Namaste Publishing

How do you pray for other people? Or do you?

A churchgoer in her seventies discovered she had leukemia. Her doctor informed her that if she had been under the age of sixty-five, she would have been a candidate for a bone marrow transplant, but due to her age she wasn’t eligible.

This lady decided to undergo chemotherapy, coupled with homeopathic and herbal treatments. Her faith community, together with her family and friends, rallied around her in prayer. Five years later, her friends were calling her a walking miracle.

The lady’s daughter believed in the power of prayer because of what had happened to her mother. But she explained, “It wasn’t like some God out there somewhere reached down and performed a miracle. The miracle lay in the energy and compassion of hundreds of people praying for my Mom. Yes, it was God . . . but in the people.”

There's a deep mystery to life that’s beyond our finite grasp. It pervades the quantum soup, and all of reality is a single interconnected web.

So much so that certain subatomic particles that were once joined, then spun apart, continue to influence each other wherever they go in the universe. Science is now regularly revealing the incredibly complex, interwoven nature of the cosmos.

When people feel our goodwill toward them, it helps awaken wonderful feelings in them. If we know someone is thinking of us, wishing the very best for us, we feel better. We are encouraged, more upbeat.

This kind of prayer violates no natural law. It simply creates a favorable atmosphere that invites everyone into greater alignment with the whole.

The father of a young football player who was seriously injured remarked that for him, the most important aspect of the prayers offered for his son were the prayers enacted. The phone calls they received, the visits, the meals the emails, and all the good that actually touched them. 

Because of this, their son is a different person. He has a depth of maturity beyond his years. Prayer changed this boy. Other people praying for him changed him.

That’s because, in them, he encountered the depth dimension of reality and it transformed him.

Back in the 1700s, The British prime minister Isaac D'Israeli remarked, "The act of contemplation creates the thing contemplated." 

We’re not talking magic here. It isn’t that we think something into being. Prayer changes how we act around people and how we treat them. It changes how we handle ourselves in each and every situation that arises in our life.

To pray for others, we go within, becoming conscious of how we can best touch their lives in a beneficial manner.

*Editor's note: Consciousness Rising appears several times each week. You can go more fully into what we are discussing with the author’s book Your Forgotten Self, along with the audio book Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart, which explores the story of the Little Prince in its entirety from the perspective of Eckhart Tolle’s insights in The Power of Now and A New Earth, together with Michael Brown’s The Presence Process. Your Forgotten Self is now available as an eBook for mobile devices and computers.