Living Life as a Prayer invites you on a sacred journey of self-discovery.
You are the living prayer offered up every moment of every day through the words that you speak, the actions that you take, the emotions that you feel and the thoughts that you think.
Through stories, rituals, poems, prayers, visualizations and meditation, let this sacred journey unfold before you.
Carol Marcy, Ph.D.
Carol Marcy is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Southern Maryland. Energy, spirit, sound, light, movement and words are her healing tools. She believes deeply in partnering with other forms of alternative and traditional healing when appropriate.
Nestled in woodlands, The Joy Lane Healing Center is her home and gathering place for a spiritual community. Here, she and others practice, using the tools for the journey into wholeness and oneness.
A beekeeper, a gardener, a mother and a grandmother, Carol Marcy is a woman who loves living out of the place of the heart.
Living Life as a Prayer teaches you how to weave the Sacred into your everyday life.
Because of the tremendous resurgence of interest in spirituality, people are seeking a spiritual path that extends beyond a particular day of the week or a particular religious tradition. Living Life as a Prayer is especially valuable if you are beginning to seek your own internal truths, to wonder about who you are, how you can contribute to a larger global community and how you can connect to the ever-present source of Divine Love.
The Core Teaching
The core teaching of the book is that we are the living prayer that is offered to the Universe every moment. Every thought we create, word we speak, feeling we engender and action we take---these are parts of prayers that we make as human beings. The purpose of this book is to help you become more aware of the kind of prayers that you offer the Universe so that you can become prayers that are consciously constructed. Guiding the discovery of the truth of who you are, the book teaches that everyone has something important to contribute to all of life everywhere.
Preparing and Creating
The book is in two parts: (1) Preparing yourself to become a living prayer and (2) Creating the prayer. The first section gives you guidelines for healing and clearing your internal pathway to open to the Divine. The second section expands the concept of prayer and teaches a variety of ways to consciously create living prayer. All concepts are accompanied by practical techniques, and lively stories illustrate how others have brought these concepts of the sacred into ordinary living.
Multiple Paths and Approaches
Although there is a Native American spiritual flavor to the teachings, the material is trans-denominational, offering a cornucopia of illustrative poetry, prayers, personal experiences and stories from family, friends and therapy clients of the author. These serve to encourage the expansion of your conscious awareness by guiding you to embrace body and mind as expressions of the Divine in ordinary life. They help you easily accessing the material discussed in a down-to-earth, personally captivating way.
There are practical, step-by-step guides of how to do certain techniques, like setting an intention, experiencing and expressing feelings, and creating prayers. There are guided visualizations and meditations that allow you to try on new ways of being and acting. Rituals and ceremonies demonstrate ways to pray and are described in detail and include guidelines to creating rituals.
Stories, Prayers, Meditations, Rituals
The stories in this book illustrate important points and ideas and help you to understand that to create yourself as a living prayer is quite possible in ordinary life. There are also beautiful poems and prayers from a variety of sources. Some are original, and some have been written by others. These poems and prayers captivate the spirit and encourage the expansion of their conceptual framework concerning the sacredness of all of life and the importance of living consciously with joy. Abstract concepts are broken down into specific processes that make them accessible and are illustrated by stories of ordinary people who are engaged in healing journeys. For example, Chapter One first defines the concept of setting an intention, then gives a number of stories that illustrate how this concept has worked in the lives of others and finally gives you a clearly stated process for creating intentions.
Living Life as a Prayer contains examples of intentions, healing journeys, shifting feelings, prayers, guidance, ceremonies and rituals. These examples are easy to grasp and are often crafted story form. The book also includes guided imagery sections that allow you hands-on-experience of the topics being discussed. There are poems as well as prose. These poems are creative expressions that enhance the text and engage both the right and the left brain. Prayers, coming from a variety of spiritual disciplines, illustrate the basic philosophy of the book, as well as teach you a variety of ways to put your thoughts and feelings into the form of prayers. Mediations and prayers are presented with sensitivity to a variety of learning styles. They encourage experiences from kinesthetic, visual and auditory perspectives. For example, the Balance Dance, a powerful movement meditation and prayer, is kinesthetic; the imagery of the cave in the belly of the Earth is a visual and auditory experience; and the toning meditation is obviously auditory.
For Everyone
Ideal for the beginner or seasoned practitioner alike Living Life as a Prayer will help you to prepare, through a variety of healing processes, to create yourself as a prayer---a prayer that expresses your own uniqueness, power and oneness with the Divine.
