The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on March 16, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Sometimes, when I sit in silent, still prayer, with a sacred intention of opening up to and resting in God, I become palpably aware of how narrowly focused my attention is.
At times, I can almost feel the restriction: it is usually located spatially at the top of my body, near my forehead, in the place that I associate with cognitive thinking. I can even track the long, narrow paths of strings of thoughts, and I can feel so tightly drawn into the string of thoughts that I actually begin to feel weighed down. It makes me want to realign my spinal cord and straighten up again!
When I catch myself wandering those narrow thought trails, I reconnect to my sacred intention of opening up to and resting in God. I take an extra deep breath, and I remember that contemplative prayer is expansive. The Holy Spirit constantly works on my behalf to widen and deepen my awareness of the activity and presence of the Holy One.
Especially when I am caught in the narrow and restrictive thought trails, it is most helpful to remember the spacious quality of expansive, contemplative prayer. A good deep breath is perhaps the most practical way to tune into spaciousness in prayer.
When we tune into spaciousness in prayer, we ground ourselves very particularly within the vastness of our sacred intention to rest in God. Spaciousness in prayer helps to open our mind, heart, and senses, and when we open these capacities, we are less susceptible to the narrow confines of those pesky thought trails.
