Samyama and Prayer:
Prayer can take many forms, and is part of nearly every spiritual path, in one form or another. Prayer can be in the form of a request, or the expression of a desire. Prayer can also be a set of words or mantras recited to God, or to any other object of our worship or devotion (i.e. our higher power, highest self, highest ideal, an aspect or quality of God, saints, guru, etc.), which represents the highest and best aspects of God and Divinity, in our own minds and hearts. In a sense, these recipients of our prayers are all God, in a very literal sense; it’s just that what comprises God is conceived somewhat differently by surface aspects of mind. However, at depth, and in terms of the potential power of prayer, the recipient of our prayer is the wholeness, the Allness, from which we can never actually be separate. How effective our prayer is does not matter on the form of prayer being used, it depends on the essence of how we pray.
We can take any prayer, the ones we recite daily or ones that come up spontaneously as a request to God, and make it count, through praying in the ways which have been proven to be effective in every spiritual tradition, throughout history and around the world. As with every other spiritual practice, effective and empowered prayer is based solely on principles that are in harmony with how the fullness of consciousness actually operates. This is where samyama comes in. When we try to control the outcome of a prayer, we are not allowing the divine to flow though us, we are trying to make the divine flow flow the way we think it should flow. We are limiting the power and the potential of our prayer, by setting limits on our request, and on our faith.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things now seen” (Hebrews 11:1, Holy Bible)
Instead, if we make a request to our God, our highest ideal, and let divine will manifest as it will, in our lives, we are opening up to the actual, infinite power of Living Unbound.
Effective prayer is created when we ask in and from stillness, as opposed to praying from an agitated or distracted frame of mind or praying in a mechanical way or make a ritual out of praying. Once we are resting in stillness (especially after meditation) , we, pick a word, or set of words (whatever comprises our prayer) in a fuzzy way, where the words and the meaning they hold for us are barely beginning to arise in our consciousness, before mind has made it a concrete thought. This is essential to the power of prayer, because this is the place in awareness-consciousness where both we and our prayer are closest to source. When we don’t allow the thought/prayer to concretely form, we actually have the balance between the essence of any focus (the specific nature of the given prayer), and the limitless potential energy that is normally frozen by making the distinctions of the prayer far more concrete than they need to be.
And so, we bring up our prayer from stillness in a fuzzy manner, and we and drop it back into the stillness; the place where intuition, arises from. In that same moment of release, we also let go any need to control the outcome of that prayer, knowing in our hearts it will be answered, not necessarily in the form the mind thinks it should be answered (hence we pick the words before the thought is formed, at the fuzzy level) , but in a way that is right for us. In this way, we open ourselves to the wisdom and power of God (or however we conceive of the Allness), rather than limit our prayer by our own limited views and desires. Life knows what it is doing, and Life is inherently free; when we align ourselves with this reality, we too can experience Living Unbound in reality.
Samyama and Healing:
Samayama can be used to heal ourselves, others and the world. Samyama can be done individually, or exponentially enhanced by the power of a group.
Personal Healing: Healing ourselves starts from the day we start the core Samyama practice. The 9 sutras provide an all round healing of the body, mind and spirit. Once we get comfortable with the core samyama practice, and picking the sutras and dropping the sutras into stillness starts to happen naturally, we begin to experience living more and more from the stillness, and our intuition becomes stronger. This is when we have begun to go past the chattering mind, and to open to the soft voice of intuitive stillness that is guiding us. At this point, we may have the intuition to add a sutra (word) to our core practice, that may help us with our health. Before this happens organically though, it is better to stay with the 9 sutras of the core practice.
Healing Others: We can add healing for others at the end of our core Samyama practice. It is better not to get too specific with the exact kind of healing we feel they need. After meditation, in order to send healing (engage in samyama) from the stillness, we pick the name of the person who needs healing, and we drop their name in stillness, and we trust the stillness to send whatever healing is needed. We do this twice, as we do with the other core sutras.
Group Healing: A group of people can send healing to one person or a group of people. At an appointed time, a group of people send healing by picking the name of an individual or a group (like a family, named list, community), and letting it go in stillness. This can be a very powerful practice. There is a group that has been doing this practice since 2006 with very positive feedback from the group that sends healing, and the people who have received healing. If you are interested, in participating, please review the AYP Global Group Samyama Healing information.
Healing The World: Although this seems like a daunting task, if each individual works on healing themselves and sends healing out to the world, the combined energy will have a huge impact on healing the world. By worrying and getting angry and frustrated over various world situations, we only add the worrisome energy to our world. “Worry is praying for what we don’t want”, as the saying goes. However, if we offer our healing intentions from stillness and faith, and let the healing flow through us out into the world, although it may seem to our surface thinking minds that we are not doing anything, we really are doing more by adding to the overall positive energy pool than we can realize at the level of thinking and reason. The whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. The idea that only the physical is real, and that minds are separate “island universes” is rapidly losing the scientific credibility it has had, and with good reason; there really never has been any valid scientific support for this view. Recent and continuing advance in fields such as quantum physics and neuroscience are beginning to open the potential, for all of us to experience a very real science of the unified field of consciousness; the science of Living Unbound. A bit of healthy skepticism is, of course, understandable. We don’t need to believe that this is the case. We just need to practice samyama, and offer our prayers with samyama. As we do this over time, the results manifest, and we know.
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