How to Pray
Notes on life as a process of becoming multidimensionally competent at prayer
A few weeks ago, someone asked me “do you think about god all the time?”
I uh, didn’t know what to do with that question. So I replied “I uh, don’t know what to do with that question.”
I wasn’t being cute, I really had no idea. There’s something I’m doing all the time, but describing it as “thinking about god” felt wrong on just about every dimension.
I’m going to try to make some notes here on what that something I’m doing all the time is.
In The Kingkiller Chronicles, there’s a language where hand gestures carry a lot of meaning, alongside the spoken words. In tonal languages, the way your voice inflects a given vowel can dramatically change the meaning of a word. We could imagine a language where your vowel inflection, hand gestures, posture, facial cues, age, hair color, tattoos, and food choices all dramatically change the message you’re sending, along with any spoken words or verbalizations.
It starts to get overwhelming to imagine, how many things you’d have to be constantly aware of and accounting for, just to carry on a simple conversation.
Since working with my Ayurveda doctor, I’ve started to see the body as a language — or maybe more accurately, I’ve started to see that there’s a constant conversation happening between me and my body and the world, and I’ve started to recognize the language of that conversation.
It’s an incredibly complex language, consisting of
all the signals I send my body (food, drink, medications, clothing & temperature regulation, activity levels, activity types, bed time, waking time, emotional habits…)
all the signals my body sends me (discomfort, pain, digestive changes, the way things taste, sleep disruptions, tinnitus, body temperature, phlegm, ease, comfort, joy, sadness, anger, sudden memories, brain fog…)
all the signals the environment sends me and my body (weather, overcrowding, flashing lights, overstimulation, sunlight, greenery, despair and chaos in the news, being surrounded by loving friends, honking trucks, blaring sirens…)
Everything that affects my body (which means everything that affects my experience of myself and the world, really) is a part of the conversation.
I don’t think any human can be said to be fluent in this language. But my doc Jess is about as close as it gets, and I benefit from her skill there. I recently had massive flares of alternating anger and despair, some of the strongest I’ve ever had — and Jess simply told me what processes were flooding my system, and pointed me at an herbal formulation to help clean up the waste from that underlying process. Within a day or two, the situation was under control, and I was back to feeling human again.
My experience of that situation, and many others like it, has been an experience of Jess facilitating a conversation with my body. We aren’t talking to my body in words or symbols, the way we’re used to thinking about language — but in functional herbs, habits, activities, and the like.
It’s an incredibly effective language. Every time I learn a little more how to engage in the conversation, my life gets a little better, and I get a little clearer of an idea of what reality is like in my body.
That wasn’t a digression from my notes on prayer. In a lot of ways, that’s the core of it.
Imagine a conversation that includes everything. Everything.
It includes all the body stuff I mentioned above, and also includes all your thoughts, words, actions, intuitions, senses, feelings, skills, imbalances, relationships, memories…
It includes families, nations, scientific advances, technological missteps, ecological destruction, pollution, relational poisoning, intergenerational propaganda, the mammal-deep love that drives the species, political insanity, civic responsibility…
It includes the void that underlies reality, the will of god that courses through your cells, the impulse to realize love, the clarity of awakening, the delusion of all the human games, synchronicities, state changes, chance meetings…
Everything. This conversation includes everything.
You are never not speaking this language. No matter how awake or how constricted your awareness is at a given moment, you’re always a part of this conversation. Your every action, every thought, every un-noticed background intuition is always both listening and speaking into this infinitely complex conversation, this Ayurveda of Reality, this navigational metis of Being.
I think this happens in a lot of domains, but I notice it most in spirituality and inner work: people seem to have some sense that there’s a right way to do things. That if they align themselves correctly towards highest spiritual good, it’s going to look a certain way.
This often feels pretty antiseptic to me. A bit neutered. We try to snip off our problematic bits in favor of some Pollyanna vision of bALaNcE or WhOLeNeSs; some soft-voiced, slow-blinking, steady-as-she-goes demeanor. I get the image of fabric softener pouring gently down the drain. Someone recently taught me the term spiritual casualties.
In my view, the whole of reality balances in the aggregate — but in its particulars, each of us is the embodiment of a very particular type of imbalance that’s been given us to steward. We each have our own unique flavor that we’re meant to hone and express in the world.
(Which isn’t an excuse to simply never change or grow up or clean up — there are integrated and un-integrated versions of the imbalances that each of us steward. The honing is so much of the work.)
To each of us, different aspects of experience feel salient and important. Each of us notices reality in a slightly different way. Slightly different things seem relevant or possible to us.
For example: if you can see something that no one else can see, that’s a sign that it’s your duty to do something with it. You’re the one stewarding it — the fact that you can see it and feel something about it is part of the conversation with reality, and the message is usually pretty clear.
We might say that every person walks through the world with a different instrument panel. Almost like every one of us is living inside the cockpit of our being, and we’re all looking at slightly different measurements for slightly different aspects of reality.
And, importantly, the specific instruments and measurements you’ve been given are an important message about which aspects of reality are yours to steward.
Phrased a little differently: your instrument panel is how you can listen to your conversation with Being — which determines how you can speak back.
How I Pray
So no, I’m not always thinking about god.
But I am almost always attuning very closely to the instrument panel, and to what its readings ask of me.
I am almost always listening to the Ayurvedic conversation with reality, and doing my best to speak back in the language of my stances, actions, and ways of Being.
I am almost always returning to (and forgetting and returning to) a “presence and continuous alertness” where I can be “always aware of the whole without excluding anything.”
I am almost always putting my awareness towards the way I make myself wrong, fog up my own instrument panel, assume that I need to be more like someone else, or more balanced or less myself — and attempting to scrub away those self-neutering impulses, so I can more fully be my function in Reality.
I am almost always aiming to become the Will of god.
I am almost always cultivating my own definition of agency.
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I don’t pray in English. I pray in the multidimensional language Reality can hear and respond to.
I don’t pray to ask for things. I pray as a gift to god, or Reality, or Wholeness, or—
My prayer isn’t one-way: I pray to god and god prays to me, and we listen to each other and make whatever beauty and power we can out of the conversation.
I almost never think about god. But I’m almost always in conversation with god.
I realized after writing this that almost two years ago, I wrote this piece, “A Prayer”. Among the many ways that piece seems to have guided and scripted my life since then, it does seem that I have now stepped towards the mode of prayer I was looking for back then. Re-reading it feels incredibly strange, but I’ll take it.
“Until only that place remains.”
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