Agapi Stassinopoulos - Speaking with Spirit: 52 Prayers to Guide, Inspire, and Uplift You

My first spiritual teacher was my mother. As a young girl in Athens, Greece, I remember seeing my mother sitting in our living room, drinking tea and eating her favorite biscuits, in contemplation. It looked like she was doing nothing, but over time I realized this was her time of spiritual communion. In quiet reflection, she seemed to be drawing upon something deep within herself. She was listening for guidance and direction as she orchestrated various aspects of our lives. This was her form of prayer. My mother always trusted that help would come her way, and indeed it did. She made miracles happen for me and my sister, taking us from Athens to London, finding us the best schools and teachers, and making a home for us in a foreign country. Support showed up in countless ways in her life and, therefore, in ours.

I began to realize that she was connected by an invisible lifeline to a greater source, and by following its guidance, she opened unimaginable doors for us. Whenever I was faced with a decision and didnt know what to do, my mother would say Let it marinate, darling. She never rushed to solutions. She trusted that spiritual guidance could not be hurried. My mothers wisdom was remarkable to experience and absorb, and I know it allowed her to stay calm and faithful in the face of adversity.

My mother demonstrated every day how to offer and receive at the same time. This instilled in me a belief that something far beyond my physical reality is always present and supporting me. I have drawn on this unshakable source of trust all my life. This belief has also given me permission to be generous with myself, both in giving and receiving, and has allowed me to open myself up to others. I have always found spirituality in connecting with others and thats where I began to discover the power of my spirit, freely giving of my love and feeling a resonance with the world that further opened me up to a sense of oneness.

Aside from weddings, baptisms, funerals, and Easter Sunday, we didnt go to church. My mother used to say, Our home is our church. On a beautiful table in our front hallway, she set up trays of dried fruit, nuts of every kind, and, of course, wheatthe symbol of abundance. This was her altar. She extended a heartfelt offering to everyone that she met and a warm welcome to everyone who came to our home. Every day, my sister and I would come home from school and sit with our mother in our little kitchen, eating a homemade meal and sharing how our day went. She called this our human communion.

My mother continued to search for deeper spiritual knowledge and was led to yoga and meditation. She introduced me and my sister to yoga when we were teenagers. There we were, in Athens, Greece, without a television, learning the practice of yoga. At the tender age of twelve, the seeds of spirituality were planted in me. She also kept the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, written in Greek, next to her bed, which became the book that led to my spiritual awakening later in my life.

My father, a brilliant young journalist in Athens, was working on a manifesto for a new vision of Greece during the Second World War. He was arrested by the Nazis and held in a concentration camp for a year and a half. When he shared with us stories about his time in the camps, he told us that every night he lay awake in his cell, editing the manifesto in his minds eye. This became a lifeline for him, connecting him to the hope and motivation to keep going and giving him faith that he would get out alive and finish the book. This was his form of prayer. He survived, and he always expressed his gratitude to God for surviving. Every night, as he fell asleep, he would cross himself and say doxasi o theos, meaning glory be to God.

Yet my father carried a deep psychic trauma from the suffering of that experience. Over the course of my parents marriage, he was involved in several extramarital affairs, which caused my mother tremendous pain. Eventually, she left him and raised me and my sister on her own. I always felt her pain, and as I would go to sleep each night, I would pray for my mother to receive help. A soft caress would touch my hand, and I intuitively knew that there was a presence there, looking after me. This was one of my earliest recollections of a connection to that presence, though I did not entirely understand it at the time. I didnt need to understand it in order to believe in it and be comforted by it. I just trusted it, the way I trust that the sun will rise in the morning. But, like many of us, I discounted it as the years went on, and a long time would pass before I remembered it.

If I ask you to remember a time when you felt connected to the presence of God or spirit, I am sure you will have a memory of knowing that you are connected to something beyond yourself, something mystical and invisible. When we are children, we live inside of this innate knowing, but as we grow up, we move away from it. We forget. Many of us, at some point, try to remember. For some of us, a recognition lingers. We feel a constant tug or a longing to reconnect with what we know is there. We feel hints of it at different moments: when we watch a glorious sunset, look into a babys eyes, hear a favorite song or poem, or meet someone who reflects it back to us. We are returned to the inner knowing that a mystical presence is always there.