A question comes in from a coach who who is in training with me, on improving her coaching and business building skills after noticing that lately I’ve been interrupting the Group Coaching sessions to take one of my five daily prayer breaks…
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QUESTION:
Hi Mamoon,
I so enjoy listening to your responses on your calls. You have tremendous sensitivity to people.
I hope you don’t mind my asking for some specifics about your 5 prayer sessions a day as I am attempting to make this part of my daily routine. I love your format: 1. Be present. 2. Start from Gratitude, and 3. Be aware of your Higher Power.
Specifically: How long is each prayer session? Are the sessions preplanned? What time is your first session and your last session of the day? What are your greatest challenges fulfilling your intentions?
Thanks so much for what you do!
Gail
ANSWER:
Dear Gail,
Thanks so much for asking your beautiful touching question.
My spiritual life is the most important thing to me – and it’s an honour for me to be able to share some of it with you.
The Form Of The Prayer
The five daily prayers that I do were not made up by me. My belief is that they were divinely ordained by the source of the universe and revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.
Each prayer can take between 5 and 15 minutes to perform depending on personal preference. The sessions are pre planned and have set times each day that depend on the sun. The first prayer is pre dawn, the next prayer is midday, followed by the afternoon. The fourth prayer is conducted at dusk and the final prayer is before bed.
Because I’m in the UK and the days are short, this means that three of the prayers happen within three hours. In summertime, there tends to be much more space between each of the prayers. The prayers being aligned with the seasons and the sun leads us to be more in flow and in sync with nature every day as we pray. I tend to sleep longer and wake up later in winter than I do in summer for example.
The Essence of The Prayer
The key points you highlighted do form the essence of the prayer and this is what I started to describe to you during one of our sessions. It involves the following:
- Be fully present.
This is important. Without presence, the prayer is merely the form of certain words and motions. With presence, the true power of the words we recite during the prayers still our hearts and lead to love and gratitude.We begin the prayer by raising our hands, saying “Allahu Akbar”, meaning, “Allah is the Greatest”. The symbolic gesture of raising our hands symbolises that we leave all of the concerns of this world, and the trivial matters taking up our mental attention aside, and fully immerse ourselves into the state of presence – which is the state of connection with Allah, the Most Loving. - Love & Gratitude.
The very first words of our prayer are ‘In the Name of Allah, the Most Loving, the Most Benevolent. All praise and gratitude is due to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds.”
We start everything we do with love. And the prayer is a physical and verbal expression of our gratitude to the source of the universe. All of the words of our prayer come from the Quran and specific words that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, gave us to recite during the different motions of the prayer. When fully understood, the entire experience is incredibly heartwarming and humbling. - Insightful Realization
It’s not unusual to be in that quiet minded, grateful, prayerful, loving, present state and to have sudden insights and realisations about the depth of the words we’re reciting. It’s not uncommon to be completely distracted by worldly concerns, and grudges and stresses and then enter the prayer, only to have all of our issues and hangups and problems disappear. And it’s also not uncommon for us to leave the prayer different from how we started.
Because this is such a regular daily practice, anyone who performs it with an emphasis on embodying the internal states that the prayer is designed for, inevitably, after several weeks, months and years is lead into internal transformation in both character and their level of awareness and presence.
This transformation occurs through the unexpected insights and realisation that we have during that state of spiritual connection, often connected with the words of the Quran that we are reciting. These insights lead to a deeper knowledge of Allah, of ourselves and of life.
That’s the real purpose of the prayer and I’m so grateful and humbled to be honoured to perform it on a regular basis.
Let me know if you have any other questions about it. And may you always be blessed and guided to find the perfect sacred rituals that enhance your life.
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In my upcoming coaching programme ‘The Spiritual Switch’, I’ll be going much deeper into the true meaning of prayer, what it can do for you when it’s performed with full awareness, and the most effective way to get ourselves into the mental, emotional, spiritual and psychological state that prayer is designed for.
There are only 33 spaces available on the programme. It opens this Monday 19th December. To check it out and get early notification to increase the chances you get a spot, register here:
