I have to admit that a part of me feels exposed when writing about the topic of prayer. I am an incredibly spiritual person who is also not at all religious. I think that a lot of spiritual people get put into the category of what I call “The Woo” too easily. For me, my own tendency to feel shame around my spiritual practices coupled with other people’s tendency to pigeonhole a person’s beliefs into a preconceived category means that I have formed an incredibly private relationship to prayer. I don’t share what I do as a daily practice with anyone but my family. I am reclusive here in this world of owning my spiritual connection. On some level, this post is an attempt to out myself and also encourage people to consider their own relationship to prayer.

Religion and dogma have done more harm to my psyche and world view than good. Thanks to 12 years of Catholic School, I have ingrained religious beliefs about judgement, punishment, and femininity that do not serve my spirituality at all. Like many spiritual seekers, I at first completely rebelled at what I was taught. I sought spirituality in nature to find connection and interrelatedness. Over time, the path of my own wellness led to my deeper spiritual beliefs. I have studied yoga, paganism, taoism, buddhism, shamanism, and esoteric philosophies to name just a few.

Truth: No one needs to have a religious belief to pray. In fact, religious beliefs may get in the way of the experience of the divine with prayer.

Suffering

I remember a few years ago visiting Medugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a sacred pilgrimage site for those who want to connect with the Virgin Mary. It was over 100 degrees the day I visited. When people visit this site, the climb up a steep, rocky hill on their knees. Some use nothing under their knees. Others choose to have a mat that they place under themselves as they climb. The belief here is that somehow suffering opens up a portal to divine love.

This form of prayer and pilgrimage is common in many religions. Suffering as a form of prayer and earning the right to divine connection is something many of us believe we have to engage in as an attempt to show our human fallibility to our god. We are putting god on a pedestal, quarantining ourself off from the the divine in a way that says our humanness isn’t powerful, our intrinsic separation isn’t divine.

When I think about this kind of prayer, it seems like we have to earn the attention of the divine through suffering. Somehow there is a twisted belief that we are supposed to suffer to get attention or deserve the divine. If the only way we can experience divine energy is through justification, we are missing a major aspect of the natural order of life around us. We are focusing on the negative and have lost sight of the beauty and innate goodness that surrounds us. It makes me sad to feel into how religion has somehow short circuited a divine right we all have - the right to trust connection to all that surrounds us.

Inside all of us is an image that we need to suffer to get attention. It stems from having to cry to get our needs met as babies. Whether or not we choose to pray from that point of suffering is up to us. However, it is in times of suffering that I notice many people turn to prayer. Maybe we should attempt to identify what beliefs hold us to the need to find the divine through suffering. Perhaps if we look towards this belief, we can allow ourselves to have a relationship to the divine without pain. We all deserve to connect to the divine in multiple ways.

Ego

Choice is one of the most divine aspects we have of being alive. Sometimes I get a bit down on myself for choosing a field of practice where advice is taking over another person’s right to choose. At times it feels like an ultimate test of my own divine nature to let everything go and stay present with the choices that other people make. I feel like the fixers amongst us are lucky. Their path is to dictate another’s process. Fixing is ultimately not my path, however alluring. I wish I could just tell someone what to do, give them my sagest advice, and ply them to my will. My reality would be easier to tolerate. I would also have a lot less of an understanding of the divine and prayer without demand.

I ask myself, if I fix another, who am I serving? If I require others to listen to my advice - no matter how educated, insightful, or spiritually guided, ahem - how does someone learn to trust their own path? Choice provides us with an understanding of our truest divine self as well as the parts of us that are human and absolutely not divine. A person knows their own divinity through their power to choose…and mess up…and have conequences… and then to still be loved unconditionally. Every time we give in to another’s will and allow them to choose for us, we lose an invitation to awaken to divinity. This carries over into prayer. Whenever we pray in a way that asks the divine to take away our choice, we are ultimately aligning with human ego, not divine right.

We as humans need to know that we can make a bad choice and are capable of dealing with the consequences. We need to know in the midst of making any choice that we are not actually good or bad but that we are learning. Ultimately, we are learning about our own divinity when we make a choice that doesn’t feel in alignment with our own soul or one that leads us into suffering. We need to feel the consequences of choice on every level in order to understand our own divinity. We need to have choice to understand how we are controlled by our ego.

When we pray from the space of ego, we are attempting to bring ourselves to the divine. We are asking the divine to feel how we are individual in our experience of life. Most of the time, we do this by telling the divine our problems. We act like Jesus before facing his own death, begging someone else to make our problems disappear. We do not want to face the consequences of our own being, our own need to learn, our own need to fail. When we ask the divine to take something from us, we are forgetting that we are also divine.

Prayer that seeks a letting go or giving away is being used to avoid facing our own ego. With the ego involved in prayer there is likely to be a lack of reciprocity. Our prayer is less likely to be relational and more likely to be controlling or avoiding. We may bring ourselves to the divine, yes. Yet we are going to fight allowing the divine to come into us. In these cases, any relief that occurs is not indicative of a state of divine connection. Relief is a response to being able to let go.

It is easier to pray for something specific than to allow prayer to be an amorphic desire to change the self without demand. We want concrete evidence when the realm of prayer is simply light. We need to allow ourselves to move from physical to spiritual beings when we pray. If the ego is doing the praying, this movement is not possible. This is the trap so many of us experience in the toxic aspects of religion. I know I learned to pray through ego, not surrender.

Prayer is not about power. It is an opportunity to experience surrender.

One to None

When we pray, we have a chance to feel something outside of the realm of our human story. We have a capability of experiencing something beyond our known self. We can invite in the experience of being none instead of holding onto our sense of being one. This feels a bit backwards to the way we usually think of the self, doesn’t it? One to none?

In this case of prayer, I am using one to represent who we know ourself to be. When we have a spiritual experience, the self, the one, can disappear or merge into a higher state of none, nothing, no boundaries. A simple state of none is a state in which the one can disappear into something else and become everything.

States of being such as joy, grace, unconditional love, gratitude, forgiveness, and acceptance morph our sense of one, our sense of self, into a sense of connected none. The one is no longer the most important being in the space. Instead, everything connects into a space where we lose the self into a greater sense of what we define as life and divine.

I believe that an inability to experience time being with the none - no expectations, no sense of need, no self importance - is a large part of the prevalent dissatisfaction in society. Simple non-demanding spaces transform our experience of self and reality. They help us lose tunnel vision and expand into connection. This provides us with a reality check and balance to the power of our own one. We have the sense of choice and perspective in all of our life experiences through the embodiment of the none.

This is something that we lack the opportunity to do as a cultural norm. Bringing back spiritual communion with life and nature has to be a choice because the opportunity to find ways to do it in society are not abundant. Simply put, our society does not support deeply spiritual experiences in community. Touchstones exist, but we often have to pay for them. It’s a matter of understanding the necessity of cultivating moments of none to feel purpose. This is often not in our perspective when we function in the realm of our own one too strongly.

When we choose to meet the divine through prayer, we have the choice to bring ourselves to the divine or to let the divine come to us. These states of divine illumination are terrifying in that there is a loss of self in the process. This is the point but also the place of our own avoidance. Every excuse we have will come up as a lure to get out of seeking an experience with the none. Control, doubt, insecurity, and resistance are a natural part of deepening a prayer from ego into none.

Even worse may be the times that we create space to pray and dissolve the ego but nothing shows up or we fail. Do we feel this as rejection and give up or do we try again? Time for prayer that invites the divine into us as a daily practice can allow space for failure and unexpected surrender. When we create an open template for a divine imtimacy in our lives, we may actually get what we are seeking more easily.

Spiritual experiences come from inviting the possibility of divine and human unity into your reality. When we pray to seek rather than to give away, we are opening up to the divine in a way that allows light and positive sensation to move through us. Light and positive sensations elevate our sense of being and changes our relationship to how we see the world. We all need a greater sense of perspective, connection, and community to thrive in our lives. The world needs more people who know how to connect and not get lost in the everyday.

I do want to completely finish outing myself but perhaps not by sharing my own daily methodology of praying. When I first started writing this post, I thought that I was going to entitle it “Enlightenment in the 21st Century.” What I realized as I started to write is that as soon as we have an ideal in our sense of connection, we have lost a vital part of the aliveness of that connection.

Enlightenment is seen as an ideal. It is seen as something to seek. It is seen as the peak of a mountain top that, once experienced, we will somehow know something more about the universe or be the idealized person we have always yearned to find.

The reality? We live in a newtonian world - what comes up must come down. Rather than create peaks, we need to be able to form roots. With a foundational understanding of how to see the good enough in ourselves and others, we create tolerance. Over time, the good enough can grow. For some of you, one breath of surrender with the divine is going to feel like more than you ever expected.

This post is an invitation to practice how to bring the divine into the self to become a person that sees the world with perspective even in times of human folly and failure. That’s it. There are no answers. There is no real enlightenment. There is simply trying. There is seeking through prayer.

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