficult it is to get into balance and how easy it is to slip out of that. Think about the fact that you do this simple act of breathing all the time unconsciously, but now you’re restricting your thoughts to focus on this one small action, and doing that action consciously can take a significant amount of concentration. During your first few sessions you may not even get to the point of praying. You can spend all of your time just figuring out how to breathe properly and to orient your body into balance. You will get better at it with practice, but the breathing and balancing aspects are themselves a spiritual practice with a spiritual message to be learned in your body.
• One more tiny tip to add about body position, but it’s an important one: touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth. It doesn’t seem like this would matter, but it does. When you are breathing properly and your body is balanced, you can sometimes feel the energy move from the spot two inches below your navel; then up the front of your body where it hits your tongue and then curls back down your body toward the energy spot below your navel.

All of this describes an approach to meditation without any necessarily Christian aspect to it.  Let’s move toward adding some contemplative Christian prayer to that practice.

• Sometimes it’s difficult to keep your thoughts focused just on your breathing. Other thoughts from your day come intruding in. This is where a “mantra” (a non-sense word or sound) is useful in many meditative practices. I’m not a mantra person. I use fairly standard, repeated, short Christian phrases, matching them to my breathing in and out. One that I use a lot is “(breathing in) I am a child of God; (breathing out) thanks be to God.” If you come from a fairly ritualized Christian background, something that’s been used by generations of Christians can be useful: “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy” or “Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison.” Scripture can work: “Be still and know; that I am God.” I have grown to quite like: “Remember I am dust; Yet Christ died for me.” Any short pair of phrases that resonates with your understanding of Christianity can work. In particularly difficult times, I can only manage the simple reminder that my next breath comes from God, and then I take that breath in gratitude. Questions can also open up paths for contemplation: “What cross do you want me to pick up today?” “How can I give my life away today?” Such phrases help clear my mind of extraneous thoughts; they reinforce the rhythms of my breathing; and they focus my meditation toward prayer.
• Once you reach a state of calm, you can begin to pray more freely. I think that Christians typically talk too much during prayer and don’t listen enough. The meditative breathing helps counterbalance that. The best two word advice I can give about meditative prayer is: “SHUT UP!” You don’t have to say something with every breath. You can listen while still concentrating on your breathing and your balance.
  • I will frequently start with short prayers of thanksgiving, beginning by thanking God for very concrete things (hot showers, craft beer) and moving to more spiritual thanks. Everything is in rhythm to the breathing, which can create spaces between the short utterances.
  • I will pray for individuals and groups. I’ve grown very fond of the Quaker phrase “I hold so-and-so in the light,” which provides me a nice visual picture (I’m either embracing the person or underneath them, supporting them, lifting them up). Again the breathing usually keeps me from rattling on and on.
  • You can then talk with God about difficult matters (remember that it may take awhile before you develop the discipline to reach this point. Meditative prayer is a practice). The calm of meditative prayer allows me to sit and contemplate my own sinfulness, to think about why certain sins are so attractive to me and about how I might change that. The calm part of myself can sit and observe the part of myself who tends to engage in patterns of repeated toxic behavior, and the calm part of myself that I have created through meditation says, “Isn’t it interesting that I do this? Why do I do this?” This is not a judgmental space (nor is it a “get thee behind me, Satan” moment). I seek to understand my own sinful behavior in the quiet of meditative prayer.
  • This is also a time to take difficult problems to God and then sit quietly. Only when you quiet everything (and meditation is a great way to do this) can you hear the “still small voice” of God. Try to develop confidence/faith that the answer you arrive at by considering and weighing the quiet voices in contemplative prayer is the right, God-breathed answer.
  • I find it useful to make a mental connection between this session of meditative, contemplative prayer and the previous one. The image I use is to think of time as being like a river, and my meditative times are islands I create, still points in that stream. I mentally connect this island in time with the previous one to acknowledge God’s continuing presence in my life, to acknowledge that God meets me here in these still times, and I thank God for that continuing intervention.
• When I am particularly aware of God’s presence, I will sometimes turn my hands upwards (still resting on my knees) in a gesture that indicates (to me) openness and reception of God’s spirit. You can experiment with gestures that work for you if that feels too “charismatic,” but you can explore finding ways for your body to express your spirituality.