Labyrinths Prayer - Lessons For Living

I am pretty new to contemplative prayer, but not new to faith. I have spent more than half of my life seeking God and learning about Him. But two years ago I was introduced to contemplative prayer.

To be honest, I struggled with it at first.

I found that there were obstacles in my own heart and mind that got in the way of me embracing solitude, silence, and stillness before God.

• Fear that I wasn't doing enough, a wrong perception of what I was doing;
• Doubt that there would be any benefit, anxiety wondering what might be stirred up.
• And most of all doubt that with my busy life raising five kids I could make room for this way of spending time with God.

A labyrinth is a path which leads, via a circuitous route, to the center of an intricate design and back out again.

We are all on the path... exactly where we need to be. The labyrinth is a model of that path.

The kind of labyrinth we designed looks a lot like a maze, but it has a significant difference. If you stay on the path, you can not get lost. The path takes you to the center and then takes you back again. There are no wrong turns, no blocked paths, and no decisions about which way to go. This type of labyrinth is pilgrimage friendly.

A labyrinth is a right brain task. It involves intuition, creativity, and imagery. With a maze many choices must be made and an active mind is needed to solve the problem of finding the center. With a labyrinth there is only one choice to be made. The choice is to enter or not.

At its most basic level the labyrinth is a metaphor for the journey to the center of your deepest self and back out into the world with a broadened understanding of who you are.

First Connect Then Correct - Ask Better Questions To Get Better Answers

A little boy of seven asked his mother "mom, how can i benefit you from these connect-correct and make better relations?"

Mom Asked the boy, "With whom do you want to have better relation?"

The little boy promptly said, "Dada ji" (Grand Father)

The mother suggested the boy that he should go to his grandfather ask, "Dada ji; How is your muscle pain now a days?" The boy ran to his dada ji and asked, "How is your pain now a days?" Dada ji's face reflected many marks of uneasiness, and then he said hesitantly, "It's terrible, very painful, especially in winters it pains a lot, and I am not at all with myself when it continuously hurts for couple of hours....."

The boy came back to mother and said, "mom dada ji's mood is off, he is behaving like a whiner, and i will not go to him again." The mother waited for a while then after fifteen minutes she again suggested the boy that he should go and ask dada ji about his childhood days and what mischievous thing he did during those days. The boy went and asked, "Dada ji, in your childhood what mischievous things you did?". Dada ji's face suddenly changed for the better as if he was altogether a different person and ready to speak for two hours untiringly.

He said, "You don't do anything as we did, you are always glued to TV or video game, In our days I used to go to watch Ram Lila by walking seven miles, I used to swim for 10 minutes continuously under the water, I used to so and so... and it went on....

The boy came to mother and said,"Mom, dada ji is very excited, now he seems to be happy."

Then the mother explained the power of connecting and asking questions and said, "Ask better questions to get better answers."

"When you connect first with people you bring a smile on their face. First Connect Then Correct!" -TAPAS