Prayer, A Way Of Filtering The Cluttered Mind – OpEd

We live in a cluttered workday life where most often our spirits are undistilled. Each day, we need to be present in our hearts and spirits. It makes no difference if our religion or denominational sects differ. Our relationship with our inner self is inseparable from how we relate to everything else. So, to know ourselves as we might hope to know our environment demands that our minds be at the right place at the right time.

I often do several rituals. Many call it prayer. Others consider it contemplation, meditation or as my great grand mom used to say “tut-oya”, a talk to someone Unseen yet Most Powerful. In my lifetime, at 55, I have perfected it as a process … a way of turning off external stimuli, free of the confines of time and space. I ride in a flow of consciousness and energy and it is best done early in cold embrace of the morning, while working in the garden, alone planting trees or breaking beads of sweat as you toil the soil.

Prayer takes you to a place of humility, reverence and gratitude that can be reached only by surrendering your mind to your spirit. The only investment is attention.

For me it is a way to get out from it all. Of the daily stress and rigors of living in a world where force, mostly negative, impose that you conform. Recognizing the truth and power of letting go is perhaps part of the wonder — of that timeless flow that we undergo under the spell of a prayer. One is taken into a gravity, a river that flows so fundamental, so uncontested. It simply takes the shortest path of communication with the Supreme Being.

And when it’s done, it is like reaching your ultimate goal, one that awaits you to go back once again and undergo the same process and unexplained phenomenon.