Prayer = Meditation

Prayer is a kind of meditation. At least it can be. It was for me growing up, although at the time I didn’t know it. I now compare prayer to mindfulness meditation, a state I have been developing. Now that I look back at my life, I realized that I have been practicing meditation since I was a young boy. I can easily recall the  hours and hours of time that I spent throughout my childhood and into adulthood in prayer. It has been a few years since I formally prayed but I can still recite many of the prayers from memory. For decades I would pray 3 times per day (if I was good about it) at the very least I would pray daily. I would make small prayers throughout my day. I would pray for myself and for my loved ones. During all those prayers, I was asking for my needs and wants. Essentially, meditating on and visualizing my future. I was picturing in my minds eye, my wants and desires, goals and dreams  and then waiting for God to fulfill my prayers. Now I realize that I was experiencing a kind of visualization and mindfulness meditation helping my prayers come to fruition. Additionally prayer and essentially meditation, was allowing me to expand my heart and love for my family and friends. It was helping to shape me into a better person, allowing me to reflect and change negative thoughts and behaviors. I particularly remember holiday prayers being the most moving and spiritual of all the prayers. 

Unfortunately, throughout my life, most of my prayers were not spiritual. I didn’t understand that prayer was synonymous with meditation. I was performing prayer but I was nit feeling it. I was praying solely based on an ancient text that I don’t understand fully or connect with. Now that I have learned how to meditate in the traditional sense, I’m able to correlate and make sense of many of the feelings that I experienced with prayer throughout my life. I can now view prayer through the lens of meditation and contrast it with my previous experience. Had I known how to meditate, prayer would’ve been a very different experience. 

Growing up as an Orthodox Jew, I believed that prayer was a requirement for every person to connect with God and ask for your wishes. To me though, the rigidness of the rules, and the requirements of the specific words that had to be said, and in a specific frequency and time of day, made prayer a very difficult chore devoid of most spirituality. For example, proper prayer for an adult male is an hour in the morning in a synagogue with at least 10 other men, again for 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon and another evening prayer all in the presence of at least 10 other men. It became a burden, and I did not understand how it was helping me. I eventually rejected my religious doctrine and stopped praying altogether.

In retrospect, I look back at my formative years especially in my choice of a career, my marriage and having children, as a partial byproduct of prayer. Prayer helped me send out my aspirations and dreams into the universe. It helped me visualize my intentions and goals and act as if they already happened. That in turn helped me achieve my goals. I was blessed to have married an amazing woman build a household together and raise four amazingly talented and beautiful children. I do not believe that prayer alone is what helped me achieve those goals, they happened in a natural fashion with hard work and consistency but prayer definitely helped me visualize and meditate on and accomplish my desires, goals, and dreams. 

However, that is only one type of meditation. Visualizing your goals and dreams is a unique and powerful form of meditation but it is not the only kind. I have since learned that meditating can actually transform your whole life. You can increase your love for people around you, all of humankind, all creatures by practicing meditation.  It can help you see the beauty in every mundane moment. There’s actually nothing mundane once you learn the power of meditation. There’s so much beauty to be experienced and seen in nature. Meditation can be used to quiet your mind and put your body  into a state of deep relaxation, ultimately leading to a state of pure energetic excitement, arousal, and blissful pleasure. It is the state where you feel oneness with the universe. An overwhelming sense of love and awe and beauty. Just existing and letting go of the ego. A state of pure existence where anything else such as sounds, smells, sensations are extra. This is the spiritual state that I discovered. A state that I now want to be in as much as possible.

I believe that prayer was invented by humans of many religions to tap in to this space. To teach individuals how to achieve this state. Unfortunately it is the spiritual state that is often forgotten or lost in translation and instead the focus is on the minutiae of the laws of prayer and the rigidity and rote of it. Or the focus is on God or a being that may or may not be able to make your prayers a reality. One thing is true though, you can make your dreams and visualizations a reality. To enter a state of peace and love. A state of pure bliss and nirvana. A feeling of being one with the universe. Try it out. 

Close your eyes and take your mind to another dimension. Meditation is about looking inward, clearing your mind and body of all anxiety and tension. Not thinking about anything other than your experience of the moment. You may find it easier to focus on your breath. That can help keep your attention on your moment to moment experience. With practice, you can enter a state of deep relaxation and bliss. A feeling of pure existence. 

I remember as a child on the high holidays, witnessing prayer in the synagogue in this fashion. Specifically a family friend an  individual who seemed to reach this kind of state whenever he prayed on the high holidays. After a day of fasting and prayer standing in prayer, keenly focused on the task at hand, I believe that this individual was reaching a state of meditative bliss. I remember tears and sobs of religious fervor resonating from his “soul”. It was highly spiritual and  pure. I believe he was utilizing meditation and prayer for spiritual ecstacy. 

I find it interesting that Muslims (and Jews on the high holidays) pray in a kneeling fashion, similar to the Bālāsana or child’s pose used in yoga. That pose is actually an amazing and peaceful pose to be in and I’m sure it helps with getting into the spiritual state of prayer. There is a lot of crossover between yoga, meditation, and prayer.

I recently opened the book, by Alain de Botton, religion for atheists and went looking for the chapter on meditation. Guess what? It didn’t exist.  There was a chapter on prayer though. Ever since I have begun identifying as in atheist, for approximately the past seven years, I had lost the feeling of spirituality until re-exploring it and discovering it with meditation.

Prayer is a kind of meditation.  A powerful and beautiful practice of you learn its secrets. Learning to meditate has been life altering for me. I should have listened to my wife years ago. She had been telling me all along to just go and meditate. During the period of time when I was practicing Judaism but without belief, I had a hard time attending synagogue as I did not find meaning in it anymore. It was boring to me. My wife knew of my predicament but wanted me to attend for the sake of the community and for raising our children with faith. She would encourage me to simply meditate while praying. What I did not realize at the time but now I’ve come to acknowledge is that prayer is meditation.