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While meditation is an infilling, the deeper realization that you are grounded in the life, love, power and intelligence that God is, prayer is your means of expressing these qualities through all the specific areas of your life. You do this through the exercise of your faculties of elimination (the power to release), faith (the power to open yourself to the new), judgment, will, and understanding.
Once you grasp the relationship between meditation and prayer you no longer see prayer as a means of getting something from God. Rather you see it as a process of releasing those mental and emotional states that are blocking your good and affirming the truth that unfolds through your quiet times.
If you have a challenge in your life that you want to address spiritually, you begin by taking your thoughts off the challenge and turning to God in meditation. When you close your eyes you’ll be tempted to think only about your challenge. With practice you will release your attachment to the negative appearance and experience an infilling of new inspiration. As you go about your day and the challenge presents itself to you, you release the negative energy you have invested in the challenge and allow yourself to experience it in a new and different way. You can speak words such as, “I now release the energy of this negative appearance. There is nothing to fear.” This is the denial or releasing side of prayer. You then follow up with statements that are true of your spiritual nature. “That which is in me is greater than that which is of the world. I am fearless. I am filled with the understanding of what I am to do and how I am to do it.”
Effective prayer asks nothing of God. You pray with the assumption that God has already given you all you need to meet the challenge at hand. Sometimes you are called to act and other times you are called to be still and know the Creative Life Force that is God is working through you in ways that allow your light to shine in beautiful ways. The power behind prayer is your understanding of your inseparable oneness with God, your unfailing source.
J Douglas Bottorff 