How Do You Pray?
Mariana Caplan is a psychotherapist, yogi, and the author of six books in the fields of psychology and spirituality.
I pray with my body. Prayer becomes deeper through action, because what I’m doing with my body is my prayer. Prayer is what I’m doing with my child, what I’m putting in my body, what I’m emitting through words, how I’m choosing to use my energy. Prayer is embodied and expresses itself through relationship and action.
Individually, sometimes it’s time for retreat, sometimes it’s time to be a new mom and sometimes it’s time to be an old lady, knitting mantras into a blanket. Each season calls us to do different things. We want to enter into our bodies and integrate our intentions and our awareness and our gestures through our bodies and express from there. It’s really important to integrate ourselves and to connect with the “other.”
Together, we are all bringing our bodies, our consciousness, our intentions and our intelligences together. We are praying together, with our bodies, our actions and a network that we are creating on every level we can.
In relationship, we have to make these direct links and weave this net as beautifully as we can, with as much integrity as we can, because everybody is needed. And every prayer we bring forth is going to be a healing force in the world. In relationship to all the destruction that’s happening, we need each other. We need everybody. We know that’s our prayer.
This is something we need to do, and it requires everybody, whether we succeed or not. Everyone’s actions toward that would be prayer. That is beautiful.
Reprinted here from How Do You Pray? Inspiring Responses from Religious Leaders, Spiritual Guides, Healers, Activists & Other Lovers of Humanity, July 2014 edited by Celeste Yacoboni, by permission of Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck, NY.
