Quote:
Just For Today
June 20
Meditation For Beginners
“For some, prayer is asking for God’s help; meditation is listening for God’s answer. Quieting the mind through meditation brings an inner peace that brings us into contact with the God within us.”
Basic Text, pp.44-45
“Be patient when you’re learning to meditate,” many of us were told. “It takes practice to know what to ‘listen’ for.”
We’re glad someone told us that, or many of us would have quit after a week or two of meditating. For the first few weeks, we may have sat each morning, stilled our thoughts, and “listened”, just as the Basic Text said-but “heard” nothing. It may have taken a few more weeks before anything really happened. Even then, what happened was often barely noticeable. We were rising from our morning meditations feeling just a little better about our lives, a little more empathy for those we encountered during the day, and a little more in touch with our Higher Power.
For most of us, there was nothing dramatic in that awareness – no bolts of lightning or claps of thunder. Instead, it was something quietly powerful. We were taking time to get our egos and our ideas out of the way. In that clear space, we were improving our conscious contact with the source of our daily recovery, the God of our understanding. Meditation was new, and it took time and practice. But, like all the steps, it worked – when we worked it.
Just for today: I will practice “listening” for knowledge of God’s will for me, even if I don’t know what to “listen” for yet.
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Nice to get affirmation. I was talking to the owner of the Holistic Center and his assistant today on my way home from the doctor's.
We talked about this thing, taking time to listen after have put in a prayer request. We pray and then often go running off not waiting for the answer to catch up to us, and we keep praying and praying, when in fact, the answer has already been given. We either ignore it because we don't like the answer, we don't hear because we didn't listen, or our internal chatter is so loud, we can't hear our Higher Power's reply. Prayer is asking, meditation is listening for the answers. We don't need to put our life on hold waiting for God. He is on a different time table.