Sacred place of prayer

One of the most important factors influencing your prayer is the place where you pray. The influence of the place, the room or space where you pray is very large but this can only be understood well from a spiritual perspective.

Of course, also the external or physical aspects of the place where you pray are important. You would rather pray in a quiet room that you decorated beautifully and in which you placed objects that bring you in the right mood than for example in a noisy hall of a train station.

Prayer is very much influenced by the location where you pray. This has most of all a spiritual reason. One place is not the other. The energies of one place are not those of another place.

I believe that many cultures of the past had much more understanding of this and therefore created sacred sites. Central on such a site could be a tree or a stone construction or a temple, or a combination of these. The meaning of a sacred site is first of all that the spiritual environment is controlled. What is more or less controlled are the energies and the spirits who have access to such a place. When you want to pray well, you best learn to make such a place for yourself.

When you pray, you direct yourself to God, but you automatically also open yourself for the spiritual reality around you. When you pray on a place that is not spiritually controlled in a good way, you can be very much disturbed by spirits who don’t like you to connect to God.

The other factor is the energies on a place or in a room. When you make effort to pray on always the same place or in the same room, and you guard that this place is being used for activities other than or too different in nature from prayer, then you will see that the feeling of concentration on that location builds up over time. Each time that you pray there, it will get easier to concentrate.

To claim a place outside or a room or part of a room for prayer may be a spiritual battle by itself. You need to change the energy of that spot and you need to guard it against invasion of spirits who might want to disturb your prayers.

Sacred places can also be related to one another, for example in some cultures many sacred trees in a country or on a continent were spiritually connected. When such trees are connected to one another, the good spiritual merit of one sacred tree location can reinforce that of other, related trees.

When you don’t yet have a good place in your own house and don’t know a sacred location outside, I would advise to pray on a quiet and beautiful place in nature. It pays off to often pray on the same spot, as the investment of your earlier prayers get energetically and spiritually stored on that place. Another possibility is to make a prayer walk, also preferably in a good and natural environment. When you make a prayer walk you don’t have the advantage of being on a prepared spiritual spot, but by walking you also cannot get so strongly influenced by what could be difficult influences on a fixed location. You just take your path where it feels good and you centre your heart and mind on God and increase your concentration during the walk.

When I make special effort to pray I usually do it in a room that I prepared for this as much as possible. I don’t let other people come in this room apart from for prayer (when it is a part of a room you can ask other people not to enter it), I place an altar (beautiful table) with flowers and natural stones or other natural objects such as shells, I paint and decorate the room with nice pictures and in pleasing colors. I keep that room clean from dust or newspapers or any kind of objects that don’t feel like enhancing the atmosphere needed for prayer. I do nothing else in that room than sacred activities.

It is possible to share such a place or room with others, provided that you know that these other people also want to pray in a deeper way.

Be aware of the fact that the sacredness of each location depends very much on what happened on that site. For example, if someone else prayed on your favourite place and he or she had a bad mood, then after this the holy atmosphere of that location needs restoration. You will have to get rid of the difficult energies that came there and sometimes the place may even have become invaded by spirits that want to harm your prayers. In that case the first prayer or prayers you have there may turn into spiritual fights in order to claim back the location.

When you have learned to pray in a stronger and deeper way and you have managed to set up or keep a prayer place sacred, you will get deep experiences in prayer. Good angels or spirits can come to you to give you revelations or inspiration and each time that you pray there for longer time, you can have deep experiences with God.