In the days following this prayer, be aware of ways God may be offering you opportunities to live into the desire.What surprised you? Moved you? Inspired you? What disturbed you? How did you feel God’s presence in the midst of this prayer? Did anything about your desire change as you prayed it? Spend a few moments right after the prayer reflecting on how it was to pray with a desire.Thank God for being present in this prayer. Close by thanking God for this desire and for the opportunity to pray in and through it.Stay in silence as you allow space for God to speak in and through your imagination. Ask God how you might assist in fulfilling this desire.Notice what, if anything, changes as a result of that request. Ask that God’s desire be fulfilled in your desire, or that God will transform your desire as needed. Linger there and see how the scene depicting your desire develops or changes. Let it become real to you in your imagination. Take a few moments in silence to see if the desire remains the same or if you want to state it in a different way. Let your heart’s deepest desire be stated before God.Say a prayer of gratitude for all that has been, all that is, and all that will be in your life. Begin by taking a few moments to become calm.
Asking God how you can assist in fulfilling this desire and then watching for opportunities to do just that. Most importantly, Helliwell adds another crucial step. In a Celtic version of this practice, found in Tanis Helliwell’s Take Your Soul to Work, you do much the same. Braden, a student of quantum physics, contends that aligning ourselves, in gratitude, with our deepest desire and then feeling what it is like to have the desire fulfilled, is action that catalyzes change in the world. And after doing that, David leaves the outcome up to the Creator. David took him into the drought-ridden desert Southwest to, as he put it, “pray rain.” Not pray for rain, but to enter into a way of prayer which leads him to feel, touch, taste, smell and see what he believes the land needs most-rain. He calls it “David’s Prayer,” named after a Native American friend who introduced him to the idea of surrounding yourself with your deepest desire and offering it to the Creator. This type of prayer is found in The Isaiah Effect, a book by Gregg Braden. In this prayer you use all your senses to create-in your imagination-a scene that depicts what you desire and you pray in and through that desire. The “Desire Prayer” is one of my favorite practices because it allows us to get our desires before God openly, unabashedly and with feeling. That’s because our deepest, truest desires are one way God reaches out to us to say “walk in this way.” Because of this, I recommend the desire prayer as a spiritual practice. When meeting with a spiritual director, they may ask you what it is you desire most in life.