“Prayer—especially the kind of prayer where you ask God for favors—has a mixed reputation in my world, where many people tend to be postmodern, skeptical yoga practitioners or Buddhist meditators. For some of my yogi-friends and students, it simply feels too religious. Some of us also suspect that prayer is useless, at best a sort of spiritual placebo. (Studies on healing prayer have yet to establish any sort of scientific correlation between prayer and healing thought there is ample anecdotal evidence in favor).

She goes on:

“So why would a postmodern yogi pray? For at least three reasons: One, because prayer softens the armor around your heart, and actually helps you receive grace. As you get the hang of establishing connection in prayer, you’ll notice more and more how praying shifts your energy. Maybe you feel less hopeless, or less defensive, or more protected, or just calmer. Chances are that even that subtle shift will also make a difference in how your external situation plays out, even if the difference is very subtle.

Second, because prayer brings you into relationship with the sacred. When you pray, you get to show up in sacred space in your most personal, human, down-home way. You don’t have to be sophisticated, advanced, or particularly holy. Above all, you don’t have to act cool. You can speak your confusion, scream for help, express desires, say thank you, go “Wow,” or even complain. Above all, you can be needy. Rumi actually recommends sheer neediness as the key to opening up the channel between yourself and God. “What is bounty without a beggar?” he writes. “What is generosity without a guest? Be a beggar, for beauty is seeking a mirror, water is crying for a thirsty man!”

Another reason to pray is simply because prayer is a practice, and a deep, multi-leveled one, which you can do at any level of spiritual development. As a category, prayer takes in mantra repetition, chanting (the words we sing in kirtan are basically prayers of praise, not so different in content from a Pentecostal cry of “Praise the Lord!”), and the invocations sung at the beginning of a yoga class. (Try chanting ‘Om’ as a prayer, and notice how much more deeply it resonates!) In the Christian contemplative tradition, there’s a form of silent prayer where you center yourself in the heart and orient yourself toward the divine.”

Read more of Sally Kempton’s article here