The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Before I speak, whether it's public, they are often in small groups or whatever,

I usually have a silent prayer that I reflect on, and sometimes different words, but the basic communication is may this in some way serve the awakening of our hearts.

I pray that the reason I do it, I've been doing it for as long as I can remember now, in terms of speaking, is that in the moment that there's a prayer, I'm connecting with what most matters to me.

It's like I've contacted more consciously what I care about, so that I'm speaking from it, which really matters to me.

But there's a second reason, which is that I find that prayerfulness brings a quality of humility or the self-sense fades some.

So it's more here we are together feeling, and things flow more. It's not so much a self-hero delivering what she thinks is good ideas about reality.

So there's this sense of remembering what matters and a little reduction of the self-ing, of the egoic sense.

So what we're going to be exploring in this class, it's the second of two parts on devotional practices, practices that awake in the heart, is the power of prayer.

And I think of prayer as a communication, like any communication, in the sense that it's connecting us, we're commuting.

And in this case, prayer is a conscious communication with enlarged beingness, and the blessing of it is that when we're really in a full sense of prayerfulness, there's a quality of grace that arises.

And the universe can flow through us more. So we'll practice and explore this together. And I'd like to again remind you of John O'Donohue's very beautiful way of describing prayer.

He says, prayers the voice of longing, it reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging.

So that is the experience of grace, the sense of belonging to and being part of the flow, the unfolding universe that's here.

And so I'll be using this metaphor of outward and inward, and I often think of it like a tree that when we're praying our roots are going deep into the earthiness of our human longing, our yearning, we're going deep with those roots.

And the deeper we go, the more we can reach out to this enlarged belonging, expressing and communicating.

And there's a third quality, which is in that reaching out, there's a receptivity. So there's reaching in to touch the longing and expressing it out and listening.

So those are the three pieces that we're going to be going over in a more systematic way as we explore together.

But first there's a reason that prayer is a part of every spiritual and religious tradition I've run into.

And that's because it's a universal that we humans intuit something larger than our ego, itself.

Some of us intuit in a sense of a very vague way. And it's been described as that William James said that the first expression of religion is the cry help.

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