My Car is a Temple, Yes, my car is a temple for spiritual practices with my prayer beads!
I want to share these simple spiritual practices with you because I know firsthand that if life is feeling hard, and if you want deeper meaning or connection in your life, a spiritual practice can make all the difference.
This spiritual practice uses prayer beads, or malas. I always have one or two sets of prayer beads in my car. It doesn’t matter how many beads are on them – it can be 55 or 77 or 101 or 108…If there are fewer beads, you just do more circuits.
I love doing something like this in my car because I spend so much time in there; I might as well make the best of it. It certainly lightens the mood when stuck in traffic!
The four practices I may do are: Forgiveness, Blessings, Gratitude, or Affirmations. It’s completely random which one I choose; I just do whichever one feels best at the time. I get in the car, get situated, turn on the GPS and pick up my prayer beads, then ask, “What do I need to do?”
Typically, I do affirmations or blessings. But just the other day I was completely triggered by hearing about an old friend and their actions, so I knew the second I picked up the beads that forgiveness was in order!
I won’t get deep into specifics about each of these practices; they all have their own blog/video because they can be practiced so many different ways. So please be sure to see my other posts about forgiveness, gratitude, affirmations and blessings.
Back to the day of forgiveness – I picked up my beads and immediately started in “X – I forgive you and myself for being a bitch, I love you as I love myself, for God is the love I am.” Harsh, I know, but that was the only word I could seem to find for her actions.
I was only 3 or 4 beads in before the awareness of the times I was a bitch came to mind. That’s the thing about this practice, you’re fully admitting that if you see and are triggered by something in someone else, you have the trait alive in you – latent or active. And while I suspect most people wouldn’t call me one, there have been moments. And so, the work here for me is to find why I was. Where do I see that in me and what does it teach me about what kind of healing I need to do?
Recognizing it within me helps to find the place of compassion or understanding for the other person, and that’s where forgiveness starts.
In this case I was complete with this forgiveness practice within 15 beads. But that’s not always the case; it can take days or weeks for the awareness to arise and forgiveness to take over, so don’t be hard on yourself. Just keep at it.
All that work done while on a drive! No extra time out of my day, no sitting in meditation for hours.
Blessings, affirmations and gratitude practices with your prayer beads are equally as powerful, so please be sure to check out those specific blogs.
How could your life change if you started treating your car as your personal temple?