Small Readings – Prayer and Meditation

This post was inspired by something I was reading recently and wanted to share. This is about how we should go about with prayer and meditation. This informed me that, prayer and meditation are not to be overdone at once and then forgotten for some time. It requires continuous rejuvenation and replenishment for prayer to become an integral part of life. Like any other thing, if you pray frequently enough and maintain a regime, a time table for prayer, you will find it to become a habit and that is necessary. Till you have to do it with conscious motivation and voluntary push, it would be a ‘chore’, something you ‘have to do’; once it becomes a habit, it would become involuntary and natural. It would not require for you to think about it, it would come to you automatically, like we get off the bed every morning and head to the bathroom to brush our teeth; we do not have to sit up and think, ‘I need to brush now’, it is the default thing we do when we wake up. Once prayer becomes a default thing, your life shall be full of prayer and ‘calmness’, for I do not know whether prayer or medication would definitely lead to Moksha but one thing I know for sure is, if you pray with your heart, truly and faithfully, you would definitely become a calm and serene person.

So here it goes:

Slow and steady – let that be your maxim! Adhere to a regular regime, a time table. Just as the doctor prescribes a certain fixed measure or weight of the drug and warns you that anything less is ineffective and anything more is harmful, so too, have some limit for your spiritual exercises. Do not overdo them or do them casually and without care. The doctors tell you also about the hour of the day and the number of times the drug has to be repeated, for the action of the quantity must be reinforced, ere it becomes weak. So also, you have to repeat the prayer, the meditation and the acts of remembering the Lord at regular intervals.

I also wrote a longer post on the same topic some time back, which can be found here.

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