Spiritual Breath Exercises: Resisting the urge to inhale is essential for receiving the spiritual breath, akin to fasting for spiritual nourishment.
Active Patience in Prayer: Consecrating prayer requires sacrificing control and embracing patience, strengthening one's spiritual resolve.
Accelerating Divine Awareness: Spiritual breath exercises hasten awareness of the Divine by cultivating patience, offering a pathway to enter the kingdom.
Receiving the breath is primarily the act of not taking the breath. The spiritual breath exercises are the form of fasting for this age. In order to receive a breath, one fasts from taking a breath. The learned urge to take a breath, like taking food, must be resisted. It is a deeply unconscious and well-patterned urge. It takes work to uproot it. It must be resisted in each breath in order to receive a spiritual breath. Practicing the spiritual breath exercises is continual fasting.
Consecrating prayer can be viewed as the pure practice of active patience. To learn the spiritual breath exercises requires both sacrifice and patience. Sacrifice is required to give up control and receive the breath. The cusp of the received breath is located between time and space, where patience resides. Dimensionality is subdued and time fades as patience is learned.
Consecrating prayer requires patience. The discipline of active patience required and learned in practicing the spiritual breath exercises greatly strengthens the abilities to overcome the world and awaken your spirit. Learning active patience over the smallest, yet greatest, of things—your next breath—is of immense value to possessing knowledge of the eternal presence of the Holy Spirit. We do not wake up to the presence of the Holy Spirit, rather we gradually become it. Our transformation is our tuning—vibrating—with our spirit.
The spiritual breath exercises are a gift of the Holy Spirit.
In many ways, consecrating prayer is patience. Our spirit’s possession is complete and permanent in the patience of the spiritual breath exercises.
Another way to view the effect of the spiritual breath exercises is that they accelerate awareness of the Divine because they accelerate patience. Consecrating prayer is a somatic not an intellectual undertaking.
The spiritual breath exercises are a gift of the Holy Spirit. They are a dispensation for this new age. We are free to enter the kingdom by way of the Living Breath if we so choose.
Moses and Jesus fasted for 40 days. Daniel and John the Baptist fasted. Fasting has a long biblical tradition. The reasons for spiritual fasting include increasing the strength to pray, purifying the body, withering sensual desire, learning self-restraint, humbling the body and inactivating self-indulgence. The most important reason for fasting is to prepare a place for the risen Christ within.
By its nature, consecrating prayer is a private matter. It is never public. Strength of prayer is learned. Self-restraint is mastered. The body is humbled and transformed. Your false self, with its worries, concerns, judgements, and anxieties falls away. You become your spirit—the solid center of who you are. You overcome the body and unite with the everlasting.
What would you give up for this “pearl of great price”? When a rich man asked Jesus this question, he told him to sell all he had and follow him. He could not do it. Would you give up your next breath for the kingdom waiting for you within?
The battle is joined from the start. Mercifully the spiritual warfare is gradual. Victory is easily won with endurance.