What is it that makes a prayer more than a mere string of words? Active imagination, not fantasy or imagery but imagination of the heart. The source word for imagination is mago, magic. When it resides in the heart, imagination is aspiration, lifting, reaching up, joyous, subtle intimacy. Breathing in. When first exploring prayer, I Read More

The post Prayer (3) first appeared on In Presence.

When something happens we can’t understand, when a child dies or an accident suddenly takes someone from us, we say “we cannot know God’s plan’. To make sense of it, we think there must be a plan, an explanation, just not one we can understand. Plan is a very human idea. It’s a construct within Read More

The post Plan first appeared on In Presence.

What is your inner work? You may know in advance. You may not. Your work may relate to what is happening in this world, your personal experience of it or a larger perspective, including protection of friends, your community or the resolution of a war. How to begin? Enter the attention space previously described. If Read More

The post Inner Work (5) – What Work? first appeared on In Presence.

On reactions, and on a personal note, I recently met a woman who within the last year had experienced a sudden awakening. All her life she had suffered from anxiety, and then one day she didn’t, ever again. Some time after her awakening, her 12 year old daughter commented, “Mom, what happened. You’re so chill.” Read More

The post Response from Adrian to Not Reacting post first appeared on In Presence.

The personal self is a bundle of habitual reactions. To react is to be expelled from the attention space. It is the work of a lifetime to live without reactions. Non reaction enables direct reading of, and engagement with, sensing and feeling. A whole universe opens to one who is free of habitual reactions. This Read More

The post Inner Work (4) – Not Reacting first appeared on In Presence.

You can’t work inwardly without help. The biggest recurring trap is that you enter this work actively, with the intention to ‘do’ it. As soon as you reverse this impulse, things become possible. You will need to find for yourself what this means. There are inner gestures of submission, apology, contrition that enable you to Read More

The post Inner Work (3) – Help first appeared on In Presence.