Prayer Many years ago, and some years after I had learnt to meditate, I went thru a few melancholy years. My meditation seemed boring and I didn't feel like I was making any spiritual progress at all. Nothing seemed important to me and I didn't feel inspired by anything. Life itself seemed to be boring. I tried just about everything, from doing more meditation, more yoga asanas, to taking up running, and sky diving etc etc. Nothing seemed to make any lasting difference to my melancholia. A fellow who was going to India asked me if there was anything he could do for me while he was there. I asked him to get me some Ayurvedic herbs or something for my melancholia. Well I never did get any herbs. Instead a psychic doctor told this fellow, and it was relayed to me by a circuitous route that the thing for me to do was to pray. That was it. The complete instruction was simply to pray. Well up to that point in my life, anyone that had told me to pray would have not have been taken seriously. My life up to that point had been very scientifically based and secular. But I was at my wits end and I felt I had tried everything else, so I resolved to give it a go and see if anything happened. OK, so who or what do I pray to? How does one go about praying? I resolved not to do a religious type of prayer because it didn't look to me that it did much good. Instead I tried to be open and unfocused in my prayer. I would try praying to all and sundry and see if any felt better than the others. I prayed to Maharishi, to Jesus, to Shiva etc as well as to some amorphous undifferentiated concept of God. It felt right not to pray for particular things in my life (even happiness) as I couldn't be sure that I knew what was best for me. Instead my prayer became something that realized that "God" or whatever it was I was praying to, must be able to see me from a larger perspective. There may be ways that I am best helped that I am not yet aware of. So I decided to trust that if there really was some sort of deity that could help me, then it would know how best to help me. My prayers were very simple things that were as non-verbal as possible, as well as being as heart felt as possible. Something along the lines of "help me, in whatever way I can best be helped". I tried to do the prayer at a subtle level in my mind, rather than at a loud, clear, and  verbal level. Eventually the amorphous, undifferentiated concept of God became the sole direction of my prayers. Why? I don't know, it just seemed to feel better. I didn't have a regular time to pray, I just did it whenever and wherever the thought arose. Over a period of a few months I began to feel progressively better and better. I have been praying in much the same way ever since. Sometimes I get the thought back that it is important not to pray in a needy way, and that God helps those who help themselves. When this happens my prayer often changes to something more like "help me to help myself". That seems to keep the nature of my prayer on track when it starts getting too needy, and dependent. If anyone had told me when I was twenty that I would be into prayer when I was thirty, I couldn't have comprehended how it could possibly happen. But it did.