Larry Dossey is the former chief of Staff at Humana Medical City Dallas and former co-chair of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions for the National Institutes of Health. He is a prolific author and an internationally renowned speaker on spirituality and medicine. As a physician, Dossey is a great believer in prayer working in tandem with medications and surgery. He thinks we can have reverence and gratitude for all healing modalities. He sees this book as a "heart-to-heart talk" and not an academic or scholarly treatise.

We are at a point where the ancient strife between science and religion can cease. Dossey takes a hard look at some of the controversies that swirl around the idea that prayer is good medicine, such as praying for others without their consent and using public funds for research on prayer's efficacy. In a series of short and pungent chapters Dossey examines ways to reap the healing benefits of prayer with material on prayer as an attitude of the heart, meditation, four-legged forms of prayer, choosing to pray privately or publicly, glimpsing the Infinite. We appreciated his observation that prayer helps us be warriors, not worriers.

The author makes it clear that prayer works, even across great distances. It always helps to ground your requests in compassion and love and to acknowledge that the Divine heals in mysterious ways. Here is a "Prayer For Prayer":

May we let prayer be.

May we allow it to follow
the infinite patterns of the human heart.
May we learn to practice the most difficult art,
the art of noninterference.
May we be guided by prayer
instead of attempting to guide prayer.
May we allow prayer to be what it needs to be,
to be what it is.

May we let prayer be.