Our culture is losing the art of silence, and with it the intrinsic human understanding and capacity for prayer. Silent dwellers, by creating spacious times of physical silence in their lives, slowly recover the human capacity to be with themselves in a caring gentle way. For, it is in silence and solitude that one learns – or regains – the human quality of being in God's presence always.
I experience the Divine Presence in many ways, but the form most often available to me is "spiration," or the act of breathing in which the Spirit often manifests itself and communicates itself. This process has given rise to the experience of inspiration, or in-spiration, in which the Spirit breathes into us. To be aware of God through spiration is to become conscious of God's subtle Presence through our own breathing.
We all share in the eternal spiration of the Spirit. When I am sufficiently absorbed in the experience of divine spiration, I realize inwardly my dependence, and that of all beings, on this subtle action of the Source.