31 October

How to pray and what should I ask for in my prayers?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

Prayer is something that no one needs to explain to you. Real fulfillment of prayer happens in two conditions:
1. When you are desperate and totally helpless. When all doors are shut, and when all your efforts seem to be leading you nowhere, then you pray. Whatever you pray for, the prayer is sincere and it would be heard. So when you feel like this, pray and have patience.

2 Prayer also happens when you get what you wanted. You feel so grateful and so you thank God. You say, “Dear God, you have given me everything”. When you remember all the good things you have gotten in your life, prayer happens. You thank God, and you thank the divinity.

When you pray, you should say, "I want this or anything better than this". But you need to ask. You need to say what is your wish, and then acknowledge that the Divine is much more intelligent, and that it will give you what is best for you. The space around us is much more intelligent than us.

In prayer language does not matter, you can pray in any language because prayer is not through language, it is beyond language. It is through feeling. Feeling is more important. If you are used to praying in Sanskrit, that is fine. It is the most ancient language of mankind and it has a connection to almost all languages in the world.
Language is secondary. Today we are divided in religion because of language. The content is what we need to worry about, not the language. We think that if we pray in that language then only God will hear us but the Divinity is beyond language.