Techniques

 We like techniques.  They deliver experience in prayer.  We feel better at that moment.  It makes my ego feel that prayer is “working.”  I even may drift into the delusion that I am a spiritual adept.  Techniques are OK to quiet us down, and get us detached from our emotional and mental clutter, for a bit.  But prayer really begins to happen, to affect us, not on any of these levels.  Prayer is when we allow God to love us.  God is Love.  It is impossible to effectively love someone who is thinking about themselves in any encounter.  If you make love to someone for what you get out of it, is that really love?  Maybe it is to a teenager, an immature person.  Nor is that encounter going to change them for the better.  I like meditation, an advanced step 11.  I ask a for nothing.  Trust.  God is at work.