New Year's Prayer

  Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Thursday, January 3, 2008

New Year's Prayer

A Belated Happy and very Blessed New Year to You All! I wish you every joy and peace in all that you do and experience in 2008.

Me in India, Sending You Love

This year, for the very 1st time in my life, I woke up on New Year's Day happy - naturally happy, looking forward to a year that will expand and deepen in the richness of a new practice that Baba has recently given me.

Meditating on my body each morning, I am finally learning to deeply relax. Becoming more conscious of the wonder of my own body's many gifts, its particular strengths and qualities, I am consciously loving my body. I am beginning to experience its subtler energies, its energetic dimensions, its connection to All that Is through the miracle of my own breath.

Oh what joy I am finding in literally, consciously breathing in life's infinite beauty, its luminous goodness, and the quickening spark of pure intelligence that gave birth to, sustains and orders all of Creation. Feeling it all informing me at levels that are beyond my capacity to comprehend, I am coming to rest, to trust.

Who knew that this kind of wonder, this magnitude of beauty and grace, the richness of All that Is, is available in every breath we take? Discovering and experiencing that is bringing me joy, such sweet and quiet, resonant joy.

So, as 2008 and my 62nd year on earth begin, I am growing in quiet confidence in the joy it is to be born human. I am no longer forcing my growth or meditation practice. I am no longer desperately milking my spiritual experiences out of fear, hoping to reach some height from which I could not possibly fall too far to begin again. I am looking forward to life being lived as a practice of letting go: letting go of my worries and guilts, my restless thoughts and anxieties into the soothing rise and fall of the breath, and receiving the peace, the Divine infusion, that is available in becoming one with my own breath.

This is what 2008 will be for me: To journey into the heart of the breath, to travel into the deep interior of the miracle of a body whose every cell can drink Divine communion and be restored to its true being and to peace.

That is both my intention and my prayer, not only for me, but for everyone on this planet.

Being in India, so close to Bhutto's assassination and its potential fallout, where bombs go off almost every day in one city or another, and with my sister having a personal connection to the church in Kenya where 50 people were burned to death on New Year's Day , I feel more than ever the intense vulnerability we are all facing in the years ahead.

Please join me in including in your prayers more prayers for our world, more prayers for enlightened leadership and good governance around the world that fosters the welfare of all peoples, more prayers for those who are suffering, more healing prayers for those souls who forget who they are and surrender their minds and hearts to violent impulses.

My love to you all,
Ann