My mom taught me several forms of healing prayer from a young age to manage different ongoing health issues.  She told me around 3-4 that I could ask for what I needed and would be given help. So I never questioned. That’s what I did, and that’s what happened. It seemed pretty straightforward, and as a result, I had a very strong divine connection as a kid, complete with dreams and visions and powerful spiritual experiences.

But I did have some pretty serious abuse going on in my home and by the time I was 15-16 I started having very severe depressive bouts. I didn’t have good luck with medications, supplements, various healing modalities. It just was a cycle where I was unfunctional on a semi-regular basis, and I just had to deal with it. I had some physical pain issues as well due to malformed hips.

I came to rely on healing prayer as my only effective means for maintaining my own strength and keeping my body and mind together.

At the same time, I’ve always been a voracious student of religion, my own, and everyone else’s. I even did a Transcendental Meditation training at 19 although I was devout LDS. I was raised in an all-one perspective–I never saw a conflict. I studied Native American Religion and Literature in college, dove into the scriptures, and loved finding overlaps between traditions.

Over the years, I became a voracious student specifically of how people and traditions around the world used different forms of prayer to heal the body/mind/spirit and relieve pain. Things I learned in this study got me through six pregnancies, raising four children, and a bunch of surgeries, and a bumpy family life, along with my regular bouts of being mentally “under the bed.”

Sacred music and prayer through song and praise was an integral part of my sustenance as well. When I started singing with the Utah Chamber Artists, some of the sacred music we sang transported me to completely new places spiritually and was enomously comforting over many difficult years.

But an all-consuming burnout came hard at about 44. I fell into a place of total despair and giving up—nihilism, really. The spiritual heights I’d experienced didn’t matter anymore I was just empty inside and could muster nothing. I stopped intentionally praying for the first time. It was a couple of years I gave up on everything, on myself, my life, my family. I had no hope for me or them. I was waiting for the credits to roll and prayed daily for it to end. I treated my body in a way that would help that dark cause along as best I could, so I became even sicker and more miserable. It was a very dark time.

But at the lowest of the low, I finally did manage to say one prayer in mid-December of 2018: “Help me.”

That night, my Apple music was on random radio, and an unfamiliar song came on that was strange—it had call-and-response singing in it and wasn’t in English. I wasn’t familiar with the type of music. But when I heard the song, I felt a physical change in my chest. I said at the time that it felt like my heart was being sewn back together, a bit painfully, even. I remember gasping and holding my chest. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t look.

But later the same evening, the same song came back on, and I had the same sensation in my chest. It was just too bizarre and unfamiliar. I looked and saw what it was, but I didn’t look it up. I was worried I’d get in my head about it or find out something that would break the spell. I just downloaded the album, put the headphones in, and played it.

All. The. Time.

For months I had headphones in and that album on, no matter what I was doing. I realized if I kept it on, I could do things again. It was annoying I’m sure, as I’d have one headphone in even when I was with people. It was like a lifeline to a tiny string of sanity.

If I started spinning downward, it was as simple as popping in the headphones, and I’d feel my heart come together and sense a powerful, lighthearted, loving fatherly presence with me. Those familiar with the tradition will know about that. I was blessed to meet a spiritual guide on the inner plane before I even knew what that meant.

I did finally go down the rabbit hole to see what the magic was all about. The song was “Baba Hanuman” by Krishna Das. The album was Breath of the Heart.

That led me to seek out a yoga therapist in the bhakti tradition. I told him I had decided to “stop giving up,” because apparently my efforts to tap out were not being accepted. I could barely move my body when I first went to him, it was like I’d turned to stone. I felt—and moved—like I was 80. But when we sang our first “Hare Krishna” together in a small room with his harmonium before doing the basic asanas for 80-year-olds, I heard several other voices singing with us. I looked up, wide-eyed, and Matt smiled and nodded and acted like that was normal.

Things were only starting to get weird.

Matt introduced me to two other members of the “stop giving up” team—a brilliant intuitive LCSW, Julie, whom I still work with, who was the one who started by advising me to “envision a life worth living,” itself of course a form of prayer; also my Vedic advisor and teacher Dennis at the Northwest Institute of Vedic Sciences. He was a fatherly presence in my life that offered much needed clarity around where I was on my path and why, and how I needed to prepare. He made it pretty clear that I hadn’t even seen anything yet on this roller coaster and has been very right so far.

I’ve now spent 500+ hours on in-depth yoga study in Jyotish, the arm of Yoga called the Science of Light, working on my 200YT training in the amazing 6000+ year old vision of the Vedas. I have been initiated into Kashmir Shaivism, Tibetan Vajra Yoga and tantra, and took my Zen refuge and boddhisatva vows. During this time, I had started having many strange memories of different times, places, and experiences, even remembering specific skills, mantras, and mudras or just finding my body doing them.

I can’t say this was always a pleasant experience. It was more than a little alarming. I started having intense dreams about different beings, places, and animals that I felt deeply attached to. I’d see specific esoteric symbols–I would wake up and have to go Google the things I saw so I could learn about them and find out what they were. They all interrelated, although I’d never seen any of them in my life. But I started collecting reminders of these dreams on an altar as they gave me a strong sense of comfort.

Put simply, I got really weird and kind of freaked out my family.

I freaked out myself, too. Most of the time I was pretty sure I was going straight up insane.

But I couldn’t argue that I wasn’t very obviously being intensely guided with a loving hand, even if it was on a very unexpected, esoteric, and exotic foreign path. Weird signs were happening constantly. It felt weirdly familiar, I’d learn something and would feel a sense of, “Oh yes, how could I have forgotten that?” I felt like my people were coming for me and I was learning a powerful form of self healing.

My prayer had been answered with a whole new world of prayer and I was living first hand the healing the power of the Name.

The ubiquitous presence of sanskrit chants praising the many, many names of the divine parents did eventually normalize in my house. Four years later, we all came to realize it wasn’t just a freak moment, it’s now just a normal thing mom needs to be happy— even my kids hum along now. The sunday playlist includes plenty of Hare Krishnas, lots of Tabernacle Choir, Gayatri Mantras, more Tab, gospel Elvis and Dolly, and of course plenty of Krishna Das, Deva Premal, and Wah. My husband even had the same heart-sewing experience himself a few times with chant of the Names and was part of some of those unexpected esoteric experiences. While he was skeptical and antagonistic at first, he now has a daily yoga and meditation practice and says the whole thing has been a positive thing in his life.

So I have had to just come to terms with being a full-blown weirdo, but life has really become truly magical in some ways. By no means has it been a straight path forward, not at all, and I didn’t always cooperate with the process. I’m definitely still on this roller coaster, but over the past year I have been able to bring all of my training to bear to stay substantially steadier and address mental, physical, and family storms on the spot with a level of stability and skill that I have never had before. I’ve even have been able to increasingly use my training to help others on the path.

When you do find out that people have the ability to self heal using different forms of prayer, it’s hard to not want to shout it from the housetops. It has truly given me my life back and is showing me new possibilities I never would have thought possible. But I have been unclear how to approach sharing this, because of how strange it all has been. I’ve decided to just go with being straightforward about it. No point in trying to explain what I can’t explain myself.

To make things weirder, much to my surprise, the more I studied millenia-old texts and translations from Buddhist and Vedic traditions from Japan, China, and Tibet, the more I decided I wanted to return to the faith of my tradition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. This was partly due to uncanny cosmology similarities, but also a very expansive view of the world and human race and the very apparent one great whole of the truth that is available out of the best books mankind has written. My teachers across the eastern traditions all teach one to go back and be with your tradition and people—that you were put there for a reason.

I don’t need any tradition to be error free. I don’t need any organization to even be what it says it is. I also do see that religious organizations do a lot of inadverent harm to people, and that in any tradition there will be things I cannot support or teach. But Zion vision has been firmly planted in me from a young age, and I could never shake it, despite my trying. My home faith is where I feel I can best serve that vision.

I was able to honestly and sincerely answer my interview questions and the day I went back to the temple was a beautiful and profound day for me—I spent the afternoon in the Krishna temple afterward. It was a full day of praise for me and standing in holy places feeling held and loved and ever-enough. Everthing looks very different to me now than it did. I can’t really share it in a way that would likely be understood by those in or those out of the church, but I can say the joy is all the same joy. I love the sisters of my faith and want to be available to them to encourage, uplift, and comfort. My love has no manner of -ites.

I’m not saying that outside healers can’t help people, that just hasn’t been my path. I went to dozens of traditional and nontraditional people looking for help for my reeling mind and body, but from early on it was clear that my path was about learning to self heal. I was given amazing advisors and teachers as trail guides, but even the most advanced of them all pointed me back to myself and my own ability. They confirmed what I already had learned the hard way—my path is to discover the divine healing already inside of me and help anyone else interested to find their own inner healing.

I continue to study different traditions from all over the world for hours each day, and I continue to use my own body and inner landscape as my laboratory to directly experience how various forms of prayer impact my own pain and tendencies toward mental disregulation. My physical pain and fatigue has been fully healed, and I can usually regulate my emotions and mind in about 10-15 minutes if I feel off-kilter. I am seeing that the human body is actually empowered to consciously self heal and there is a symphony of instruments that can address almost any ailment.

I have seen that different prayer forms are types of healing instruments, each delivering a specific type of medicine to the needed part at just the right time. I have also increased my energy sensitivity substantially to the point that no faith or belief is required on my part at all–I can physically and kinesthetically feel divine energy, it is simply a matter of building sensitivity and tuning into that space.  But faith still is the first principle. I have to trust that as I have asked, and the divine has promised that I will receive, that means the answer is always coming.

While I’ve been acting as a lay chaplain for a group of women for quite some time, I’m now beginning my formal training with a Masters in interfaith chaplaincy. This is a lifelong dream for me, and I’m grateful to finally get to do it.

I don’t know where this ride will take me, but I’ve learned that when I tune in throughout the day, listen closely, and follow the call, I continue to discover and experience new levels of divine love I never thought possible. We choose where we place our gaze, and that thing will fill our eyes, life, and experience. I choose to keep my eye single to divine love. Nothing is so sweet to me.

Val