What is Prayer?
Prayer is not an act of belief, nor is it necessarily even an act of words. It is an act of attention.
There are many forms of prayer in every tradition throughout history. Anciently, prayer was a form of “communion,” meaning one actively opens to and engages with the benevolent force—that mystery of life, of aliveness, itself.
I’d propose that everyone, both the devout believer and the person of no belief or faith, would find something of value in experimenting with some prayer forms. After all, as one of my most dear teachers said, “All action is prayer.” I’ve come to see this is the case. Once one realizes one is inadvertently praying all the time, one is wise to start being a bit more intentional about it.
Prayer is a validated spiritual technology that has been used for millenia to heal people in every aspect of their being. Let’s start on some basic, self-verifiable ground.
YOU ARE ALIVE
As a living being, you are in fact life—a cell in the body of all that lives, full of living cells. You emerged from a living system that you can’t exist or survive without independently. There is a force inside you that keeps you alive. We understand some of its processes, but we don’t know what “life” is. We just know we wouldn’t be without it.
Life clearly is observed to be a powerful force that creates, nurtures, sustains, and heals—life knows not only how to make new life, recycle old life, turn seeds into food for life, and create new beings and entire networks of living systems—it knows how to heal a broken bone, a broken mind, and even a broken heart.
Life is a strange, ubiquitous force in and around us that we take in with every breath. Yet somehow we manage to ignore and dismiss it. We childishly assume it is “known” simply because we can observe and describe to some extent its cycles and processes. We may think of life as separate from God in the traditional sense. But the mystery of the whole thing that is aliveness remains. We have no idea what it really is.
Consider the story of the big fish who swims by two little fish and asks,
“How’s the water?”
To which one little fish turns to his companion and asks,
“What’s water?”
PRAYER IS FEELING THE WATER
When we become still and start paying attention to it, to life—to its bigness and beauty—this is what I would call “prayer.” It’s an intentional act of placing our focus on the mystery that surrounds and lies within us. It’s an honest question asked of it all, “What is this?”
It’s the humility to set aside everything you’ve been told out the whole thing, and even your own thoughts and beliefs and past experiences with it, for a moment to ask and really want to listen to the answer, not just explain at it what you’ve decided it all is.
It’s obvious that our eyes are filled with what we look at. Where our attention goes, that’s where our energy flows. Our attention and focus is our literal energy, our own life force. As we focus our own life force, our perception, to observe the whole life force within us and around us, life meets life in our awareness.
When we sit curiously with life, usually starting with our own breath of life, and we pay attention to it—life itself starts to grow to fill the experience. It starts to look back at every turn. The mind wants to go crazy with this and talk about it and decide what it all means, but it’s critical to be the librarian here with the ever-present, “Sh.” This life force you are observing doesn’t work in words.
The kingdom of heaven is truly found within, and it doesn’t mind much how we label it with human words. It’s busy breathing you, sustaining you, and healing you, literally all the time. To simply tune into this reality, to appreciate the quality and flavor of it, on purpose, opens us up to a whole new universe that we can directly experience right here, right now, in our own skin.
It moves beyond opinion and belief into a daily, lived interaction. And while it is subtle, it changes everything—we can start to actually feel the water we’re swimming in—that is swimming in us. And as life by nature heals, this act of attention on life starts becoming medicine, healing us without need of any direction on our part, simply because we are part of it.
OBSERVING LIFE VS. DIRECTING LIFE
Life knows what our life needs without any asking, that’s observable and obvious. Life will keep healing your cuts and regenerating your cells and making you food regardless of whether you appreciate it or “believe” in it, whatever that means. It will keep doing its beautiful thing long after all of us end our sojourn here.
But weirdly, and unlike most other beings, humans have a unique form of consciousness that allows for self-destructiveness. There is a logic and order to this, but that’s for another post. It’s clear to everyone that humans are equipped with a will that allows us to ignore and fight against life, even against ourselves. We’ve mostly been raised to sit in darkness at noonday and inanely pretend that it is we humans that wield life, and not compeltely obvious that it is the other way around.
So this type of prayer, or communing with the force that is life, is more an act of curiosity, cooperation, submission, observing, and allowing than accomplishing or directing anything. It’s about putting down our fight and opinions about everything and actually looking around with a beginner’s mind for a minute. We start being humble and curious observers who are interested in watching what’s actually happening rather than trying to make things happen.
We suspect that perhaps there is something more interesting to discover and learn in this beyond chasing our desires and playing the culturally approved game of the day (which you might note arbitrarily changes every generation).
This style of prayer is about stopping to listen and observe it rather than constantly be stating our will into the wind. And despite how most of us have been taught to pray—we can’t listen when we’re talking.
IS LIFE DIVINE? IS LIFE GOD?
Those with a directional faith in a specific higher power generally see the force of life as a manifestation of divine power. That would depend on what “divine” means.
I find a practical definition of divinity is “a beneficient, powerful force that unconditionally creates, upholds, heals, and sustains living beings.” (Spoiler: creating, upholding, healing, and sustaining are together my working definition of loving.)
From that view, that would encompass our entire ecosystem, the complete network of life, including the earth which we spring from and which feeds us, the sun that sustains us with light, warmth, and growth, the atmosphere that breathes us alive, the water that makes all our cells functional, the fire/electricity in our nervous systems firing between our synapses. In fact, it is the entire cosmic clock that keeps us graciously in a gravitational cycle of push and pull that supports life rather than whirling us randomly out into space. It would also include the fifth element, or aether, the space between all of that which provides the container for it to exist.
Life isn’t the effect of these things nor can it be separated from these things, life is the entire combination of all these things—part and parcel with them—one, big, very busy verb.
SO AM I GOD? IS GOD SEPARATE FROM ME?
Another obvious and observable fact—we live within this living system. You are one cell in its big, fat endless body. Feel into what that is like, you don’t need to just imagine it, it’s happening here. We are parts and extensions of it, not foreigners to it. Our obsession with separateness doesn’t even make any scientific sense–that’s not how the natural world works at all. Nothing can exist outside of the system it sprang from.
As Watts explained, paraphrasing here: we didn’t come into the Earth, we came out of it. Just as an apple tree “apples,” the earth “peoples.”
Even if you believe your consciousness came from another dimension, planet, pre-existence, or out of nothing (not scientifically a thing), your consciousness now exists in a living form that springs from a living system. Your consciousness has been trained to think it is separate from its system. That doesn’t mean that your system isn’t conscious of you, or that the system itself isn’t in fact the root of your consciousness, but that’s for you to explore for yourself.
This is why all of our ancestors respected all of these forces as divine—earth, air, water, even fire, and all the space between—these are concrete, material observable forces that clearly exist both within and without each of us, and we can’t live without the entire combination. No rational person can argue this, as we all can observe it with our own eyes.
From a spiritual standpoint, this is also why contemplatives from the gnostic corner of every world religion report the same interconnected, all-one experience when they take this inner path to the whole, as do folks today spending time with plant teachers. Life will indeed talk to you if you’re interested in listening, and while your experience will be your own, it will still likely follow a general trajectory laid down by elders across a wide range of traditions worldwide for thousands of years that all correlate.
Neglecting all of the documentation on the topic that we now have translated from even the most remote corners of the world is just another example of outdated bias interfering with clinical inquiry. We’ve only had all of it in hand for a decade or so, but it’s all right there. Regardless, the good news is this can be a fully DIY project, no outside sources or middle men needed.
It seems rather silly that such an appreciation of the web of life as one great whole, each of us being a pearl in Indra’s Net reflecting back the whole from our perspective, is deemed spiritualistic or irrational. It’s biology-based, observable, and rather practical, from an ecological point of view.
THE PART CAN EXPERIENCE THE WHOLE
And even better, as parts of this thing, we can turn our attention to it. We can tune into the whole, be the fish feeling the ocean.
In doing this, we discover there is a radio station, so to speak, that is always playing. We get to hear that music, we get to tune and atune our instrument. If we choose to pay attention to it, to set aside the external game and playing our little part for just a moment, we get to physically and directly experience the magic of the whole. As we do this, belief, even knowledge, becomes irrelevant. God is no longer an idea, a goal, or a creed—it becomes a direct, daily experience.
BIG DEAL AND NO BIG DEAL
When one begins to really take the time to feel into what it is to be embodied in this one great whole—a whole new world emerges.
The big beautiful mystery really is a big deal, a big discovery that has always been just right there. Sometimes when tuning in you can get just a taste that leaves you full of amazement and praise and true bliss for days, and the devotion and praise spontaneously wells up for the big beautiful thing we live within that is aliveness. The ocean of it is so vast.
But, also it’s not a big deal. It really is a simple practice of attention, of tuning in.
Sure, there are amazing moments on the inner path. But mostly it is quiet, awkward, slow, very personal, and hard to communicate. Words fail most of the time. At first you question your sanity, later you wonder how you ever didn’t see it.
In a way, it really doesn’t feel that different from sitting by the actual ocean. Yes it is overwhelmingly huge, essential to all life, dangerous, vast, ancient, terrifying, and full of living beings, death, secrets, and mysteries. It is always beautiful.
But sometimes you can still sit down in the sand and feel sad.
WHERE IS THE EDGE OF ALL THAT IS?
So yes, I take a pretty expansive view of God. I have directly experienced what I would call the divine in many forms. I have found it within myself and around me. In moments, I have felt it in all forms, in every face, in all and in the nothingness.
For me, there is no edge of what I would call divine. It is all one big magical mysterious thing that somehow I get to experience being a part of, yet also directly and personally interact with in an infinite number of forms. I do rely on specific forms of the divine when I turn my attention toward it to speed my tuning in because they hold a lot of power for me. But I also know that even these are gateways, one face of the thing that can never encompass the whole of it.
Plenty of people with and without formal religion take this view. Most people from any tradition have moments where they marvel at the beauty and complexity of the force that makes the earth and everything on it alive. When I talk about prayer here, I am speaking of a very safe space beyond beliefs where we women of most traditions and faiths—or no specific faith at all—can appreciate and marvel together.
Simply consider spending some time being with and listening to the force behind life, the sound it’s making in your lungs, the way the wind feels on the skin. Consider that there may be something there to listen to, butit may take a bit to detox from constant overstimulation and distraction, which dulls the senses.
I had a friend in a faith transition say, “I just haven’t figured out the whole God thing yet.” And of coure my response was, “How weird that your 3lb cranial meat bag hasn’t yet been able to wrap itself around the Infinite.”
Let’s have some humility here and quit drawing fences and putting the infinite mystery of life in made-up human boxes that have nothing to do with reality. As the scriptures say, the divine thought process is not our thought process, the divine ways are not human ways, we can’t even fathom the scale of what life is, let alone grasp the omnipresence of its force. However, we can wonder at life, open to it, and allow ourselves to be fueled by it.
PRAYER is an inner cultivation our own inner power to connect to the whole of life to heal and regenerate ourselves where we are at right now. It’s an act of attention—resting the mind in grace, creating an inner healing place.