The difference between prayer and meditation

I was queried, "What is the difference between prayer and meditation? Is one better than the other?

It has been quipped that prayer is when you talk to G!d, and when G!d talks to you, it’s schizophrenia.

The dictionary, as well as “spiritual experts,” seem to agree on a major difference between prayer and meditation. In a nutshell, they see that prayer is for talking to G!d/deity/spiritual being, while meditation is for listening for a response. Prayer in the traditional sense is to ask for something, to make a request, to express a desire, need, want, or lack, and ask for it to be filled. Prayer can also be expressions of appreciation that a desire has already been answered—–and may be said whether the fulfillment has been experienced or not, as an act of faith that where the desire is, the fulfillment is also. Meditation is a state of consciousness in which there is no asking or requesting, not even an expression of gratitude. Instead, there is a union of the individual mind with the “divine mind”, a state of being in which there is no perceive state of lack.

There are also different forms of prayer and meditation. For example, there are mind-filling meditations, which use imagery or focus on an object or on breathing a certain way or the repetition of a word or phrase to keep the mind focused and not wandering, free of the usual “chatter” or “internal dialogue” that flows through most of our minds most of the time; and there are mind-emptying meditations which deliberately withdraw awareness from the senses, the body, thought, and towards nothingness. There are also movement meditations, from Buddhist walking meditations to Sufi whirling and Quakers and Shakers quaking and shaking, all designed to either facilitate meditative/prayer states, or as a result of such.

The essence of the perceived difference between prayer and meditation by most people (and dictionaries) is that in prayer, one starts with a separate sense of self that longs for help from a higher plane––often G!d, the universe, one’s divine nature, Brahman, etc.––to change the world, a person, or a situation as they would like it to be, and meditation aims for dissolving the sense of separateness. Furthermore, while meditation generally involves removing judgment from one’s thoughts and ideas, prayer involves distinguishing between the positive and the negative and pleading for what is good or virtuous while changing what is bad or negative. Prayer usually has an objective, while meditation is simply being and breathing. Clearly, prayer and meditation each involve distinct techniques, with different objectives.

However, it seems to me that much of common thinking in regards to many things is based on dualism, and has become highly polarized:  religion vs spirituality, prayer vs meditation, body vs soul, East vs West, gay vs straight, right vs wrong, and is reflected even in the political climate in this country. In this dualistic thinking, there is little room for the gray areas, for finding the meeting points on the various continua, much less seeing the continua in the first place.

And of course, there are within religious traditions forms of meditation and prayer. Christianity has centering prayer and monastic contemplative prayer, while Buddhists have intentional thought-centered meditations such as the kindness meditation. In other words, Christian prayer and Buddhist intention are very similar, as is Buddhist mindfulness and Christian contemplation and centering. It seems to come down to spiritual practice in its various forms, all techniques which are not ends in themselves; they are means and vehicles, to enlarge our heart and souls, to inspire, to expand and support the ways in which we live in the world and interact with the larger community. If prayers are said only from the lips and do not engage the heart, are they true prayer? If meditation is performed only to feel a blissful state, is it true meditation? The Buddhist Dōgen Zenji wrote, “To study the Path is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things”. To a native American, prayer can be as simple as a good thought.

There are some who claim meditation to be superior to prayer, and others who believe prayer to be superior to meditation. To this I would ask, Why does one need to be superior to the other? In my opinion, we need both, and they are not so far apart from one another than the dictionary definitions would have us believe.

In fact, this is actually being proven by a new field of neuroscience, called neurotheology. One pioneer in this field is Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, including How G!d Changes Your Brain. He has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than a decade. He has found that people who meditate, from Franciscan nuns to chanting Sikhs to Tibetan Buddhists, go dark in the parietal lobe–—the area of the brain that is related to sensory information and helps us form our sense of self. His findings? When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience. “There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it’s just all one,” Newberg says. The interesting part is that those who self-identify as atheist, when instructed to meditate or “contemplate on G!d”, do not display any of the brain activity in the frontal lobe that is observed in those who identify as religious. Dr. Newberg concludes that all religions create neurological experiences, and while G!d is unimaginable for atheists, for religious people, G!d is as real as the physical world.

It has been well-established that years of Buddhist meditation results in some rather profound brain changes. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who is at the University of Wisconsin, has scanned the brains of Buddhist monks who have logged years of meditation. When it comes to things like attention and compassion, their brains are incredibly finely tuned. Davidson wondered, “Could ordinary people achieve the same kind of connection with the spiritual that the monks do — without so much effort?” He conducted a study of ordinary people new to meditation, and even by spending only a few minutes a day meditating, in just two months, found positive systemic changes in their brains and immune systems.

Michael Persinger, a neurologist in Ontario, is conducting research into temporal lobe epilepsy by placing electrodes on the scalp and stimulating the right temporal lobes of his study subjects, inducing visual images and sensing a spiritual presence otherwise unexplained. He posits that both Paul of Tarsus and Moses at the burning bush were experiencing temporal lobe seizures at those moments. It is important to note that his work does not indicate that the spiritual experience was just a seizure, but that right temporal lobe seizures, even tiny almost imperceptible ones seem to further a spiritual experience. An EEG study conducted in 2016 by a doctor in Queensland, Australia asked, “What happens in the brain when we pray compared to when we meditate?” The conclusion of the study? “These findings show that both spiritual practices are associated with widespread changes in neural activity across the brain, in particular at frequency ranges that have been implicated in positive emotional experience, integration of distributed neural activity, and changes in short-term and long-term neural circuitry.”

Bottom line, both prayer and meditation are very beneficial, beyond their obvious spiritual and religious reasons. They have been shown to be highly effective in lowering our reactivity to traumatic and negative events, because they focus our thoughts on something outside ourselves. During times of stress, our limbic system, more commonly known as our central nervous system, becomes hyper-activated, which thrusts us into survival mode where we freeze, fight or flee the situation, which prevents us from thinking clearly.

When we sit down and engage in prayer or meditation, we are able to shift away from this frightened and stressed survival mode into an intentional state, which reengages our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that rules our executive functioning and enables us to make intelligent, mindful decisions. Both meditation and prayer can trigger the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain, like serotonin, dopamine, and even oxytocin. Both prayer and meditation help us regain our footing so that we can step out into the world and take positive action. We reconnect, re-center, recharge and gain the strength necessary to take steps that will create real change. And it is well-established that meditation lowers blood pressure and reduces stress, fosters emotional healing, and has even been found to help the body cope with disease. Does this mean that meditation trumps prayer?

While theologians and philosophers and others may ponder the difference between prayer and meditation––a matter of techniques––neurologically speaking, prayer and meditation both produce remarkably similar brain activity and long-term effects. This was shown specifically in a series of experiments that directed people from different faith traditions to pray while scientists scanned their brains. Among all subjects––Christians, Buddhists, and non-religious people who meditate––researchers noted increased activity in the frontal lobe, which is responsible for attention and focus. Buddhist monks show increased activity in the occipital (visual) lobe of the cerebral cortex, due to the focused visualizations that characterize their practice. Christian nuns, on the other hand, showed increased activity in the language centers of the brain, due to Christian traditions’ emphasis on spoken prayer. Despite the marked differences in technique and religious orientation of the Buddhist participants and participants who engaged in prayer, i.e. non-theistic versus theistic respectively, there appear to be substantial similarities in the neural correlates of prayer and meditation, whichever techniques one was using.

The parietal lobe is the part of our brain that keep track of our immediate surroundings and sense of physical presence. It gives us our sense of taste and touch, and it creates an ongoing map that’s vital to the lower brain when we’re trying to escape a source of danger in our environment. But researchers found that religious people with a consistent prayer practice basically shut down their parietal lobe during prayer. This reduced activity can create the sensation that one is leaving this reality and connecting with something greater and less physical.

Furthermore, the study’s finding was that prayer and meditation are so similar in the brain that we can describe prayer as a type of meditation. And this should be encouraging, because research shows that meditation is one of the best things we can do for our brains––right up there with reading and physical exercise. Neuroscientists have found that people who pray regularly have thicker gray matter in their prefrontal cortex (responsible for focus and willpower) and their anterior cingulate cortex (responsible for compassion and empathy). The heightened activity in these keys parts of the brain also reduces the responsiveness of the amygdala (responsible for fear and anger).

Both prayer and meditation effect changes in the brain’s neural network that, in turn, changes our outlook and behavior. While prayer and meditation may employ different techniques, at the end of the day, our brains tell the real story: they are both effective and both have nearly identical impacts on our neural networks, according to brain imaging studies. 

In the Talmud our sages are described as meditating for an hour before and after services. Rabbi Nachman had much to say about prayer and meditation. One of the most beautiful things about Judaism is its incredible depth and width, diversity and variety across the spectrum of our daily spiritual lives, including, of course, prayer and meditation. Our tradition is rich, profound, and complex, interweaving many forms and opportunities for prayer and meditation, infusing every facet of Judaism with deeper meaning.

Jewish prayer and meditation nourishes our soul, transforming our living Judaism from a solely intellectual endeavor into a spiritual practice that links us to Judaism in the most profound way. Meditation helps us bypass our intellect in order to experience the alignment that comes of feeling at one (at-one-ment). Each mitzvah, holy day and cycle of life has its own rhythm, nuance, taste, character, and prayers, pulling us in, beckoning us to invite G!d into the most minute aspects of our daily lives.

We pray or meditate alone, we pray with our families, and we are even commanded to pray together, communally. When a minyan prays or meditates together, there is a reciprocity of awareness, caring, and support, a sense of communal belonging, that emerges within the prayer dynamic. A sense of belonging is part of our spiritual and emotional wellbeing as humans.

Prayer and meditation are part of becoming self-actualized human beings. The hows of prayer and meditation, the differences in techniques between prayer and meditation, aren’t nearly as important as that we do them.