Prayer is as fundamental to our inner lives, as breath is to our physical lives. It’s a word most of us have heard, and yet few of us grasp. Many of us have associations with prayer that are so confining, restrictive and even off-putting, that we’ve dismissed the whole idea of praying.

The growing number of people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” assume prayer is religious and, therefore, not appropriate for them. Even many who consider themselves religious don’t pray in a way that deeply resonates with them. Atheists assume, since they don’t believe in God, prayer is not an option.

But then something happens in our vulnerable human lives, and whether we think of ourselves as spiritual, religious, atheist, or none of the above, we find ourselves scared and in real need. Someone says to us, “I will keep you in my prayers,” and we find ourselves in deep-felt gratitude, even though we don’t exactly know what it means to be held in prayer.

Prayer has been called a yearning of the heart, an instinct to reach beyond, and the most fundamental, important language humans speak. The act of prayer is evidenced in written sources as early as 5,000 years ago. Some anthropologists believe the earliest intelligent modern humans practiced something that we would recognize today as prayer.

As diverse as our human family is, so are the ways we pray. While prayer has long been associated with specific religions, we are now on the precipice of a prayer revolution.

A hundred years ago the words spiritual and religious were synonymous. Not so today. The word spiritual has gradually come to be associated with a private realm of thought and experience, while the word religious has come to be connected with the public realm of membership in religious institutions.

With more people gaining insight and inspiration from a variety of spiritual teachers and faith traditions, many are happy to embrace spiritual wisdom from around the world. We don’t have to be Buddhist to appreciate meditation; we don’t have to be Islamic to weep at a poem by Rumi; we don’t have to be Christian to be inspired by the teachings of Jesus; and we don’t have to be Jewish to study the Kabbalah. No longer confined by adherence to separate religious doctrines, we embrace spiritual nourishment wherever we find it.

This has profound implications on whether we pray and how we pray.

The practice and power of prayer can no longer be boxed exclusively into the category of religion. Prayer is a personal expression that connects us to the Infinite (God, the Universe, Possibility, the subconscious mind, Spirit, Loving Intelligence, etc.).

So as long as we pray, no matter how we pray, we tap into something mysterious and profound. We make ourselves available to transformation -- an opening of the heart, a willingness to forgive, a change of perspective, awareness of a solution we had not seen before. There is no limit to what we can accomplish through prayer.