UniversalistPrayers

Guided Meditation on Resistance

Touching earth or touching something that touches earth, send your awareness to how you are part of this earth and how earth supports your whole being. Breathe with this awareness for a while.

When you feel tuned into your awareness of connection with and support by earth, start to turn your awareness to where you are holding resistance. Where are these places in your being? What are their qualities? Breathe with noticing where you are holding resistance for a while, until you grow curious about one of the areas.

Once curious about the resistance you are holding, invite the resistance to greater presence and awareness. Now we notice not only the location in our being and the qualities, but we also become more aware of why. Resistance is often protective. What are we protecting ourselves from? Are these perceived threats true and real and present now? Sometimes we choose resistance as protection. Sometimes we have resistance as a protective habit.

As you breathe with your learning about the resistance you are holding, you have choices. Perhaps you want to keep the resistance and even strengthen it. Perhaps you want to soften the resistance or even release it. There are lots of choice points between these decisions and probably choices I have not imagined but you can. Now, we are breathing practicing discernment, holding the choices, the potentials, and imagining what flows from pursuing one of those choices, comparing them and how they feel.

As you breathe, noticing your choices and possibilities, eventually you might arrive at a decision you wish to try. If you decide you need to strengthen your resistance, how can you do this in helpful, supportive, non-harming ways? If you decide you need to keep your resistance, what are the most nurturing ways to hold this so the resistance protects but does not harm you or others? If you are choosing softening around the resistance, how can you encourage softness, easing, or more permeability? If you are choosing releasing resistance, how can you honor the resistance and how will you let it go? Are there physical movements to accompany your decisions?

As you complete your time with greater awareness of how you are or were holding resistance, perhaps return to awareness of earth. Earth’s solidity offers us resistance as we wheel or walk around, allowing us to travel through our lives. Earth’s permeability cleans and stores water, nurtures mycelial networks and plants, literally allowing us to breathe, to eat, to drink, to survive. Resistance is a practice and like the changing qualities of earth, we can change to employ resistance more skillfully in our lives.

Breathing in and out softly, thank resistance, thank earth, and thank your breath as you complete your practice.

A Prayer for Reading Freely

Lover of Curiosity, boldly open with us bookcovers and library doors and digital library gateways to authors we have never read before, to people we have never met, to times we have never lived, to ways of thinking that ask us to think anew, to questions we never bothered to ponder before, to imagination and wonderment and reverence and surprise and laughter and so much more. Lover of Curiosity, help us protect school and public libraries as actively circulating collections that invite us past the smaller world of comfort and our own creating, that teach us how to be responsible citizens who ask hard questions, that give us back our histories that were hidden from us. Lover of Curiosity, may we nurture a love of reading in our birth languages and in acquired languages, sharing profligately across cultures and beliefs and understandings, nurturing a world in which we can respect and care for one another in part because through reading we have learned a little bit about each other and how to be with what we do not know or understand while we are finding our way ahead. Lover of Curiosity and Lover of Liberation, may we reverse the book bans, get difficult books into the hands of readers turned off by stories and ideas they cannot find connection to, challenge ourselves and one another not to hide, ban or burn those books but to turn another page, have a deeper discussion about problems or questions from the text, think, talk about, share, enjoy, and return to books that change us. Amen.

A Prayer for the Sweetness of Slow

Breath of Being, when we are caught up in false urgencies help us slow down, settle onto a park bench, plant a few seeds, share a poem, drink in dappled sunlight and cooling tea recognizing these times, too, are important, to happiness, to the earth, to a life lived compassionately and lovingly and well. Breath of Being, when there are real reasons to be afraid, to agitate, to organize, may we also make sure there are breaks, oases of casting on a new hat, of sharing a generous joke, of appreciating one another in our wholeness, the wholeness we are organizing to protect, freeing to make real, and seeking to root into fruitful reality for each and for all. Breath of Being, breathe with us touching the slowness of life that can be so sweet, finding in the space between urgencies us meeting one another heart to heart and growing together. Amen.

Prayer for Discernment

Breath of Being, pause with us in the space of dignity, the choice point, discerning what is skillful and what is possible and what is needful. After breathing out, may we pause in the emptiness of the breath, in possibility, in the blessing of not yet. Breathing in, may we welcome life’s sweetness, choices, and being part of this amazing whole. After breathing in, may we pause in the fullness of the breath, on the cusp of decisions put into action, of making mistakes and learning and of touching life’s happiness and contentment. Breathing out, may we flow with the choice made. And then, Breath of Being? And then may we learn, grow, nurture, flow, choose, make a life worth living together, decision by decision, holding this life and these choices and this earth and one another tenderly and compassionately. Amen.

Guided Meditation to Curate Reverence

Breathe.

 

Allow your exhalation to grow long, slow, soughing up from the belly like the wind moving gently through dried grasses.

 

Become the grasses, sentinel, for the next few breaths.

 

Attend to your heartbeat, pulsing, flowing through you with a river of life.

 

Become one with the river of life flowing through and around you for the next few breaths.

 

Allow the warmth of the sun, or the flutter of shadow, or a cool breeze, or the circling flight of birds, or the unfurling flowers to draw your awareness.

 

Melt your awareness into those moments, becoming one, part of the whole.

 

And, when you are ready or it is time to go, shake yourself like the dog who just finished playing and smelling all the good smells and is right with itself and the world again. Be right with yourself and the world again. This, too, is good.

Prayer for Earth Bailout

Breath of Being, as we breathe, we might not notice the nanoplastics accumulating in our lungs and nostrils, but help us remember they are there. Well of Liberation, as we drink this cool water, we might not notice the microplastics and forever chemicals pervading our waterways, but help us remember they are there. Lover of Life, we have inherited this mess of climate change and pollution, been party to, even without our consent or knowledge, to this massive desecration of the home where we live, where so many live. Mercy and Compassion, may we make way for climate change refugees and migration driven by political instability and collapsing economies because of how damaged our planet is. Imagine with us, Great Dreamer, of what it is to put the healing and repair of this planet at the center of our lives, our economic policies, our laws, our honoring of sacred places especially when they are not our sacred spaces. Courageous Love, rise with us every day to long labor to draw us from where we are right now to where we can be, to a planet transformed not only by our disdain and extraction, but by our care and reverence and healing to be abundant and splendid and supportive of each and of all. Amen.

 

A Prayer for Responsible Dissent

Lover of Diversity and apparently Appreciator of Arguments and Imagination and the Very Long Work of Peacemaking, may we learn how to practice dissent responsibly. That is, dissenting as a matter of conscience without causing more violence and with offering and imagining a shared way forward that improves life for everybody, except maybe those committed to cruelty. Teach us how to dissent when laws are unjust and outlaw us living into our own long traditions of ethics and spiritual teachings. Teach us how to dissent to create possibilities and embed them into history and memory that future generations can hold onto and help shift us into greater responsibility toward the earth and one another, greater equity, greater opportunities for all to thrive. May we nurture our imaginations not with revenge, self-righteousness, or bloodshed, but with figuring out peace that nurtures the earth, that allows our differing cultures and faiths and communities to live and thrive side by side, interdependent and together. May we be responsible with our freedoms of thought, speech, and argument, these freedoms that need us to root our words and deeds and build the future from facts, from inclusivity, from addressing injustices and dismantling oppressive laws and practices, and from learning from one another, from the best and most uplifting of our histories, cultures, and traditions. Teach us to dissent in ways that grow a better future not just for some, but also for those we have not yet thought about or remember also belong here. Amen.

A Spring Table Blessing

This blessing acknowledges that in the southern end of the Northern Hemisphere, some areas are moving into a summer semi-dormancy, where the weather becomes too hot for many food crops, but helps nourish citrus, pineapples, and sugarcane (things harvested in winter or early spring in the Northern Hemisphere). Other areas are emerging from a full dormancy where outside of greenhouses, sprout jars, and windowsills, fresh produce is just returning with first radishes, asparagus, dandelion greens, watercress, and fiddleheads.

 

Breath of Being, may we bless this table of spring’s renewal, this season of sprouting, leafing out, rooting down, drinking in rain and cloaking ourselves in fog. As the seasons shift, may we shift with them, aligned with the earth’s bounty where we are. If emerging from dormancy, finishing the winter stores and welcoming the first bright greens and ferns of spring. If heading towards dormancy, may we finish putting up into sauces and pickles and frozen treats the winter abundance season to carry us until cooler weather. As the plants root and leaf more vigorously, as the sun warms the land, may we also nurture our relationships with the earth where we live, the farmers and food producers around us, and this interdependent network of vitality to which we all belong. May we set our tables with gladness, with bright colors and spring fragrances, and make welcome to one another and this new and renewing season. Amen.

 

Prayer to Respect Each Other in Our Diversity

Prayer to Respect Each Other in our Diversity

 

Wisdom, bring us into the difficult and interesting conversations community by community, and help us find ways to nurture communities in which we all can thrive, in all our diversity of being and beliefs. May we honor and respect differences in our beliefs without causing harm to one another. May we stop discrimination on the basis of faith, whether prosecuted by the state or by neighbors or by family to differently believing members. May we learn how to have nuanced, challenging, and thoughtful conversations that open possibilities for thriving, for living together well, without causing each other moral, emotional or physical harm. Wisdom, teach us about the vastness of being and how difficult that is to grasp, and how to live humbly with one another, our differences only a few of the aspects of being that is so beyond mortal comprehension. Teach us not to take the easy way out by sticking to the idea that there is only one right way to believe for everyone, or at least, take these religious arguments out of legislation and state policies. Wisdom, challenge those of us who call ourselves believers to truly have faith, and not need to insist all those around us live and believe just as we do. Wisdom, help us learn to respect one another as reflective, moral people even though we differ from each other about what that means in living each day. May we learn to respect each others’ languages of reverence, traditions of ethics, ways of making home, and that includes the very many of us who have no language of reverence and root themselves in secularism. May we keep learning about the vastness of being, and stay humble, leaning into compassion and mutual care across our divisions. Amen.

Guided Reflection to Cultivate Zestiness

 

Many of have been taught to prune our interests that give our lives zest and meaning because we were told or worried we were not good enough at those interests. Here’s a guided meditation to imagine how it would be to embrace those interests.

With each ... take the time to pause you need for practice.

 

Settle into a comfortable, supported reclining shape or seated one, where your torso can be long and your breath can be easy. Make sure you have all the support you need to be comfortable that your space permits.

Let’s breathe quietly together, inviting our breath to bring ease and to grow easier...

As we breathe, supported in our chosen shape, may we flip through the pages of our being, seeking out those bright sparks of interests we used to have, but have put down along the way...

You are deserving of interests that bring zestiness to your life, even if you are never skillful with them. You are deserving of interests that bring joy into your life, even without having to meet expectations or standards of play, production, or mastery. You are deserving, just by being here on this earth right here and now, of nurturing joyful pursuits for the pleasure of the pursuit, practice, or interest.

Select one of the possibly many bright sparks of zestiness to focus your awareness on. Maybe you used to be passionate about the stars or maybe you used to make things from clay or maybe you used to tell stories…or….or….or….pick out one zesty interest that you have learned to put aside and hold it gently...

What sensations arise in your being as you hold this interest?...

Can you imagine choosing to spend time with this interest now? Why or why not?...

If all the obstacles were cleared away, how would adding this spark of zestiness back to your life feel?...

What would it be like to give yourself permission to be a beginner, an amateur, or even bad with this chosen interest?...

If that permission feels risky, what is at risk? Can you imagine it going well?...

What would it be like to enjoy this interest without having to compare yourself to others? To enjoy it for the process?...

Savor what this possibility of choosing to return to this once-passion or interest and to allow yourself to play with it again...

As we breathe together, gently holding these sparks of zestiness, may we notice what has changed in our being...

As we return to our lives, out of this guided reflection, may we set in motion the next thing to do to nurture this spark of zestiness that is also part of you.