Prayer

Already a new season arrives at our door. We usually attach something of our hearts and tie it like a ribbon to some wish for personal awakening. Some of us set goals and intentions. Some of us examine something of ourselves in some way to let go of some old conditioning. Some of us do both. A great many of us seek a change though we cannot define it. A great many of us seek some mastery to a renewed aliveness. The quieted and yet slowly burgeoning energy of a season gives us the opportunity to look within and focus on a want and a need.

The language of a rejuvenation is just under the earth. There is something in the heart we wish to discover and plant. Spring is also a time when the earth reaches in for an expression of glory. How we yearn to incorporate Spring’s prayer for joy and happiness. How we all wish to partake in a fruitful and beautiful peace on this earth. How we all wish to  enjoy our world and the blessings of life we largely to now have taken for granted. How can we also join in and touch that glory?

Equanimity

Indeed, there is a resounding wish in your heart and mine that we all enjoy peace, health, happiness, hugs, and the freedom of movement to be there for others, and to connect. And yet the world is heavy. Do our prayers for peace and well-being achieve anything, and when the world is what it is? The simple answer is yes. We all have come into the world for such potential and promise. Then how do we capably plant prayers for a more peaceful and beautiful world confidently and just the same?

We give our prayers for peace the greatest solidarity and its highest merit when we ourselves agree to live in peace. Our individual and collective journey to share in a true happiness and peace requires our frankness, our diligence, our perseverance to the challenges and tests, and our utmost kindness and confidence. Can we agree to live in peace within ourselves? And, can we agree to wholeheartedly practice a high standard of living in peace with all others? This movement toward love is what creates a healthy world. This inevitably requires an honesty to our shortcomings, of which we all are made, and cultivating our hearts ever to a deeper love. When we agree to do the work – this great kindness work— and agree to learn how to carry both strengths well, our collective prayers join in a stronger abundance for a success. This agreement is at the heart of what it means “to be kind”.

How can we maximize prayer all the more? For our prayers to carry for the greatest outcome, we must make sure our prayers are truly and sincerely broad and free from preconditions, negativity, or any conditions of exclusivity at all. Pure and calm and thoughtful prayer contains a higher energy of a a loving abundance about it. Extending love from such a peaceful heart space expands the energy of a heart prayer’s “light” qualities all the more, and gives it a meritorious weight. We are in the pocket of true kindness when we apply this logic of collaborative prayer to our everyday actions and thoughts. Success for a peaceful world, a peaceful existence, requires an honest work — a hard, incredibly rewarding, often messy, and a more than a beautiful kind of heart work.

Acceptance

“S/He realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be part of the problem is to be human.” -Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

Confidence is faith and confidence is also a kind of love. Our honesty asks that we lead with a friendliness to all that is. Love asks that we be frank with ourselves about our inner truths as well. Our kindness naturally then encourages that we take care to realign and put forward our best intentions for the most peaceful good and in the sincerest way.  This is how peace secures. It often then means, too, that we put others before ourselves and take joy in accepting an inconvenience for the greater ease of others. When you and I up our agreement to do this kindness work, you and I really do up the outcome; and you and I do heal the world. This is how a broken world repairs.

What is most important is that we grow in love and that we grow our calm and do not give up. As we are human, we will make mistakes. There are days when it will be more difficult to transcend our emotions. We must notice and reset. The process relies on our commitment to stay the course for a loving success. We must continue to give our solidarity to such a kindness with love and faith.

“The heavens are the heavens of the Lord— they are already heavenly in character. “But the earth He has given to mortals”— so that we might make of it something heavenly. –Kabbalah on a Shabbat Jewish Prayer

Compassion

Sincere prayer has its own excellence and is without distinction. We give prayer more energetic weight the wider our hearts embrace more in the world, and this includes both its negative and its positive aspects. No matter our many differences (in opinion, beliefs, custom, ways of being, ways of living), we can still have a strong, open-hearted vibration of a steadfast peace thrum in the heart. Peace and prayer is not dependent on existing in a world with an absence of differences. Can we dig deep and plant a wish of peace for everyone without one ounce of energy that anything or anyone is destroyed or suffers?

A prayer for peace is stronger when it is imbued with kind thought, loving thoughts, and devoid of any language in the heart that contributes to a conditionality and an aggression. The greatest solidarity any of us can give to a peaceful prayer is to make it as pure as can be within our hearts. But yes, peace takes time. It takes time. But we can’t give up on it. We can’t. It is not like the work of joining a gym and expiring your membership after a few years. We have to help the power of faith become complete.

Take Kindness and Benevolence as Basis.
Take frankness and friendliness to heart.
— Master Ou Wen Wei, The Path of Life

We also give peace a better chance and a more abundant prospect the more we do our best to stay calm. Being calm and peaceful within ourselves is wise so that the maximum love energy can really get through. Calm and kind thought gives more roundedness to any healing send from one’s heart space to another. It increases it in radiance and in its level of compassion. It fortifies its energy to a friendlier and more sincere direction. It is wise work to endow our prayers of the heart with the utmost open-heartedness we can muster to all that Is. The energy of love has a colour and shape. It is wise to  drop into our hearts often in a day, and to feel it, to imagine it, to try to broaden it, and as we momentarily check in.

As an example, recently many worldwide students of Pangu Shengong joined with Master Ou in a peace and healing marathon on behalf of the present world situation. Over the course of four hours, we were asked to send love energy to Putin to appeal to his conscience. We were of course sending lots of healing energy to all the people in need. We all dug deep to send an energy of compassion and love and peace and justice to both sides, and effectively to all sides, all people, and all the hurts in this world that need to be released. We were asked to not doubt the efficacy and love energy in our healing prayers; and we were asked to keep the faith and to not give up.

Embrace

Our prayers for peace need our frank and full embrace. We are here on this planet at this time with reason. Our job is not to judge others but to shift the balance of understanding in the world by increasing our own.  When we work at it, we higher the energy of love and glory.

Thankfully, most of us do not have the ability to even understand how such great kinds of negativity can exist.  And yet, we all have choice. We all can choose evil or good. Thankfully most of us choose good. And yet, if there’s mess in the world beyond that, it’s because our language of faith is incomplete. It’s also because we understand kindness and respect in different ways. As an example, many people and many companies say they are kind and respectful and value others. You and I know, however, that many are also hypocrites in how they go about it. It’s sadly part of the infection. The Madman and the sociopath expresses the negative we all have within to an extreme. For this very reason, we need to give everything more balance and our deepest compassion.

We may see now that we have become more economic with our actions and more happily efficient to our goals when our time is structured with love and patience to things and to what we are doing. We see the great importance in our how. We have all experienced how breathing with what is from a non-resistant space is far more helpful to our heart’s success. Working for something keeps our thoughts and our actions kind. Working against something does not. Strong, sincere prayer follows this same rule of collaboration.

So what is the structure of a strong prayer for peace? What is its heart? It means we agree at every moment to embrace a life of improving the quality of our love and to live a life grounded in a determination of lowering our hate. We must nourish peace like we would the heart and beautiful faces of benevolent flowers. Spring’s awakening unites within us. Let us strive to open our hearts each day a little more, like a Spring flower— ; and let us remember that peace is love and love is glory. After all….Peace is my prayer, my equanimity, my acceptance, my compassion, my embrace.

Photograph provided by Paul Fraser.

Master Ou offers a poem for My Heartspeak Readers.
Readers are invited to breathe deeply and read slowly
so as to absorb the maximum healing energy and healing properties
infused in the poem, and that is also a song.

Big Family
by Master ou Wen Wei

No matter where I go,
Always in my heart I have my big family.
Kind father, kind mother give me profound love,
Melting the ice and snow in my heart.
Ah…ah…ah…ah…

In the family flows a river of divine love,
Nourishing the world’s myriad things,
Letting them sprout and grow—
Unafraid of winter’s cold or stormy rains,
In my heart only a golden sunset.
No matter where I go,
Always in my heart I have my big family.

No matter where I go,
Always in my heart I have my big family.
Brothers, sisters, I have a passion
To nourish with heart these benevolent flowers.
Ah…ah…ah…ah…

In the family sounds the music of divine love,
Intoxicating, overflowing with joy,
Like a beautiful poem, a beautiful picture.
Let me open my heart like a flower
To embrace tomorrow, tomorrow—
Beautiful, elegant, glorious,
To embrace tomorrow, embrace tomorrow—
More beautiful, elegant, glorious…glorious.