The Role of Prayer
in Mediumship
Your mediumship will blossom with a regular prayer practice because it will bring you into alignment with the Great Spirit and the web of life. The Great Mystery, Infinite Intelligence is the Great Spirit that permeates everything that exists, including people, animals, plants, trees, rocks, rivers, oceans, mountains, the sky, planets, and stars. When we get into the habit of praying, we align ourselves with that overarching permeating spirit. It begins to flow through us in a broader capacity, expanding our own spirit and capacity to love and be compassionate toward others and ourselves. As these spiritual qualities expand within us, they open the doors for contact with the spirit world.
I have known several people whose ability to perceive the spirit people opened up when they began a prayer practice. None of these individuals spends inordinate amounts of time on prayer, yet each feels gently inspired to pray for others during the course of their day.
For example, one woman’s walk to work leads her through her neighborhood cemetery. One morning she noticed the fresh grave of a male child and felt moved to pray for him and his grieving family. A few days later, on her way home, she experienced spontaneous communication from the deceased boy: He thanked her for her prayers and assured her they had helped.
Moving forward, she made a point to pray for those whose graves somehow drew her attention. As a result, she started to experience more spirit contact. Over time, her mediumship has beautifully expanded. One day she noticed her previously harsh and hectic work environment had become more peaceful. She attributes the positive changes at work to her prayers on the way to work.
Another woman, an avid hiker, got into the habit of ending each hike with prayers for the health of Mother Earth and the animals that live upon her. Within a year, she became aware of animal spirits. This led her to become an animal communicator. Over time, her gift expanded to communication with deceased humans. She, too, has become a very talented medium.
How to Pray
For some people, the idea of prayer brings back memories of the doldrums of rote prayers forced upon them in Sunday school or parochial schools. Unless you feel an affinity for certain traditional prayers, you do not need to use them. Prayer works best when you use your own words. You do not need to use fancy or flowery language and you do not need to make lengthy prayers. Longer isn’t necessarily better. What matters is that you pray with sincerity. What matters is that you feel in your heart the sincere desire for what you pray for.
Jump-Start Your Prayer Practice
People often say that prayer is talking to God, but I find that prayer doesn’t always need to be a mental monologue. Any activity that inspires a deep reverie can be your prayer. It can occur spontaneously—as you drive across Chain Bridge in Washington, DC, and you spot a bald eagle diving into the Potomac River below, or when a particularly beautiful piece of music cracks you wide open. Vigorous cardiovascular exercise can also inspire reverie, when with each breath you feel a profound awe of the miracle of being alive.
You can purposefully engage in activities that touch your spirit and connect you with God. Below are a few exercises to help get you started. Feel free to engage in any and all of them, or similar ones of your own, whenever you wish.
Practice: Practice Gratitude
Perhaps you are unaccustomed to prayer and you don’t know how to begin to pray. I suggest you start with gratitude for all the blessings in your life. Even if you are currently going through a rough patch, there is always something to be grateful for, whether it is that you are employed, or are blessed with a loving family, a dear friend, or good health. Perhaps you can simply appreciate the beauty of nature all around you. Gratitude opens the heart. It creates a great sense of joy, appreciation, and love, just as it reduces the illusion of separation from the Great Spirit.
Practice: Ask the Great Spirit
to Awaken Your Heart in Love
Have you ever noticed what happens when you are in love? When your heart is opened in love for that special person, you cannot help but see beauty everywhere and in everyone. That is because love is the glue that connects us to everything around us. When we love, we feel the presence of God.
After you’ve made your request, it is important to back up your prayer with action. As you go about your day, make a conscious effort to be a caring, cheerful, loving presence to everyone you encounter. It won’t be long before you realize something magical is happening in your life.
Practice: Go into Nature for Sunset Prayers
On a day when you are unhurried, and preferably alone, find a beautiful natural setting. Ensure you have whatever you need to be comfortable and focused. For example, even if it’s a warm day, bring something warm to put on in case the temperature drops—you don’t want the weather to distract you. Watch the entire sunset, from the time the sun sinks low in the sky until complete darkness falls. As the sun sets, give thanks for the abundance in your life. Thank the Great Mystery for the beauty of this earth. Pray for good health, healing, and well-being for all life on this planet. Let your prayer well up from deep inside you, in whatever way you desire. Ask the rays of the sun to take your prayer—and God’s blessings—around the planet.
Practice: Make Evening
Prayers in the Deep Woods
Find a quiet place in nature where you won’t be disturbed by passersby, and make your prayers. Keep your eyes open as you pray. Give thanks for and pray for everything your eyes see. Continue praying with your eyes open wide, observing how nature responds. When you are finished praying, sit quietly and listen to the sounds of the woods surrounding you. When you feel the energy shift, record your experiences in your journal.
Practice: Take a Sacred Walk
Go for a walk in nature or in your local park, and ask God to walk with you. Ask God to let you experience the woods through the Great Mystery’s eyes. With each step, know (or simply assume) that God is walking with you. With each breath, send your love and your thoughts to God. Give thanks for every step you take. Give thanks for your body and your health (even if it is not as perfect as you’d like it to be). Give thanks for the beauty all around as well as for the smells of nature. Walk slowly. Don’t rush. Let each step be a prayer. Notice how this makes your walk different from an ordinary walk. Focus your mind on the presence of the Great Spirit. At the end of your walk, record your experience in your journal.
Practice: Pray for Everyone
Pray for everyone in a given situation. Pray that everyone’s needs are taken care of. Pray that God will surround them with love. Pray they are given all the help they need at this time to move forward with their life missions. Pray that everything in their lives will be healed. Ask that God will look upon them with loving eyes and with compassion.
Make sure you include everyone you know in this prayer, especially the people whom you might not care for or with whom you experience difficulty. Include your greatest enemies. When you pray for everyone, including enemies, you will find that situations transform faster and more positively, because everyone receives what they need. Don’t pray that people will change to your liking. Pray for their highest good and for their well-being.
Be sure to make notes in your journal about your progress in life as well as your relationship with them. Oftentimes when we start praying for others without trying to bend them to our advantage, our relationship with them begins to change positively. Praying for everyone is a wonderful way of expressing unconditional love, being a light to others, and transforming hardened attitudes.
Practice: Pray Everywhere
Daily life gives us many opportunities to engage in spontaneous prayer. Pray while you are stuck at a red light or when the rush-hour traffic crawls to a halt. Pray while you wait in the grocery store checkout line, or while you’re at the gas station waiting for your tank to fill up. Take these short moments to “check in” with the Great Mystery—offer a short prayer of gratitude, or pray for those who are also in line with you, or just send loving thoughts to everyone in your environment.
Practice: Write Your Prayers
There can be situations in our lives that we obsess about. Perhaps you are worried about your brother’s cancer, how to afford the new car that you so desperately need, or whether you’ll ever have children. Get out your journal and a pen. Set ten minutes on a timer. Start writing your prayers. Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation. Just write as fast as you can without stopping. Don’t hold back, and pour your heart out! Don’t stop writing until the timer rings. After you have written your prayer, release it from your heart and mind, knowing that help and guidance are on the way.
Practice: Decree Blessings
I hit upon this exercise after I moved into my apartment in 2012. One day as I prepared for my morning meditation, the neighborhood became particularly active. School buses stopped in front of my building and honked incessantly. The garbage truck pulled up and took forever to get aligned just so with the curb. The little terrier downstairs got agitated and started its incessant barking. I could feel my neck muscles tense in frustration—and then I suddenly decided to bless all the noisemakers. I sent a mental smile and hug as I thought, “Great Mystery, please bless the driver of the garbage truck. Bless the little dog downstairs. Bless the school bus and all who ride on it.” With each blessing, I felt better, more relaxed, and joyful. Then something amazing happened: my neighbors all started to leave for work at once. As each door opened, I blessed the occupants. A brawl broke out downstairs. I blessed those involved. A toddler started to scream. I blessed her. Ambulances and fire trucks hurled down the street. One stopped below my balcony. I blessed them all. I continued blessing everyone and everything I heard. I realized the act of blessing brought on more people and situations that desperately needed to be blessed. Finally, once all the noise settled down, the Great Mystery blessed me with one of the most profound meditations I had ever had.
Prayer Confers Spiritual Protection
As a Spiritualist medium, I preface all my work with the spirit world with prayer. This ensures that only the highest and the best spirit communicators are going to connect with me and that the spirit messages serve the recipient’s highest purpose.
There are different schools of thought as to whether it is necessary to specifically ask for protection during the opening prayer. Some mediums ask for protection and feel vulnerable if they don’t. Others argue that if you ask for protection, you basically declare that there is something to fear. If you focus on what you fear, so the argument goes, you will attract it. Personally, I feel that when you invoke the Divine Presence in prayer, you are automatically protected and all is well.
I like to use the following invocation, also referred to as an opening prayer, whenever I wish to connect with the spirit world:
“Infinite Spirit, Great Mystery; please surround us with your love and light. Uplift our hearts and minds so that we may be cognizant of your loving presence. We miss our spirit loved ones, and we would like to visit with them today. Please make this visit possible. We ask that they will bring abundance of proof of the continuity of life as well as messages of comfort, guidance, encouragement, inspiration, or whatever might be needed at this time. Bring us into attunement with you, with one another, and with the spirit world. Thank you! Amen.”
Feel free to use my prayer, if you like, or let it inspire your own invocation.
Questions & Answers
I tried prayer for a couple of days but I just can’t get into it.
You are struggling because prayer is new to you. In the beginning, many people have a hard time warming up to it. Teresa of Ávila compared prayer to the cultivation of a garden: In the beginning, the soil is dry and full of weeds. It’s as though you have to draw buckets of water from a well by hand. You can’t sit still. You get distracted. You feel bored.
Once you make it past this difficult beginning stage, you begin to discover the rewards of prayer. Teresa compares this phase to the discovery of a wheel above the well: As you turn the crank, the buckets of water come up with much less effort. Your prayers flow and you begin to feel emotional and spiritual upliftment as you pray.
Over time, as you continue your prayer practice, the garden of your soul is watered by a spring or stream. Your desire for material things and pleasures dwindles. You experience an intense longing for union with the Great Mystery.
Finally, Teresa assures us, the garden of your soul is watered by rain. Your prayers are effortless. They pour out of you as you greet each moment with prayer. You experience profound spiritual insights and understanding that change your life in a new and positive direction. Manifesting your dreams is effortless, as you know that you are always supported in your endeavors.
I have found this to be true. The rewards of prayer are definitely worth the initial struggle, so I would suggest that you stop the inner argument and just stick with it.
How can one person’s prayer really make a difference?
Once, in a meditation, my spirit guides showed me the power of prayer. Even though you might be praying alone in the privacy of your home, unsure if anyone or anything even listens, each prayer is powerful and makes a positive difference in the world. You might not realize it, but every prayer reverberates through the universe, affecting the entire web of life. This is similar to the ripples of a rock thrown into a body of water. The ripples expand and create motion across the entire water.
I grew up in a particular spiritual tradition. I feel most
comfortable praying the formal prayers of that faith. Do I
need to change how I pray in order to develop my mediumship?
Feel free to continue to pray your favorite prayers. You do not need to abandon your spiritual tradition in order to become a medium. However, I would suggest that you use or adapt the opening and closing prayers suggested in this book when you wish to engage with the spirit people.
You say I should pray. Do you mean
that I should constantly ask God for favors?
No. Your prayers don’t need to be a constant begging of favors from the Divine. You can hold a prayerful state of mind throughout the day by noticing and appreciating the beauty of nature. A heart filled with gratitude also brings us into deep states of communion with the sacred realms. Both will help increase your sensitivity to and perception of the spiritual realms.
I was taught that I should only pray
for others and not for myself. Is that true?
No. There is nothing wrong with praying for others and praying for yourself. You are a sentient being who is just as deserving of divine assistance as the next person. We have free will, and no one has the right to interfere with our free will. This means that we need to ask for help when we want it. Never hesitate to pray for support in all of your endeavors.
What is the best and most effective way to pray?
The best prayers come from the heart. Pray like you mean it, and pour out your heart. Pray with passion and with love. Guru Paramahansa Yogananda said:
Prayer in which your very soul is burning with desire for God is the only effectual prayer. You have prayed like that at some time, no doubt, perhaps when you wanted something very badly or urgently needed money—then you burned up the ether with your desire. That is how you must feel for God … and you will see that He will respond.3
3. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man’s Eternal Quest: Collected Talks & Essays on Realizing God in Daily Life (Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982), 353.