I knew as a member of the church that I needed to really get into my prayers. Pray anxiously and fervently. Pray until I was in tears or until the spirit had spoken something telling to me. I used to feel disappointment when someone (often a kid, but definitely not always a kid) would offer up a hollow, cliche-ridden, formulaic, by-the-numbers prayer. They just weren't into it enough!

If one wanted the spirit, then one had to dig deep and offer sincere, possibly tearful prayer. Those were the good prayers, and by implication, the really spiritual Mormons who offered them. No one could doubt one's spiritual efforts if there was a catch in one's throat or tearfulness offered up in one's prayers.

Also, one could offer sincere gratitude for this or that person's character, efforts, qualities, etc. This would earn certain brownie points with that person and with people who cared about that person, or with people who would just be touched that you thought of widow Johnson's plight, etc. Or one could show one's thoughtfulness or nearness to the spirit by asking for blessings for this or that person or missionary effort or national leader or earthquake victims, etc. Again, this earned spiritual points, maybe even putting you on the Bishop's radar as someone to give particular callings to.

But what really hit me, now that I've been detoxing for a few years, now that I have some distance from my TBM days, was to hear my teen son at the dinner table the other night offer up a deeply voiced, heartfelt, reaching prayer. It sounded like his whole heart was in it. Oh the care and concern that poured out of this teenager. It was like he was following some special way to do prayers....

Now there is this whole rhetorical pose in Mormon culture--sometimes sincere and sometimes one has to wonder--where the speaker (the "voice") of the prayer or blessing or ordination (or parade or football game or high school graduation) offers up tears, pregnant pauses, catches in the throat, difficulties saying emotionally charged things, etc., and other means of displaying presumed sincerity. This gains one attention for the depth of one's spirtuality.

To me, hearing my son say the deeply voiced, serious, brow-clenched praying intonations reminded me of nothing so much as trance. I'm not so sure that teens should be going into trance or inducing others to go into trance. I'm not so sure that religion should teach daily prayer offered by laymen as a form of trance. Trance seems like handling someone's soul or as a way to open one's self to suggestion that may or may not be rational or in one's best interest.

One of the ways that police officers and citizens are taught to identify a possible terrorist is to note whether or not the person is mumbling trance-inducing prayers. These seem like a way to put the mind on auto-pilot. People can be convinced to do terrible things when they turn off their reason. When they are trained to routinely shut off their critical faculties such people can be opened to abusive suggestion and coercion by an organization.

A lot of good research has been done on the positive effects of meditation. I would recommend reading up on it, and seeing the difference between "prayer" and meditation, and then suggesting these techniques to your son.
It may not go over well, even though TSCC teaches prayer and meditation, meditation is usually frowned upon.
I actually view prayer more of a passive aggressive way of thanking people, welcoming/blessing people that should just be thanked, welcomed, or given well wishes outright. Why pray to god to thank someone for making the food, when you can just tell the person to their face, "thanks for making this great food"? Why not call the sick person and talk to them instead of praying to god about their well being?

...so-and-so in "fervent payer"--I get a picture of some guy rocking back and forth for hours at a time, sweating, hyperventilating and clenching his hands together until he gets light-headed and almost passes out, then miraculously seeing angels & all sorts of things.

The church teaches "fervent prayer." No one denies that, right?

Prayer, particularly public prayer, can be engaged in hypocritically or in a manner that is so sincere and naive that it is all too exposed and exposing.

There is for sure a social use to prayer. I've seen this in action in an LDS setting, and I'm sure others have to. Not just the social capital of well wishing, with all its low cunning and ward politics in motion, but I've heard a Bishop say that "Sis. So-and-so gave a very spiritual prayer at Mutual the other night, and we should pray about her as a possible next YW President."

Unless you believe the Bishop is truly inspired of God and that Sis. So-and-so delivered up a public prayer that was "sincere and of pure intent"--then thinking about prayer as a possible tool of manipulation and as way to induce trance, becomes a way to identify and question one of the church's chief means of mind control.

My sense is--and evidently not many other people think this is worth thinking about--that the church teaches prayer in a manner that serves the church by binding members mentally and emotionally to it. Remember Transcendental Meditation? One of the effective criticisms of TM was that it was essentially a method of mind control.

Crickets chirping. I know. It is interesting that the idea that the church teaches prayer as trance is considered by many readers of this and similar boards as either too uncontroversial to bother with or too far away from the immediate concerns of deconverting and managing one's family relationships in the wake of that, or perhaps that the idea is trite or otherwise not important enough to consider.

For me, being able to talk to TBM family members about trance and what it is and what it does is another way to lever their own reflective and critical faculties into action without me directly attacking the church or attacking that very sacred cow, prayer. Instead, as when one discusses Scientology or JWs or Jonestown, or the Hale Bopp suicides with them, one instigates their own processes of knowledge about mind control mechanisms. And again, one does this without mentioning or attacking the LDS church.

The two things, critical reflection and a deepening awareness of mind control mechanisms, is our best means of addressing and decreasing the influence of coercive groups in society.

. . . during prayer, this may account for many reports of answered prayers. There is a school of thought that basically says that we are all incarnations or manifestations of the Divine. God is not a "being" out there somewhere, separate from us, but more like a field of potential, taking form only AS us. So when we pray, we're not asking some other being to do something for us. We're declaring what will happen through our own power and authority.

This doesn't work in an ordinary state of consciousness. There are a lot of techniques for achieving the necessary state of mind, and I wouldn't be surprised if occasionally some Mormon accidentally got himself into that state of mind. Without understanding it in the least, of course.