March 8, 2007

Just finished an excellent book by B. Allan Wallace, entitled The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind. His lucid analysis of the deepening of attention is worthy of very close attention -- it is so, so easy to let our attention mechanically wander here and there, even as we act as if we are indeed being wakeful. Part of what is needed in enhancing our capacity for attention is to recognize our dreaming -- whether sleeping or not -- for what it is...

Though we commonly view dreams as being unreal, especially when compared to waking-state phenomena, very rarely do we do so while we are dreaming. We dream that we aren’t dreaming, seldom recognizing this at the time. Strange, anomalous, bizarre, and impossible things regularly happen in dreams, but we do not very often take their presence as signs that we are dreaming.

We tend to view dreams from the perspective of the waking state, but how often do we do the opposite? Rarely. Usually we get uneasy when we hear something about how the waking state is actually not fundamentally all that different than the dreaming state, as if on guard against any suggestion or implication that we might be dreaming right now. But, in a very real sense, we are dreaming right now.

We are, for example, not seeing our hands, but rather are experiencing a neurological  unfolding, optical and otherwise, the resulting mental imaging of which represents, with an inevitably questionable accuracy, that for which the word “hands” stands. Of course, this is not really news; we’ve known for quite some time that what we see is not what we think we are seeing, but our knowing of this is mostly just intellectual.

It’s not that our senses deceive us, but rather that they cannot provide a direct apprehending of an object, regardless of our assumption that their readout actually does accurately represent what’s “out there.” This is further complicated by the fact that objects are not really objects -- that is, they don’t have a truly objective, independently existing existence.

This is more obvious in dreams -- if we sufficiently attune ourselves to their detailing and shape-shifting flux -- because the less-than-solid reality of things is more tangible in the dream-state. A single thought can alter an entire dream, and not just cognitively; buildings may disappear, people may change form, landscapes may radically alter, and all in the blink of an “I.” If we are awake in our dreaming, we can witness this, and recognize something essential about the the actual process of perception.

Dreaming is the feature presentation of perception with no external sensory input. The waking-state, by contrast, features perception with external sensory input. The body we have in dreams can be, and sometimes is, very different than the body we have in the waking state, but the mind we have in dreams is pretty much the same mind that we have in the waking state. Our self-sense is basically the same in both states; the activities, landscape, and persons may differ greatly, but the eyes -- our “I” -- through which we see it all remain the same. Whole lotta dreaming going on...

To say that life is a dream is not to say that it is not real, for is there anything more real than dreams? Some might say the dreamer; but in the same sense that seeing creates the illusion of a seer, and hearing creates the illusion of a hearer, dreaming creates the illusion of a dreamer. Wake up during a dream, look around and within, and realize that everything in the dream, including the role that you’re playing (probably the lead role), is part of the dream, and then ask: “If all of this is a dream, then what am I?”

A profound question this is, asking in essence for something more real than an answer. Meanwhile, dreaming goes on, spinning out with marvelous creativity the dramatics of a dreamer and all the various props -- human and otherwise -- with which the dreamer can interact. This can range from a tempest in a me-knot to a sublimely liberating encounter with apparent others that leaves nothing in its wake but untranslatable beauty. Dreams can yield meaning, and often very helpful meaning, but the deeper we go into them, the more mysterious they become, finally transcending all explanation, inviting us into boundless revelation.

Undreaming eyes don’t see what’s actually happening, but rather see through it. To see through the dream is to see beyond both subjectivity and objectivity, to dwell where inside and outside are lovers, to recognize that all that can be known is but absolute mystery, to enter the Emptiness that both holds all and is all. To see through the dream is to wake up so fully that the lights cannot be switched off.

March 11, 2007

Perhaps the most hallowed mark in all of baseball, if not sports in general, is Hank Aaron’s lifetime home run total of 755. Only 22 homers short of breaking Aaron’s record is Barry Bonds, perhaps the finest -- if not the most feared-by-pitchers -- hitter ever. The only problem -- and it’s a freaking massive one, at least according to most sportswriters -- is that Bonds may have had some chemical assistance along the way, especially in the form of steroids. Though he’s not been found guilty of using them, there’s quite a pile of apparently incriminating evidence amassed against him, which various sportswriters dutifully remind us of ad nauseum.

The fact that Bonds is famously unfriendly toward most sportswriters has perhaps made him an even bigger target. His quest to break Aaron’s record is, claim most, tainted by his alleged steroid usage. The fact that he has won 7 MVPs -- the most ever in baseball -- during his career seems to matter little, as do his other honors, like having the highest slugging average ever for a season, topping even Babe Ruth. Bonds appears not to care all that much about the fuss, but it clearly does weigh on him. He has not admitted usage, nor denied it in a way that implicates him (as did Mark McGuire, once all but assured of a place in the Hall of Fame and now unlikely to ever get in), continuing in his characteristically unfriendly fashion.

Did Bonds use steroids? The media’s hyperfocus on this (much like its current fixation on Britney Spears’ shaved head and Anna Nicole Smith’s remains) shifts the attention away from such hyperfocus and its animating forces. So did Bonds use steroids? I don’t care. Yes, if he did, it probably helped him, especially in hitting with power, but if we dismiss his achievements because of steroidal assistance, we’re probably going to have to dismiss the achievements of a lot of other players. There’s no telling how far steroid usage has gone in baseball.

And not just baseball -- most other sports are in the same rocky boat. Drug-enhanced performance has been around for a while, probably most famously in track and field. Who can forget Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, running perhaps the most explosive 100 meters ever, leaving Carl Lewis, widely considered the greatest Olympic track athlete ever, in his dust? I remember seeing Johnson in the starting blocks, with his bodybuilder torso and reddened eyes, rising into the set position with astonishing intensity. A great, great run, 9.79 seconds of electrifying beauty and power, brought down from its laureled heights a few days later when it was announced that a banned substance -- a steroid -- had been found in his urine. Johnson was hugely disgraced, and never seriously ran again. And well prior to his fall from grace, East German women track and field athletes (and swimmers) were chewing up record after record, with manly ease. Their drug usage was eventually revealed to be not just an individual undertaking (as it was with Johnson and his coach), but a state-run and state-approved undertaking.

I’m sick of great performances, whether in track or cycling or baseball, being presented in almost the same breath as the wearisomely predictable cry or implication that such performances were, or probably were, drug-enhanced. If Lance Armstrong used some chemical assistance, so what? Many of his fellow cyclists probably were, as well. But who can know for sure? Drugs that enhance sports performance keep evolving, keeping a step ahead of the testing that would reveal their presence. And there’s no reason why this won’t continue.

We’re not going to eliminate drug usage in sports, no matter how sophisticated and thorough our testing, so why bother? Why take the joy out of a sport like track and field by framing just about every great performance as a drug-enhanced event? Why make such a grail out of purity in sports? Yes, when Roger Bannister so dramatically overtook John Landy in 1954’s Miracle Mile (they were the only two men in the world who had broken the 4-minute mile barrier), it was very, very unlikely that either one was on anything other than their own adrenaline, but that was way back when athletes didn’t get paid for running. The word “amateur” meant something then, but now it’s an anachronism; medal winners in the Olympics get hefty cheques, and a tenth of a second improvement in the 100 meters can mean the difference between a small paycheck and a couple of million dollars. Sports as business. Players used to stay on the same team for most of their career; now they jump from team to team, generally settling in with the one that pays the most, or gives the best deal. Sports as business. And why shouldn’t it be?

I don’t care if Bond’s records were, and are, steroid-assisted. We cannot go back to drug-free sports; there’s too much at stake for athletes, coaches, and owners to give up the edge that drugs can provide. I’m not saying yes to drugs, but am suggesting that we drop our naïveté regarding saying no to them; just saying no does not address what is behind drug usage, but simply makes a virtue out of repression (I’ll get into this in another blog). So no more role-model bullshit, and no more romanticizing of star athletes’ supposed impeccability, and thank God for that! No more gulping down the Breakfast of Champions. We’re in a different age of sports; yes, it’s more cynical and mostly greed-driven, but is the culture out of which it arises any different?

Instead of trying to go back to a more innocent time -- milkshakes instead of steroid injections, and gee-whiz smiles instead of hip sleaze -- and instead of resigning ourselves to the flattened payoffs of cynicism and moral relativism, why not step into and start embodying a deeper way of being? And instead of waiting for athletes to show the way, why not pick up the ball, or bat, or racket, or spikes, and do it ourselves? Sports change in accord with the culture out of which they arise, and what will change our culture for the better? It begins, of course, with us.

The noble, unblemished sports icons of yesteryear ought to be allowed to lie at rest. No more resurrection fantasies, no more trotting out of fabled morals against which to measure ourselves, no more idolizing of stars. Just as we cut JFK way more slack than Bill Clinton for womanizing, we have done the same with sports icons of bygone times. So let’s drop our romanticizing of the sports greats of those times, while simultaneously ceasing to make such a big deal out of the shortcomings of contemporary athletes.

Furthermore, let’s be more ruthless with our own hypocrisies regarding sports. For example, we make a great fuss over a tennis player (like John McEnroe) getting testy with a line judge, but have little or no criticism for a couple of hockey players taking off their gloves and slugging it out while referees stand by watching. We complain about how boring most athletes are when they are interviewed, deploring their reliance on the usual obligatory clichés (“the award I just got should go to all the guys”), while at the same time tearing down those who dare to speak their minds in a way that rubs us the wrong way. No wonder Bonds isn’t fond of speaking to the press. He knows what they want, and is understandably stingy about giving it.

I’m rooting for Bonds to break Aaron’s record, just as I’m rooting for Tiger Woods to break Jack Nicklaus’s record, and for Roger Federer to break Pete Sampras’s record, and for somebody to blast past the 30-foot barrier in the long jump. I can’t help it; I love witnessing the far edges of excellence in sports. I don’t care if Gene Rychlak was on steroids when he bench-pressed 1010 pounds, nor if Michael Johnson was juiced up when he blasted out a 19.32 200 meter record that may not be broken for a century.

Let’s keep sports in perspective. Trying to eliminate drugs from sports is like trying to do the same for our culture. To halt an addiction -- and not just to drugs! -- we must do more than just take sides. Some real work is needed -- and not just work that we think others need to do. Addiction asks for neither prohibition (as exemplified by the “just say no” bleatings of those with socially acceptable addictions), nor for permissiveness, but for the embodiment of perspectives that can both contain and transcend both “sides”, in fitting conjunction with an openly felt passage into and through the pain that is at the heart of addiction. Let’s stop expecting sports stars to embody a morality that we don’t have; it’s fine to live through them a bit -- even an aged armchair jock gets a rush out of feeling himself making that broken-field run -- but not so fine to hold them to a standard to which we don’t hold ourselves.

So let’s enjoy Barry Bonds’ quest for the home run record. If we want to put an asterisk after his record (to remind ourselves that he probably had some chemical assistance along the way), so be it. If we want to sour our celebration of his achievement, so be it. But let’s stop making such a fuss over how he does it. It’s not like someone reaching the peak of Everest by being dropped there by a plane; he has had to work hard, very hard, to get there. How many other players, even souped-up to the max with performance-enhancing drugs, could get to where Bonds is? Very, very few, perhaps none. So let’s enjoy his quest, and stop planning for a halfhearted or lukewarm response to the record that he will likely have by this September...

March 17, 2007

Jealousy is a painfully intense reaction to -- and dramatization of -- feeling rejected, whether the rejection is real or imagined. Even the slightest threat of rejection, however groundless, may be enough to trigger jealousy, especially if we already don’t feel very secure or stable in our intimate relationship.

Given jealousy’s power to erode and undermine (and, at worst, destroy) intimacy, it is very important to work with it skillfully, which begins with knowing it, and knowing it very well. Jealousy can take many forms, ranging from a mildly gnawing sense of being unwanted to raging or even even murderous revengefulness. What follows concerns not the pathological extremes of jealousy, but rather the more common kinds of jealousy that arise when there’s a perceived threat (real or not) to our closeness with our intimate other.

Jealousy can be exceedingly painful, as anyone who has writhed in its straitjacketed fires knows all too well. Most of us strive not to provide fertile conditions for jealousy, but it still manages to sprout up, with a green not of sun-embracing reach, but of dark and sometimes venomous force. However, jealousy is not some inherently evil or negative or always inappropriate feeling.

What matters is what we actually do with our jealousy. Do we get lost in it, thereby embodying (and enslaving ourselves to) its point of view? Do we try to rise above it, acting as if we are beyond it, thereby denying ourselves full access to our depths? Or do we condemn  it, sentencing it to a padded cell, thus walling away the very vulnerability of which our jealousy is but a confession, however twisted or dark? Or do we abstract it, talking about it with relentlessly level, disembodied rationality and unnatural calm, even as we now and then wonder why our emotional life tends to be so flat and unexciting?

Do we believe in our jealousy so strongly that we do harm to one we love? Or do we run from it, avoiding any circumstances that resemble the ones that originally catalyzed our jealousy? Or do we deny that it is actually happening, while we slowly die inside, painting good cheer and non-possessive smiles all over our collapse of heart? Or do we make good use of our jealousy, giving its energies room to breathe and move through us, while not submitting to its viewpoint?

So how to work with jealousy? First of all, acknowledge its presence and name it -- as blatantly obvious as jealousy can be, we may have trouble (probably shame-based) admitting that it is indeed present. Second, don’t try to get rid of it; instead, explore it, dig deep, mine its depths for what lies at its core (if possible, work on this with a good psychotherapist). Third, get it in healthy perspective; allow it to be there, but don’t let it run the show (psychotherapy and meditative practice are very useful here, especially when employed in conjunction). Seat your jealousy where you can keep an eye (a non-jealous eye!) on it, so that when it starts to act up, you spot it immediately and can take steps (like shifting perspective) to keep it from overwhelming you. This is not easy, but gets easier with practice.

Without attachment, there’d be no jealousy (and there’d also be no compassion!) -- but don’t allow yourself to make a problem out of attachment,  and be aware/beware of spiritual approaches that view attachment as something to shed (except, of course, our attachment to such views!). It’s so easy to get attached to not being attached. Yes, attachment does have its pathological possibilities -- like addiction -- but in of itself it is not necessarily a sign of neurosis or immaturity. Attachment comes with relational intimacy.

Jealousy is made possible through attachment; and a more mature, awakened love can come through jealousy, if we will but cut through its melodramatics and go right to its heart...

In its more neurotic forms, jealousy is the outraged cry of thwarted possessiveness, sometimes being hard-fisted, cruel, and rabid with indignant logic, and sometimes being sunken, mushy, jammed with self-pity, crammed with boxed-in sorrow, submitting to an unnecessarily hellish tomorrow. But whatever form it may take, jealousy often features a compulsive drive to blame the offending -- or apparently offending -- other for what is happening to us, as if to somehow legitimize our extreme contraction of being.

The core of jealousy’s message is: “You don’t love me!” or something similar, implying colossal rejection, as of an infant by its mother; and accompanying this is another, implicitly held message: “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing!” This is reinforced by the fact that sometimes the other’s jealousy-catalyzing actions are unloving, including to the point of actual betrayal.

It is easy to get marooned in the wastelands of rejection, especially if our history has predisposed us to being readily hooked or triggered by any sign of rejection. And what an art it is to stay open, present, and loving -- or at least connected to a loving context -- in the midst of real rejection: There may be anger and tears and indignant disbelief, and all the symptoms of jealousy, but there will be no significant withdrawal of self, nor any indulgence in blaming; there may be force, but not violence; there is vulnerability, but not mushiness or sunkenness; there is real sadness, not reactive sorrow; and there is a clear willingness to go right through jealousy’s dark realm, rather than just adopting a righteous positioning somewhere within it; and most of all, there is love, or at least the all-out commitment to making room for it, rather than an uptight, loveless waiting to see if the other, the one who has apparently rejected us, is being loving, or is going to become loving toward us.

If we will only love when we are already being loved by the other (as in me-centered relationships), then we are prime candidates for deep jealousy, for we are then chronically on the search for signs that we are not being loved, miserably sniffing around for evidence of abandonment or neglect or betrayal, reducing ourselves to neurotic sleuths, sinking into overamplified suspiciousness, again and again demanding, however indirectly, that the other consistently demonstrate or prove his or her trustworthiness. Such demonstration, however, is rarely enough for us, for we, in the gripping dramatics of our jealousy, won’t trust anything except our mistrust and doubt regarding the other. In short, we then expect betrayal, and perhaps even in some sense crave it, so as to recreate (almost always unconsciously) infantile or childhood scenarios of unresolved rejection.

The lesson here, at essence, is to love, or to remain truly open to being loving, even when we are clearly being rejected. The form of such love is not meek or passive, nor necessarily all-accepting of rejection; rather, it is potent, dynamic, passionately alive, quite capable of fiery yet clean anger, more than willing to call bullshit bullshit (as when the other deliberately does things to catalyze our jealousy, so as to feel more powerful). Such love does not shrink in the face of rejection, and nor does it piously stand aside or put on the robes of idiot compassion. Instead, it radiates forth, generating an environment that simultaneously cradles reactivity and renders it transparent.

When we complain that we not being loved, we, in our very complaining, are not being loving, but are only barricading ourselves from fully feeling our woundedness; we are, in effect, actually rejecting what is most vulnerable in us, doing to it what is being done to us (or what we imagine is being done to us) by the one who is “making” us jealous. Real love does not reject the other, but it may reject something that the other is doing.

Jealousy is the open abscess of feeling cast aside, the endarkened sensation of betrayal-catalyzed separation. When untouched by awareness, jealousy is mostly a hysterical or  mean-spirited temper tantrum, a coupling of twisted anger and exaggerated hurt up on a toxic soapbox, righteously ranting about right and wrong, making too much noise to hear its own true song.

When held and penetrated by real love, however, jealousy eases its defences, becoming but an uninhibited, nonviolent expression of relational hurt, a heart-opening confession of possessiveness amplified by rejection, an honest sharing of deep feeling, leaving us sobered, unmasked, and more loving, more at ease with our possessiveness and our demand for integrity from our partner, no longer struggling for either ownership or detachment, no longer held hostage by the possibility of potential rejection, no longer afraid of jealousy, and no longer so bound to being in relationships that, through their unresolved neurotic patterns and lack of real grounding, provide excessively fertile conditions for the arising of jealousy.

None of this is to say that we should never be jealous. The closer we are to another, the more attached we tend to become to that one, and the more attached we are, the more likely it is that we’ll feel jealous, at least in me-centered relationships and we-centered relationships. And those in being-centered relationship? Jealousy may still arise, but it does not have, or is not given, the power it has in earlier stages (and nor are partners here inclined to engage in the kind of things that would generate jealousy).

When jealousy arises, treat it neither as an enemy nor as a green light for blame, but rather as a difficult guest. Listen to it closely, separating what’s neurotic in it from what’s not. This means feeling it but not identifying with it. Stay with it, until its dramatics diminish and its raw vulnerability and hurt is clearly in the open. In the presence of your loving attention -- and it may take a while to access such attention -- your jealousy may rage briefly, but will quickly be but hurt. Don’t try to fix that hurt; instead, simply be with it, holding it as you would a hurt child; when it has settled, then whatever action may be called for can be sanely considered...

March 20, 2007

So many are yearning to be in a truly intimate relationship -- a relationship that consistently enlivens, deepens, and awakens us -- and wonder why they continue to find themselves in relationships that don’t really work for them (but that they keep hoping will). So many are having a relationship not with the other -- be that other their partner or their hoped-for-beloved -- but with the other’s potential. (Such a romancing of tomorrow, such nostalgia for the future, is the essence of hope.)

Some think that all that they have to do to attract their beloved is to wish and intend for that one to somehow show up, but wishing and intending is not enough, no matter how ardently we may believe in our power to manifest what we want.

So how to attract our beloved?

Let’s begin by looking at how not to attract our beloved.

First of all, let go of thinking that all you have to do is think about attracting that one. You may have heard that this is all you need to do, and that if you don’t get the results you want, it is simply because you’re not putting out the right thoughts in the right way. You may have subscribed to New Age notions about the power of thought to create your reality, especially in the context of the so-called Law of Attraction. Such notions tend to both overemphasize and oversimplify the impact that your thoughts can have, as if by just changing the content and direction of your thoughts you can have what you want. 

At the same time, though, it is important to recognize the power and impact that our thoughts do have, especially when we amplify them, however unwittingly, with our attention. Perhaps what matters most here is not what we are thinking, but what we are doing with what we are thinking: Are we identified with our thoughts? Are we allowing them to recruit emotional energy? Are we trying to change them? Are we listening to them uncritically? Are we letting ourselves be controlled by them? Are we aware of them, and if so, to what degree? Are we relating from them, or to them? And when we are using our thoughts to help manifest something we want, how aware are we of which us -- or which level or place in us -- is wanting that particular something?

Directed thought is not all let’s-manifest-it wishful thinking, but we need to be aware of what is motivating it. Drug addicts’ directed thought may be very clear and single-pointed when their craving for a fix reaches a certain intensity -- there may be a very precise and unwavering focus on the desired object, so that they attract whatever helps fulfill their craving. Similarly, much of what “we” want is animated and directed not by us, but by our conditioning. We may, for example, seek a partner so as to try to fulfill unmet or badly handled needs from our childhood, and we may romanticize this to such a degree -- not to mention eroticizing it -- that we block ourselves from seeing what is really going on. At such times, our conditioning -- which we are allowing to refer to itself as us -- is running the show, not us.

So it’s useful hear to shift the focus from where we’re going (or wanting to go) to where we’re coming from. And we cannot simply think or intend our way through this; something deeper is needed, namely a journey into and through our conditioning and its roots.

In short, we don’t attract our beloved through thought or intention alone.

And nor do we attract our beloved through manipulation, however tastefully dressed  or spiritualized that may be. Presenting ourselves as other than we are means that the other is going to be having a relationship not with us, but with our self-presentation. This may “work” for a bit, but sooner or later it wears thin, as the other sees through us, or we simply lose the energy to keep up the facade. Putting energy into being other than ourselves is ultimately exhausting; the grief which it covers -- the grief over assuming that we, as we are, are not enough -- eventually must surface, including through the cracks that inevitably will appear in our self-presentation.

Of course, presenting ourselves as we are is more than just a matter of being an open book; we need to take into account others’ openness to really seeing us, as well as their capacity to do so. The entire book does not have to revealed right away; if you give too much, others won’t be able to digest and integrate it. Recently I saw the title of a book that went something like: How to Seduce Your Beloved. If you have to seduce that one, what is implied is that he or she wouldn’t otherwise be drawn to you.

The power -- basically power over -- expressed through the act of seduction (which is little more than eroticized aggression) is simply a confession of an underlying sense of powerlessness; rather than get seductive or otherwise exploitive, we would do better to face, explore, and work through the very powerlessness for which our seductiveness is a “solution”.

We also won’t attract our beloved if we are looking for someone to make us feel whole or better. What we will then attract is someone who has an investment in making us feel whole or better, an investment -- or energy-guzzling charge -- that probably has its roots in their not being loved unless they were busy making someone else, like one of their parents, feel good. Only when we release relationship (and everything else!) from the obligation to make us feel better, will we truly feel better.

Something more than positive thinking, intentionality, manipulation, and hope is needed  -- namely to face, really face, and work through whatever it is in us that’s in the way of attracting our beloved. This means not only facing our doubts and self-defeating beliefs, but also facing and working through the originating forces that underlie such doubts and beliefs.

That is, to attract our beloved, we cannot just sit back and think a certain way or do some affirmations or hold a certain intention (which is not to say that such activities are without value) -- rather, we have to do some deeper work on ourselves, work that includes and integrates our physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions, so that we’ll be sufficiently ready for our beloved. Ripe.

Full alignment with what we long for -- a relationship that actually works, not later, but now -- is necessary, and this requires that we not only clearly see our conditioning, but that we also cease letting it run us or refer to itself as us. And we don’t do this by somehow getting rid of our conditioning (such eradication being but a fantasy) or rising above it (which is just a form of dissociation), but by relating to it instead of from it.

Once we have done enough work to be able to see our conditioning for what it is, and to take full responsibility for it when it arises -- waking up in the midst of our reactivity, and so on -- then we can begin generating potent prayers/invitations for our beloved to come into our life. We are ready, and we know it, right to our core. Here, thought, intentionality, raw feeling, intuition, and faith all come together to produce a fitting prayer that aligns with our beloved.

Such prayer may look like wishful thinking, but is not. It may look like it’s aimed into the future, but it’s not. It may look like it’s constructed of hope, but it’s not. It is firmly and unshakably rooted in the now, leaving us not leaning into later, but deeply settled into the present moment.

Such prayer is a kind of active meditation, conscious and empowering, a clear statement of opening and trust and patience. It is not at all the sort of prayer that is just narcissism or greed or desperation in spiritual garb, asking for stuff (as if from a cosmic catalog or shopping channel that requires only our wishes as payment for its goodies).

Let’s now take an in-depth look at prayer, and the levels of prayer, before we continue with the type of prayer best suited for attracting our beloved:

Yes, prayer is desire, but it it the final frontier of desire.
           
Although prayer may include thought, especially spiritually oriented thought, it is not primarily an act of mind. It is much more an act of heart. A divine personal.

The desire highlighted and presented through mature prayer isn’t greedy or desperate for fulfillment, being rooted not in the futurizing of hope, but rather in the here-and-now openness of faith (where hope promises, faith gives; where hope dreams, faith awakens).  

Prayer is sacred conversation, even when it is absolutely silent. 

In its beginning stages, prayer mostly asks. As it ripens, prayer may still ask, but its primary characteristic is deep, devotional receptivity. So prayer initially has a lot to say, but later on it mostly listens. (After all, if our beloved is trying to reach us, why not listen more deeply?)

Ultimately, prayer becomes what it is requesting, through bringing us into such deep intimacy with What-Really-Matters that we’re no longer significantly separated from the object of our prayer.

Much depends on who — or what — we assume is hearing our prayers. Let us call the ear we are trying to reach God. If we take God to be a kind of super-parent or cosmic Santa Claus, our prayers will be like those of a child asking for favors. But if we move to the other end of the spectrum and take God to be Absolute Nondual Being, our prayers will mostly be communications between wakefulness and Wakefulness.

To whatever degree our attention may be object-oriented (that is, focused on thoughts, feelings, sensations, things, others) — as opposed to being oriented to its source — it still exists in the domain of awareness. When prayer arises and flowers in the continuum or field — the timeless, infinite field — of awareness, it is already in contact with its fruition. (And this our beloved can feel, through the interconnectivity of all that is, however difficult that might be to explain.)

That is, what prayer seeks is recognized, at least to some degree, to be already found. There is actually no real gap between seeking and sought in bare awareness — it is only in time, only in the manifesting of prayer’s requests that there appears to be a such a gap.
 
Prayer helps to bridge the unmanifest and the manifest by creating fertile conditions for bringing potentialities to life. Prayer provides sacred templates for intentionality.

As it matures, prayer’s context shifts from petitioning to gratitude. Then prayer does not end with a thank you, but is a thank you...

It is in the spirit of this that our prayer for our beloved will be most effective. The more we let go of having to have something happen here, the more likely it is to happen. No desperation, no rush, just making haste slowly.

Look at what you have attracted thus far, and find out what it was in you that was the driving force behind such attraction. See what childhood agendas may still be operative in you; see what you saw in the other; see where your charge or excitation (whether positive or negative) was, and still is, in relationship; see which needs you eroticized, and still eroticize; see through the intoxicating dramatics of romance; and look inside your looking until your inclination to let your wounds attract your beloved fades to nothing.

When doing your prayer, be very specific and precise when describing the qualities you are looking for. Be thorough. Do the entire list each time you pray (saying each part mindfully and with full feeling), and precede doing so with enough meditation to get you centered, and follow it with enough meditation to settle and ground you. Be thorough; if you want someone who’s taller than you, put that out. If you want someone who is finished with previous relationships, put that out. If you want someone who is committed to being present, put that out. Put it all out.

Allow your prayer to expand, deepen, and awaken you. Let your voice, however soft, emanate from your core as much as possible.

Do not ask for anything you are not prepared to give.

Open yourself to being with someone who is already capable of meeting you fully.

And remember to remember that your beloved is trying to find you. Let yourself feel your beloved’s prayers to find and be with you.

Let your longing for your beloved be your primary guide. Separate that longing from other longings, like wanting to feel special or needed.

And remember: You deserve to be fully met in relationship. You are worthy of it. Your beloved awaits you. Fill the gap between you and your beloved with love, presence, and integrity. Feel that gap, that open space, feel your way into it, inhabit it. Feel the already-reality of you and your beloved, and make yourself at home in it..