In modern society, people rarely take time to stop and relax. No wonder many human beings have trouble reducing stress and finding peace.
The first step away from chaos and toward peace is to learn how to live in the moment, which can be learned and practiced through prayer and meditation. Even further, taking the time to pray and meditate helps a person live life in a state of mindful awareness.
Live in the Moment By Praying and Meditating
Spiritual people believe praying helps a person grow closer to God. But it also has additional benefits, relaxing the body and mind and helping a person find peace. In the Bible, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 tells Christians to "pray without ceasing" (or to "pray continually" in the New International Version).
The key to praying without ceasing is to live prayerfully during every moment but to also take time for extended prayer (or communication with God) if praying is a part of one's religious belief. When a person makes time for prayer, his spirituality.
Finding Peace in the Moment - The Miracle of Mindfulness Meditation
Meditating takes this communion with God a step further into mindfulness, becoming intensely aware of self and surroundings, senses heightened yet the body and mind relaxed and peaceful. Being mindful makes every moment come alive. Even watching an ant crawl across the dirt becomes colorful and magnificent. In this state of mindful living, in heightened awareness, a person knows he is part of divine creation, close to God.
Elizabeth Lesser, author of The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure and co-founder of The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, states that “meditation does not make things miraculously different… Meditation does something much more subtle and even more magical. It wakes us up and leaves us standing tall in any weather.”
Lesser also says that “mindfulness is an attitude of openness… a practice that teaches moment-to-moment awareness, a kind of falling in love with naked reality.”
Moment by moment, prayerful meditation takes humans away from the stresses of life and leads them toward the divine.
How Praying and Meditating Helps People Find Peace in Everyday Life
During moments of prayer and meditation, when a person focuses so completely, it becomes possible to set the hectic world aside. Just for a moment, a person stops noticing the aches and pains from illness or injury. Just for a moment, a person stops worrying how to pay the bills. Just for a moment, problems live somewhere else, outside of a person, and one can focus on the experience of living.
If a person spends enough time living these moments in prayer or meditation — in deepening spirituality, outside of everyday responsibilities — then those peaceful moments start to stay with him, helping him find peace amidst the craziness of daily life. A person can take regular alone time to meditate, but he can also feel calmer and more at peace throughout life, both alone and while with others. This state of calm brings peace to all of a person’s actions, relationships, and life.
The Secret to Living in the Moment
Living with mindful awareness, which includes regularly praying and meditating, is the secret behind how to live in the moment. When a person lives in a state of mindfulness, she is at peace. She is alive and “standing tall” as Lesser puts it, yet she is also calm and worry-free. In fact, mindfulness clarifies why other methods of living in the moment succeed. It’s the awareness (the mindfulness) that focuses a person during time in nature, while reading a good book, when exercising the muscles, during prayer and meditation, or during any other activity that helps a person live in the moment.
All of these other “methods” are merely vehicles to force the mind into awareness (or consciousness) – to force the mind into, as Lesser states so eloquently, “falling in love with naked reality.”
Mindful living makes the world come alive around a person while simultaneously calming the person’s soul within.
A person can take this awareness with him anywhere in life, into any time and place, any struggle or triumph. With this awareness comes peace, moment-by-moment, no matter what a person’s life circumstances. Spiritual people might call living in this kind of “anytime peace” being happy.
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