Yogananda said that most people “pray vaguely and absent-mindedly, then turn away and hope for the best.” He contrasted that with yogis, “whose bliss state is the result not of blind prayer, but of direct, determined, loving inner communion with God.”
Ananda Sevaka and hardware store owner Bruce Davis will help you supercharge your own prayer life by examining the nuts and bolts of effective prayer.
What is the best way to pray:
I thought that reading it, I said it all pretty perfectly, but I will elaborate a bit.
I had to laugh when I first saw the topic because, you know, what is the best way to pray? My wife, my dear wife, is always asking me about books and restaurants and whatever we do together. She says, “Well, what’s the best? What was best about this? What was the best part of this trip? On a scale of one to 10, rank this restaurant.” She’s always doing that.
And my brain just doesn’t quite work that way. I just kind of experience things; I have to go with the flow. And so, she makes me get out of my— I don’t know which side of the brain that is, but I have to get out from one side, get into the other, and analyze it. But for this talk, we’ll do a little bit of both. We’ll do a little bit of the best practices of prayer, and then we’ll do a little bit of experiential.
So based on the thing with Ananda, if you looked at its offerings, you know, we have kind of a couple of niches here. You would say that one niche is meditation. People come to meditation classes and seminars, and various things—retreats. There’s beginning meditation and advanced meditation. They’ll teach you how to teach meditation. Same with yoga. Yoga’s a niche of Ananda, and there’s all kinds of yoga and yoga teachers. There’s tall yoga and short yoga, and you name whatever flavor of yoga there is.
But prayer? Not so much. And you would be excused for thinking that prayer might not be quite the emphasis here. And yet, I was counting the number of prayers we’ve had this morning since the choir was warming up, and it was probably about six or seven prayers that we’ve had, counting affirmations too, but we’ve had six or seven prayers. And there will probably be another six or seven prayers afterwards. So, I think prayer at Ananda is kind of baked into the product. It’s part of what we do.
And yet, one of the things I think is that everyone kind of knows how to pray already. It’s not like we need to teach prayer, per se. The Christian churches do a great job teaching everyone to pray.
Master had some very rich material on prayer. He had a lot of material on prayer, and it was a real treat to go through all that material for this class. So, everyone knows how to pray, right? So, let’s do a prayer.
Let’s do the Lord’s Prayer that was mentioned in the reading, and let’s just do it together. But before we start, let’s take a moment, close our eyes, and just sense where you’re at. Where is the energy in your body right now? Feel your spine. Where’s your energy?
So, let’s say that prayer, and I think most of us know this prayer.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.”
Now, keeping your eyes closed, just feel your body. Where’s the energy now? For me, I started with a lot of energy around my heart, but I can feel that the energy has gone up some. I’m wondering if maybe you experienced something similar.
At Ananda, that’s kind of the point of meditation, yoga, and everything we do—to bring that energy up to the heart when we do our practices. Now, that’s a different class, but I’m just tying it into what we do here at Ananda.
So, let’s get to the nuts and bolts. The best way to pray. Jyotish, our spiritual director here for Ananda worldwide, has a nice way of thinking about it. He uses his hand, five fingers, five points of how to pray. The first finger is familiarity.
Swami Kriyananda, who founded Ananda, said the two most important words in the Lord’s Prayer are “Our Father.” It’s a personal relationship that we have. It’s interesting because we call it the Lord’s Prayer, and we all know that lords are people in palaces on thrones, high up, while we are low down, with probably no interaction, and maybe they don’t even care about us.
So, it brings it down into a familial relationship with a father. The father cares about us. He wants our upliftment. He’s raising us. So, that’s who we are relating to—a father, not a lord.
At Ananda, we start prayers like “Divine Mother,” “Heavenly Father,” “Friend,” “Beloved God.” Isn’t it great to think of God as your friend? When it first came to me, it kind of blew my mind. God, friend—it didn’t quite compute initially. It took a while for it to start to compute for me.
Starting on a familiar level is where we want to begin.
When I was young, maybe 10 or so, our family would go on vacations. If there was an ice cream shop nearby or something I wanted to buy, I’d go up to my father and put my hand right into his trouser pocket, fishing for some coins to get my treat. That’s the kind of familiarity I want you to understand—He’s there for us, He really is.
One of Master’s most important prayers was, “Father, give me Thyself so that I might give Thee to all.”
So, the first finger is familiarity.
The second finger is faith. This involves praying with belief, believing that God will answer your prayers and that He is there to help you. The belief is that He wants nothing but your highest good and is listening to you. It’s very intimate; God is fully willing to give us everything we need.
In the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” is a statement of faith, acknowledging that God will never lead us into temptation. If we find ourselves in temptation, it’s our doing, but He will deliver us from evil. “Give us this day our daily bread” is another statement of faith, signifying that God will sustain us and provide for our needs. To draw His grace, we need faith—that’s the tie-in.
This temple has been here for 16 years, and now we’re bursting at the seams. Before the temple, we were in a rented space on Roosevelt Avenue. It was nice but not very magnetic. There was talk about needing something better, and we had this vision of a temple in Assisi with a blue dome, a kind of blueprint in the ether. So, we started praying.
We had this affirmation, “Beloved Master, in Thy name, we build this new monastery.” Through generous donations, we got some land, but we still needed to build the temple. It took a lot of money and fundraising, and the right people showed up. Throughout this process, which took years, we kept saying the affirmation. It took a lot of faith—this place was built with faith.
So, the second finger is faith.
The third finger is frequency. Now, when I went to church, we would say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, and I thought that was pretty good. In fact, I remember, going way back in time, I was part of another group, a kind of New Agey community of folks, and we were talking about prayer. One gentleman said, “Well, you know, God knows everything already. He knows our thoughts. I think you just need to say it once, and you’re done.” That thought kind of stuck with that group, and so we didn’t do a lot of prayer.
But I think prayer is mainly for us. It’s not so much for God. Like you said, He knows everything. It’s more for us to reaffirm ourselves. So, in the Christian churches, you would say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. But really, that prayer is a daily prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread” is intended to be a daily prayer.
At Ananda, we pray in the morning, before meditation, before meals, before big events, and we pray all the time at church. Ultimately, you want to find any kind of excuse you can to pray, to build it into the fabric of your life. I was on the road in traffic, which is not unusual, and I prayed, “Lord, what’s the deal with the traffic here? Shouldn’t be traffic. What do you want me to do? Should I just keep going or go around this?” You have these thoughts already. It doesn’t take much to turn it into a prayer and be intimate with the Lord.
So that’s frequency.
The fourth finger is fervor. I would also put in there honesty as well. Honesty is kind of like looking into the soul, and I’m talking about the kind of honesty where you look into your soul and then bring that kind of honesty out in your prayers. Master emphasized prayer demands. This was really big with him, and it took me a while to get it. It’s a difficult concept for me because if you think of God as Lord, what position are we in to demand anything? But Master didn’t like wimpy prayers.
“Give us this day our daily bread”—that’s a prayer demand. He didn’t say, “Please give us this day our daily bread.” He didn’t say, “If I’m a good boy, would you give me my daily bread?” He didn’t beg. He said, “Give us this day our daily bread.” That is a prayer demand. “We are Thy children, all of us.”
So, I have a couple of prayer demands I’ll read for you to help get the idea.
This book, “Whispers from Eternity,” is an awesome book. Master said that after he was gone, if you want to feel his vibrations, read this book. It is full of prayers.
I will read “We Demand of Thee as Thy Children.” Take a moment, feel where your energy is right now, and absorb this prayer demand:
“Thou art my father. We are made in Thine image. We are Thy children. We neither ask nor pray as beggars but demand of Thee as Thy children the gifts of wisdom, salvation, health, happiness, eternal joy. Whether or not we are good, we are still Thy children, all of us. Help us to perceive and understand inwardly Thy will for us. Teach us the independent use of our human will since Thou gavest it to us freely attuned to Thy wisdom-guided will.”
Now, notice how you feel, what your energy is doing.
I have another one I want to read for you. This one shows my long relationship with it because when I first visited Ananda 41 years ago, I brought this back to that same spiritual group, and they all liked it. We kind of immortalized it. This particular one blends prayer and affirmation together—it’s the soul story of your life or the story of your soul as it goes back to God. There isn’t an ask in it; it’s not asking God for anything. It’s an astral level prayer where you’re not really praying to God; you’re praying in God.
Take a moment to center yourself and feel this prayer. Feel where you’re at, where your energy is at. Feel your spine. Think of this as your story too.
“I Demand to Return Home” is the title.
“Impediments beware. Flee my path. I am homeward bound through the long corridors of time, stumbling often into pits of error, then lifted out by the unseen hand. I have walked painfully discouraging darkness, barbed wire fences of habit, stony embankments of nice, mountains of indifference, oceans of unfaithfulness, sirens of sense. Longing may stand even now in my path as if to prevent my onward march to Thy palace. But a million kingdoms and six trillion years of unblemished worldly happiness will never tempt me again to turn away from Thee.”
Do you feel the fervor in that, the yearning, the love?
And now, the fifth finger, the thumb, is following the will of God. One of Master’s most important prayers was, “I will reason, I will, I will act, but guide Thou my reason, will, and activity on the right path in everything.”
You noticed also that will came up in several of those other prayers- the demand for children.
He says, “Teach us the independent use of our human will, attuned to Thy wisdom, guided will.” And in the Lord’s Prayer, it’s “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come.” This is God’s kingdom. It’s not really ours. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
So, help us to understand Thy will. It helps us ground that prayer into something that’s not ego-inflating. We’re living God’s life in a sense and just coming to grips with that.
In summary, five fingers:
- Familiarity: Start out with “Our Father,” make God your friend.
- Frequency: As in “Give us this day our daily bread.”
- Fervor: “We demand of Thee as Thy children.”
- Faith: “Thy will be done.”
- Will: “I will, will but guide Thou, my will.”
So those are the five best ways to pray. I gave you a little bit of best and a little bit of experience, and we’ll finalize with a reading from “Whispers from Eternity.” One more reading helps if I get the right prayer.
This is called “Reinforce Thou All Our Blended Prayers,” and again, this is kind of like the story of the soul, but for all of us together:
“The streamlets of our prayers rush out and conjoin with the wellsprings of our heart, uniting in a single mighty flow. Our broad, deep-flowing rivers of prayer move swiftly towards Thy oceanic presence, breaking all narrow embankments of indifference, dissolving every eddy and large whirlpool of worldly desires, flowing freely over the protruding rocks of bad habits, and straightening the once winding ways of delusion. Our great river of devotion crosses sands of human oblivion, uncounted lives lost in eternity to present memory, inundating every trace of past trials and painful experience. Yet even now, thy shores seem far away. Doggedly our flood moves on towards Thy sea of shining vastness. Pour Thou unceasingly the raindrops of Thy mercy, swelling the flood of our prayers that they reach at last triumphantly Thine ever-waiting shores.”