Prayer and Meditation

Prayer and Meditation - two wings to fly...

I was taught to pray from a very early age. At home our family would recite the rosary several times of an evening. Interestingly enough, we did not face each other but rather kneeled facing away from the centre of the circle, each of us propped up on a chair, leaning into the seat, eyes closed.

At school we had doctrine classes. The teacher would ask, "What is prayer?" We would reply, "Prayer is talking to God." We would recite formal prayers learned by heart and make up our own to hasten the fulfilment of long cherished desires ("Please God, let me get that new bike with the banana seat and monkey bars in the window of Pins Cycles!") or to get us out of tricky situations ("Please God don't let Patrick Mullins beat the living daylights out of me after school!").

Meditation was never discussed. It was not until my late high school years that I first heard about it through a friend of my sister who was a practising Buddhist. At the time (mid 1970's), it seemed a thoroughly groovy thing to do although I never found out from him what one actually did while meditating.

Over the years after finishing school, I developed an unspoken sense that I had something within me that was immortal. After all, it made no sense to me that we just ran around like mad things for our three score years and ten and then that was it. There had to be something more to life, a comma or semicolon, rather than the full stop of death ending the life sentence. I had no idea what this thing inside me was. The nuns at school had made passing reference to something called the soul, which you were in danger of losing if you did something really, really bad but never described it in detail.

It took quite a few years of conscious and unconscious searching to find satisfactory answers to this and other questions. Once I met my spiritual teacher, Sri Chinmoy, everything fell into place. He confirmed for me that I do have a soul, like all other living beings and that I can nurture and develop my conscious awareness of it through the process of meditation. It is indeed the immortal essence of my existence, a tiny spark of the infinite vast that links me with all life and my Creator. He likens the soul to a bird, its two wings being prayer and meditation. With just one wing the soul-bird cannot fly into the infinite.

I now practise meditation every day, as an essential part of my life's journey of self-discovery. And after many years of neglect, I am learning to pray again, not for the fulfilment of childish desires, but as a way of deepening my relationship with my inner self.

My early teachers introduced me to prayer. My spiritual Master, Sri Chinmoy, revived this in me and introduced me to meditation, showing me how the two are essentially linked.