How to Pray & Develop Your Prayer Practice

Is prayer part of your daily practice?

So many of us grew up with a dogmatic, rigid idea of prayer. We sat through church services, repeating words we didn’t truly understand the meanings of. But over the past ten years, I’ve discovered that prayer is fluid and entirely unique to each and every person who practices it. Others of us grew up with no relationship to prayer at all. And I’m sure some people also had a really beautiful relationship to it.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing my personal journey with prayer and helping you start your own intentional prayer practice or refine however you’ve been practicing.

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Growing up Catholic, I developed a deep connection with “God,” Jesus, and Mother Mary. Now, I incorporate elements of my upbringing in my daily practice and relationship with the divine, but I also don’t let the understanding of my upbringing limit me.

Whether or not you prescribe to a certain religion or consider yourself more “spiritual,’ your prayer practice is a powerful tool in developing your connection with the divine.

Join me in today’s episode as I explain how my prayer practice has grown and evolved over the years. I’m breaking down the different parts of a prayer and also sharing some of my favorites to inspire you if you are open for inspiration..

Listen to episode 378 now!

In episode 378 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

[1:35] Why we pray and how to set your intentions in prayer
[2:57] The three types of prayer I’ve worked with throughout my life
[6:23] What “God” means to me and my relationship with the divine mother and father
[7:24] Where I pray and how I incorporate it into my daily life
[9:02] Some of the people who have inspired me and impacted my prayer practice
[12:58] What prayer isn’t and how to disconnect from the sensationalized definition of “spirituality”
[17:59] My personal journey with prayer and how my process has changed over the years
[18:51] Prayer and organized religion and why they aren’t necessarily inseparable
[23:54] Why the law of attraction isn’t real and why you shouldn’t use prayer isn’t instant gratification
[27:21] How to integrate traditional prayers into your personal practice
[29:35] The elements of prayer that I use in my own practice
[40:57] Practicing vulnerability in your prayers and your earthly relationships
[43:16] Prayer through journaling and how putting your words on paper can be powerful
[44:26] Why we sometimes feel our prayers aren’t being answered and how to practice active listening
[50:12] Consistency and repetition in your prayer practice
[52:06] Praying for others, even people you’ve never met or don’t yet know
[1:01:38] How to close your prayers in a way that resonates with you
[1:03:57] One of my favorite prayers for love and light regardless of religion

Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in the episode:

Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:

[00:08:26] “Prayer for me is really about having vibrant two-way communication with the divine.” – Elizabeth
[00:13:35] “Sometimes it’s just the most subtle stuff that can honestly catalyze the most miraculous healings, changes, transformations.” – Elizabeth
[00:56:15] “Prayer is energy work, prayer is potent. Prayer is powerful, especially in groups and especially in volume. So of course your prayers are powerful action.” – Elizabeth
[01:09:04] “You can take and work with any kind of prayer and make it your own.” – Elizabeth

How was this episode for you?

Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!

About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

Transcripts for Episode 378:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Embodied Podcast in 2022. I am your host Elizabeth DiAlto and since 2013, I have been teaching women how to harness the power of their sacred bodies and free their wild souls. This podcast became a big part of that work when we launched in 2015. And what listeners consistently share that they love about the show is how we always aim to address, synthesize and integrate the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of not just healing, but finding self love, wholeness and liberation. The show is available on all podcast players and YouTube and our show notes pages, which you can find at untameyourself.com/podcasts include minute markers and transcripts. If you’re a note taker, or it’s just helpful for you to see things in writing, head on over there and check it out and thank you so so much for listening. Your time, energy and attention is valuable and precious. And I appreciate that you’d focus any of it here with me and our guests. Let’s get into the show.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode number 378 of the podcast. I think I’m just gonna call this episode how to pray because this whole episode is gonna be about prayer. So if that’s something you’re curious about, you are really gonna love this one. If you’re skeptic, if you’re unsure, as in all things I have ever offered on this podcast over the course of the last almost seven years now, take what resonates for you and ditch what doesn’t. So to start out when it comes to prayer, it’s like in all things, right? Why are you praying? What’s the intention?

I do wanna begin by saying that while you can’t really mess up prayer, there are two things that I do not recommend. I do not recommend just using your prayers to ask for things for yourself. And I do not recommend just praying for yourself and your own life. When we do that, that’s kind of like treating God like a vending machine. It’s not reverend or respectful. It’s not reciprocal. It’s not devotional. It’s not a practice of communing with God. And it will also not yield the results that you want, which often, if people are praying or engaging with religion or spirituality with an expectation of how it should go or how it should look or with any entitlement about how their life should be or what they deserve, because they’re doing it, like they’re owed anything in return and then things don’t go that way, they will typically blame God, right? Blame the source or internalize it and make it about being unworthy or God must not love me, or there must be something wrong with me or I must not deserve. And none of that stuff is true.

So three types of prayer. I’ve worked with extensively are structured, inspired, or free flowing. And those aren’t like formal definitions of any kind of prayer. Those are just what I’m calling the three types of prayer that I’ve worked with extensively pretty much for my whole life. By structured what I mean is that you can recite prayers that other people have written. By inspired, I mean that you could take inspiration from the prayers that other people have written and personalize them. So for years in my virtual programs, especially my power program and even now in the wild soul sacred body membership and my archetypes, immersion and the embodied self love course, I have prayers. I give people prayers. But I offer the prayers to people with some guidance around, you know, open the prayer however you want. I pray to God or divine beloved or we’ll talk a little bit later in the episode about how I address God in my prayers or the divine of my prayers, but I always invite people to personalize that, customize that, make that your own. If there’s any words in the prayers that I write that don’t resonate for them, I encourage people to find the words that do. And so that’s what I mean by taking inspiration so that there’s some kind of foundation. So you’re not like staring at a blank page or a blank slate or feeling into your heart. And there’s not really anything there place to start.

So inspirational is, find something you really love and make it your own. And then by free flowing, I mean just have open unstructured conversations with gut, that is a form of prayer. So this episode is really about two things, why and how to pray. And my intention here is to help you either find if you’re a person who does not currently have a prayer practice, to help you find or start one. And if you’re someone who is active with prayer already, perhaps to help you refine your current practice. I tried to structure and organize this episode a bit, but once I got going, my love and fervor for prayer kind of took over. So if you’re looking for something specific, go to the show notes page, untameyourself.com/378 and check out the timestamps there. There’s also a transcript on that page. So if you wanna specifically see any of the prayers or any of the passages that I read or share with you in this episode, you can find them at untameyourself.com/378.

So this year on the podcast, if you’ve been listening, you’ve noticed I’ve been asking our guests as my opening questions, what they call God, how they relate to God and what their current relationship to God, like how they actually commune or connect with God, actually looks like right now? So in this episode, I’m sharing some of my answers to those questions with you explicitly, but not exhaustively. Prayer is a dynamic, devotional and miraculous practice. People write and teach volumes on this. So as always, and I said this earlier, but I’m just gonna say it again, take what inspires you or resonates and ditch anything that doesn’t, maybe there’s like a nugget and you’ll be like, Ooh, you wanna go down that rabbit hole? That’s great. Do whatever you want with this information. So let me start with what I call God. First and foremost, I call God God. And to me, that’s a really neutral non-binary term, except when it’s not, like sometimes I do wanna commune and pray specifically to the divine and father, to the father aspect of God. Sometimes I’m praying to the divine mother and which for me, when I pray to the divine mother, as a person who was raised Catholic, who is no longer religious, but still feels a deep connection with Jesus, mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, off from what I’m praying to the divine mother, I’m specifically praying to mother Mary. Other days, I do pray specifically to Jesus or Mary Magdalene. Excuse me. Sometimes it’s about invoking angels and other unconditionally love and beings that are on my divine support squad, which by the way, divine support squad is a to term that I made up. I ran a workshop about it last year. If you wanna check that out, you can go to untameyourself.com/workshops.

And I wanna make a quick note also on where to pray. I pray several times a day, wherever I am, in my car, at the groceries store, on my walks, laying in bed in the morning, all over the place. If anything is going on and I feel like I need to talk to God or my angels or my ancestors, I’m just gonna do it right then and there. It doesn’t have to happen out loud, although it can, it can happen in your mind, it can happen quietly. So I actually really love going on prayer walks with the intention of just talking things out with God the whole time. What I’ll usually do is I’ll pop on some solfeggio healing frequencies or other kind of soothing, instrumental music and I’ll spend 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour, 90 minutes just talk and listening for and feeling the guidance come through in response. So prayer for me is really about having vibrant two-way communication with the divine. It’s a devotional practice, it’s relationship building, it’s refining my communication with an understanding of how God’s presence in my life. And that’s just like relationships with people where you work on your communication so you can understand each other better, you can hear each other, you can know what each other means. Prayer is a way of developing that in our lives. And it’s a big part of co-creating with the divine. Prayer can be a manifestation practice. It’s transformational, it’s healing, and there are so many ways to pray. And so before I get into that, I wanna share a bit from a few of the people who have informed how I pray over the last decade.

So the first one I would say I’m probably the person I credit with really bringing me back into a deep prayer practice would be Tosha Silver. It started with her book, “Outrageous Openness”. She now has this whole book called “Change Me Prayers”. And I wanna read you a quick passage from the intro of “Change Me Prayers”, in case you can relate to of this. Tosha wrote, “Someone wrote me once and said, I love your book, “Outrageous openness”, but I can’t relate to these weird prayers you do. I don’t wanna change. It’s taken me years to realize that I’m perfect the way I am. Why on earth should I ask to be changed? And she says, well, here’s why. Yes, of course you’re perfect as is, but is it possible that you’re still struggling? Einstein himself said that a problem could not be solved by the consciousness that created it. In other words, the ego can’t solve the problem created by the ego. It tries constantly to steer often with great futility”. And she shared a personal story about this. I’m not gonna read that whole personal story, but when what she based said was having this super, super, super close relationship with her mother. And then years later finally receiving the call that she dreaded her whole life. Her brother called to say that her mom, who was in her late eighties at the time, was on her deathbed. And in that moment, here’s what Tosha wrote. “How could I do this? I knew that moment that I had no freaking idea how to say goodbye to the one being on this planet I loved more than anything. Believe me, I was well aware that no sanitized, pretty little affirmations like I am open, safe, and relaxed, would’ve done a darn thing. I needed the divine to take over and change me into one who could handle this. So here’s the prayer I used. And the reason why this book exists, change me divine beloved into someone who can sit in this room and say goodbye to my beloved mom. Change me into one who can watch her blessed body slide away. Help me cry all I need and hand this all to you. Allow me to know she is you and you can ever leave me. Let me let you take this over completely. So that’s why I do these prayers. And they’ve carried me every step of the way. All it takes is the invitation and the offering. The divine indeed can do what the small self never could”. And I love that about Tosha. All of her work is about this offering. It’s about the surrender. The it’s about letting the divine take the lead. I believe that was actually the subtitle of the “Outrageous Openness Book”. So I love that. Even if you are perfect the way you are, asking the divine, any given moment to change you into someone who can handle what is in front of you, whatever it is, that’s an incredible use of prayer, an approach to prayer.

Then there’s Caroline Myss. I love Caroline’s way of praying. It resonates a lot with an instinct I’ve had since I little, which was just to talk to God. So yes, I would recite the prayers of my Catholic religion and ask for things because that’s a very elementary part of prayer that most people get. Even people who don’t pray, a lot of people get that we can ask God for things. In fact, there’s no shortage of spiritual awakening stories that start with people who were not particularly connected God, religion or spirituality, but found themselves in a crisis, not knowing what to do. And something told them in that moment to start praying, even though they didn’t know how, and then boom, some kind of shift occurred, even if it was a subtle, subtle, subtle shift. And this is one of the things that I really love about prayer as a proud of communing with the divine, as a devotional practice is that it really helps us. Prayer is energy work. So being in the energetic practice of praying really helps us to become attuned to the subtle shifts that occur when we pray and that are always available to us. And also it really helps us to unhook from this sensational or sensationalized view of what it means to be spiritual or have a connection or relationship to God, or be a mystic, whatever it is that you wanna call it, that everything always looks like these big massive epiphanies or revelations or synchronicity. Sometimes it’s just the most subtle stuff that can honestly catalyze the most miraculous healings, changes, transformations or whatever.

So this is my favorite thing about prayer. In a world that wants magic bullets and immediate gratification, I have not found anything that works faster than prayer, or that feels more gratifying than opening up a prayer and immediately feeling the energy shift around me. I particularly love Caroline’s focus on grace when it comes to prayer and she speaks to something around reconciling religion, better than anyone else I’ve heard. So I wanna share that here, in case you relate to that, in case you’re listening, or maybe someone who is struggling with that, you can share this with them because a lot of people’s hesitation around prayer, or God, or spirituality comes from poor experience with religion. So this is from the introduction of Caroline’s book, “Intimate Conversations with the Divine: Prayer, Guidance, and Grace” which I highly recommend this book actually got it on my Kindle and then I loved it so much. I ordered a print copy as well, so I could keep it on my bedside table and flip through it. And so she said something, this is in the introduction in a section called a word on religion. And this is just an excerpt. Here’s what she said. We crave the sacred in spite of the ways human beings have mismanaged our religious organ organizations. We cannot throw the baby out with the bath water. We cannot sacrifice faith in the unseen because of the perpetrations of human beings. We need grace. We require it. We need to be in touch with the sacred. We need to know that a power far greater than our individual selves is in charge. We need this to survive, to flourish and to be sustained. It is not optional. If there’s one thing I could communicate to you with this book, it’s that our holy channel of communication with the divine has nothing to do with religion. Heaven is not the formal organization that religion is. Leave all the formalities in your rear view mirror, and don’t let the misdeeds human beings have perpetrated in the name of stand in the way of your nourishing yourself with the grace of the divine. Choose an intimate way of addressing the divine in your prayers. When that works for you and pray. If there’s one thing I know it’s that all prayers are heard and heaven always responds. And that’s like bringing me to tears right now. Little tears of truth.

Those of you have been listening for a long time now. That that’s one of my, when truth is present, I tend to cry or at least get the tears. And I wrote this post when I was first going through this book back in January. I’m inspired by this book and with a few more passages in it. So I’m gonna share that with you now, since we’re talking about Caroline. Here’s what I wrote. “People who diminish the power of prayer haven’t really learned how to pray. Anyone who’s experienced the grace of divine communion, healing and resolution that comes through prayer would never tell someone else that their prayers don’t count as powerful action”. I’d here with the excerpts that I shared from Caroline’s book, “Intimate Conversations with the Divine When you hit that internal send button and the light of a prayer is delivered to the person in need. It’s a miraculous thing. I will always remember the person who told me she experienced the of grace during a car accident. Having an out of body experience, she saw a person, a stranger sitting in a car nearby watching the accident and sending prayers. I loved the fact that she thought to look at the license plate of the car in which the praying stranger was sitting. Later when she was healed, she located that woman via the license plate number to thank her for those prayers. Lord, I believe you wanted me to meet this woman. So I would know that praying for others and sending grace were not useless acts of personal, emotional comfort, but profound responses of love to a fellow human being. Though others appear to look different from us in the moment, everyone is really a part of our own soul”. And then I wrote in the caption on that post, “I’ve been a person who prays my whole life, literally, as long as I can remember. I even still say a short bedtime prayer ever since I was really little before I go to bed, most nights. It doesn’t even sound like me now, which is actually what makes it very tender, sweet and honest prayer”. I’ve experimented with different ways to pray a lot over the last decade. And I started writing and offering prayers to clients and students many years ago, always with the invitation to edit and tweak what I offer, because prayers are personal, but some people really need a place to start.

Of late, I’ve really loved exploring prayer through Caroline Myss book, “Intimate Conversations with the Divine” That’s where the passages in this slides and this poster from. Prayer is energy work. Prayer is grace work. Grace and energy are what connect all of us. It’s never ever a waste of time. Now I wanna move into someone else whose approach to prayer has been monumental in my life over the last, I wanna say, when was 2017, 5 years ago. So over the last five years. And this is Kathleen McGowan. She’s also the author of my favorite historical fiction books, the “Magdalene Line Trilogy”. And I say this all the time, but it always bears repeating. I am not anti-religion, but I do have a good bit of beef with religion. And one of those beefs emerged when I got into my twenties and started moving away from the Catholic church and really questioning authority, but not from the rebellious teenager place of questioning authority, but as an adult who wanted to build a life of my own for myself, that aligned with my values and felt genuine and authentic to me. So something I I noticed was how people just show up to masses and religious services week in and week out of their lives and recite words in unison, which by the way, is a very potent energetic practice. And that’s another reason why this kind of beef with religion started to come up for me because it was in my twenties that I first started studying energy work and training and energy work. So people show up to masses, religious services, the reciting words in unison, and a lot of these people have not deeply contemplated what the words they’re repeating actually mean. They’re just showing up and repeating the words because that’s what you do. And this struck me after a few years of not going to church, when I randomly went for a holiday with my family and I could still repeat the words like in perfect timing with my eyes closed from the Catholic mass, because I had done it literally thousands of times since childhood and that disturbed me because I was someone who hadn’t deeply contemplated the words I had previously so willingly repeated without asking any questions, right? And this is part of Catholicism. If you don’t go to Catholic school, which I did, and I went to public school, you go to what’s called CCD, which I don’t even remember what it stands for, but it’s like your Catholic religious instruction. You go like once a week after school, I don’t know what it’s like now, I mean, I was in elementary school in the nineties. So eighties and nineties. So they teach you what things mean when you’re or a kid, when you’re too little to understand it. And then you just, you’re repeating it a mass for the rest of your life. Now, granted, that might just be how things worked in my family, right? Like we didn’t do Bible studies or any deeper things. We were just people we did the requisite things growing up you get your back baptism, your first communion, your confirmation, you receive your sacraments, you go to your CCD or my mother actually went to Catholic school and I went to a Jesuit College.

So I went to college with a lot of people who went to Catholic school, which by the way, I noticed these people knew way more about certain things than I did when it came to the Catholic religion, which in retrospect, I see that as a blessing in disguise. It’s like I was less programmed because I didn’t have that deep immersion through Catholic schooling. But I bring this up because Kathleen McGowan’s book is called “Source of Miracles”. And it’s based on working with the Lord’s prayer, also known as the, our father, if you know it by that name. And she works with this prayer in a deeply transformational way, and this is the central, if you’re not familiar with Christianity or aspects of Christianity, the Lord’s prayer is like the central prayer to Christianity. So I have loved this book, which is called “The Source of Miracles” for years. But in 2021, I decided to do a 40 day practice with it. And this was happening during my transition from being in California for eight years, to moving across the country to Miami, which even though that was an exciting time and something that I was like super excited to do and it was very, very aligned and also divinely guided and inspired choice, the actual execution of a cross country move still during a frigging pandemic, when I was already stretched like to my max, pandemic fatigued, and working a ton, almost took me out. So it was a lot for me as one person to handle. So I decided not to try and handle it by myself and to really invoke a much greater power than me or even my friends and family, which is God in a much more intentional way. And so it truly was a miraculous experience and I’m actually still experiencing the ripple effect of those 40 days. And I’m still working with the Lord’s prayer in the way that I learned from Kathleen’s book.

And I’ll say, I wanna read you a passage from the book also because she speaks to something that we talk about here and there on the podcast. We’ve actually did a whole episode about this a couple years ago with a colleague of mine, Chanda Katrice. We’ll put a link to that episode in the show notes about how the law of attraction in it. And Kathleen talks about that in the beginning of “The Source of Miracles” book. She said, “The market is flooded these days with books and DVDs.” This book is from, let me look and see when she published it. She published this book in 2009. That’s why we’re talking about DVDs. Some of you younger people here are probably like what the hell’s a DVD. Anyway, “The market is flooded these days with books and DVDs on the laws of attraction and how to manifest unlimited abundance. These programs promise instant gratification. If you can imagine that Ferrari in the driveway and really feel like you can have it, then you can. Ask, believe and receive, it’s that simple”. Is it, really? Remember the old cliche that If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Well, I’m about that quite a few of you reading this now have also read those manifestation books. I’m also willing about that there’s no Ferrari in your driveway, even if you asked and believed you likely didn’t receive. And here’s the simple reason, those other techniques do not require any kind of accountability. And therefore they do not work, period. They tell you that you can have whatever you want with responsibility and no consequences.

But one great truth of the law of abundance is this, you cannot manifest something that is not in the best interest of the world around you. You do not live in a vacuum. You live on a planet with almost 7 billion other people. In order to manifest everything that you desire, you must learn how to live in harmony with the bigger picture and find your own place in God’s plan as a member of the human family. Of course, becoming aligned with your own spiritual nature and destiny will likely change the specifics of what you truly desire, making it that much easier to attain. What we are reaching for here is something deeper, something that endures in your life for years after you turn the last page. That is the essence of transformation in the following chapters, you’ll be asked to dig down into the deepest recesses of your heart and soul. You’ll be asked to examine your beliefs about yourself, about God, and about your fellow human beings. Because it’s in the understanding, the synergy of those relationships, the truth that we’re all connected and must work together, that you will find dramatic results. It’s not enough to know what you want. You must also know why you want it and what you will do once you have it. All those elements impact the world around you. And therefore it must be considered. When we wish for something without considering the whole of the world around us, we are not honoring our place as a member of a larger human family, God’s family”. And then again, she goes through this process where she breaks down the different parts of the prayer. She breaks it down into six main parts. So just check out that book, if you want it if that’s a prayer that resonates with you, because either you are currently a practicing Christian or you were raised in some kind of Christian religion, or if it just sounds like, “Damn, I’d like to see what this book is all about. That sounded good to me.” Go ahead and check that out.

So when I was young, growing up Catholic, there were specific prayers connected to that religion that I’d recite the, our father, which is the book, the Lord’s prayer that Kathleen McGowan’s book is about, the hail Mary, the act of contrition. And that was something that you’d say before you go to confession and I still use these prayers. I still really like to pray the rosary. If you’re familiar with the rosary, it’s just that my context has changed. And by the way, I’m reading a book right now, which it’s about praying the rosary. I got pulled back to that a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t finished the book and to be quite honest with you, it might be called the way of the rose. I’m not even remembering who wrote it or what it’s called. I’ve just been working my way through it. And I have a couple of sets of rosary beads. That mean a lot to me. One of them was my grandmother’s and one of them, I got on my pilgrimage to Southern France, when I visited Mary Magdalene’s cave in the gift shop, I got a set of rosary bead. And both sets of rosary beads that I have are made out of rose petals themselves. So some of you know this, my most intense tattoo that I currently have is a rose that has a lot of deep meaning for me, and is connected and tied with this. And so that’s just another thing that I love about Kathleen McGowan’s book, how she also pulls in the imagery of roses and rose petals to help make sense of and give context to the different aspects of that prayer. And so perhaps again, you were raised religious or still religious and find comfort in certain prayers. There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to be a practicing member of any religion or faith to benefit from, or use or connect with prayers, because if you’re really praying with reverence in your heart, you can’t appropriate when there’s reverence presence. And you offer these things and you use these things again in alignment with what Kathleen was talking about, what is the greater good? What is really for the benefit of all beings is the way some people put it. This isn’t just about personal game.

So let’s get into a couple of elements of prayer that I really love to play with or experiment with. The first is the invocation, right? This is how you open your prayers. This can be formal or not. Honestly, when I wake up every morning, the first thing outta my mouth is, “Morning y’all. I love you so much.” And I’m talking to God, I’m talking to my angels, my ancestors, all the other divine beings who love me unconditioned, which that’s a term I got from another teacher, Alana Fairchild, and I love her prayers in her Oracle decks. So her mother, Mary Oracle deck is really why I have such a deep relationship with Mother Mary now. And there’s two versions of it. There’s the pocket version and then there’s the full version. So check those out, if you’re someone that feels a connection to, or desires to have a connection with Mother Mary, and she has some really beautiful prayers in there. And I’ve worked, I love all of Alana Fairchild’s stuff. My favorite decks are all hers, “Earth Warriors”, her Rumi Deck. I freaking love that Rumi Deck so much. lake Rumi is in my divine support squad because of that deck. And then what’s the other one of hers I have, oh, the “Isis Deck”. My goodness, I’ve been working with that “Isis Deck” for like eight years now. And so she has these prayers. She talks about divine beings of light who love you unconditionally. And so this is also important when you’re praying, you could be praying to. Prayer again is energy work. Prayer is a form of communion. Prayer is a way of communicating with not just God, but ask different aspects of God or different divine beings, even your own ancestors. Those things can be prayers. You can pray to these different guides and these different beings. So when I begin to say my prayers, the invocation is like setting or opening the container of that experience. So there’s an opening and a closing. And so this is something that you wanna think about when you’re paying, how do you open up? How do you say hello to God or whatever else, whoever else you’re paying to, what do you call God? What if you don’t know what you wanna call God? Like some people, I know, some of you can probably relate to this. You don’t pray because you don’t know what you’re praying to. You don’t know what to call it. And that makes you feel like, Ugh, either unsafe or confused or like it’s not good enough. So I just wanna let you know, it’s all good. This is where God being omniscient and omnipotent comes in handy. God knows what you mean.

I can’t believe I left this book out. Any Florence Schaffhausen work, which I was introduced to Florence Schaffhausen through Tosha Silver in her book, “Outrageous Openness”. She will refer to God as infinite intelligence. And I love thinking about that. If we think of God as infinite intelligence, we can accept that God knows what we need. Like, God isn’t gonna get mad at us for being confused or uncertain about how to talk to them. They’re just gonna be happier even there. And yes, I’m using like the, they them pronoun for God. ’cause like I mentioned earlier, we can pray to gendered aspects of God, if that’s something that resonates with you, like the father God or the divine mother aspect of God, that’s fine. But I mean, ultimately God is not a person. God does not have a gender. But another way to relate to God is as a divine parent, not a human parent, right? And listen in religion, if you’ve related to God the father, especially so many religions have deeply patriarchal influences. If you’ve related to God as a father and that context as a parent, as people, our context for parent is human parents. So we project those, what’s the word that I’m looking for here, characteristics and qualities and that context onto the great beloved, onto God, onto source, the creator, infinite intelligence. And I’m kind of being a little dramatic about this because I want you to feel like just how silly that is that we would think, or act or behave or base our entire our spirituality on an idea of God that behaves like a human? No. So there’s no guilt with God, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve called, right? Like we all might have parents or grandparents, family members, well, you haven’t called me in how. God isn’t like that. God isn’t like sitting up in some cloud in heaven. Like, well, she hasn’t prayed for a while, so I’m gonna leave her unread and I’ll get to it when I get to it. No way, that’s not God. And so this is an important thing to recognize as you open yourself up to receiving the deep nourishment of prayer, if that’s something you desire to do.

Don’t address or expect God to be human, God is not human. I love the phrase divine beloved, which I got from Tosha Silver. And then I also love, in terms of opening prayer, praying to the creators of all there is, whose essence is within us and in all things and for the life of me, I mean, I’ve been using that for years, probably since like 2012. I cannot remember where I saw that or when I started using it specifically. But what I love about it is the reminder and the declaration that there is a creator of all there is. And the essence of that creator is within us and in all things. It’s like a reminder to me every day that’s why I open my prayer with that, to move through life with that knowing and understanding, especially when it’s hardest to see the divinity in myself or others or the unfolding events of life. And some of you know, this you’ve heard me say this. And some of you’ve heard different versions of like a use me prayer. And so my prayer, which has been edited for many years, but the current iteration is, use me, move me and make me an instrument and a channel for your infinite love and grace. For many years, my prayer was use me, move me and make me a force for expansion, for love and for good. And I think I’ve mentioned this in another podcast episode. I don’t remember which one recently, but at some point in 2021, it just hit me one morning. I was saying my prayer. And this goes back to that thing that I was mentioning earlier about going to mass and just repeating things on rows, because that’s what we’re used to doing. Sometimes that prayer would be that way for me. I would just say it. To my beloved creators of all there is, whose essence is with innocent and all things, use me, move me and make me a forest expansion for love, for good and for healing. And I wouldn’t really be feeling into what that actually means. And so one morning, I guess it had been after a phase of just kind of like saying that without much like feeling or intention behind it, the word force, make me a force really struck me. And I was like, I don’t wanna be a force. I wanna let the divine be the force. I’m the instrument and the channel. And I love that context because what that did for me, that was probably about a year ago now. What that did for me was it gave me focus with my spiritual practice and my embodiment practices on being a clearer, more receptive, more pure channel for receiving and being used, being moved. Really it’s, if we’re thinking about being a channel, to me that’s the receiving part, make me a channel so I can ask actually receive. And then being an instrument is the move me part. So I can be an instrument of your infinite love and grace. And I love putting the word infinite there for the same reason that I love remembering that God is infinite intelligence because it’s like, it’s also just a reminder that these mysteries that we’re engaging with here are mysteries, they’re life with paradox. That is how the divine works. And because it’s infinite and because it’s mysterious, I don’t need to get it and I don’t need to understand it. I just need to feel it. I need to work with it. I need to engage with it consciously and intentionally and consistently to build my spiritual power muscles around that, working with that, engaging with it, having a deeply devotional and potent relationship with that. But I don’t need to be the force. I just felt like, and listen, if you wanna be a force, be a force, that’s fine. But for me, and at that time I was tired. I was so tired and I was just also realizing something that I’ve spent a lot of time healing from in my life and still can get hooked back into here and there, is hyper vigilance and control. So it was like, no, I don’t need to be the force. Because for me it felt like, let me surrender, let me surrender myself to be useful and get out of the way and let me trust that God will use me and I will be a willing participant.

And so all of that whole little tangent just stemmed from the invocation, how you open your prayers. Or if there’s like an initial little like vignette, that’s almost like a vignette, right, for how you wanna start your prayer. After the invocation, I like to begin with thanks. And that kind of, when I say, I like to begin, that is kind of automatic for me now, too. It always starts with thank you, thank you, thank you. Like I wake up in the morning giving thanks for the day for what I have, for being where I am, for being who I am, for all these things. Gratitude practice is popular practice, but personally, when I’m giving thanks, I’m always giving thanks to God and what feels very important to me as about making my gratitude part of my prayer practice is for me, it recognizes honors and fortifies my connection and faith in God as the source. And again, as a recovering hypervigilant person, as a recovering person with control issues, who had control issues, I am so happy now to not try to control almost everything like, all right, let me see what God wants and then let me just respond to that. Let me take my actions in response to divine guidance. That has cleared up and healed up so much for me, it gives me so much space in my life to allow grace to be the force rather than me trying to force anything. So some days there are things top of mind that I’m wanting to work out. So I’ll bring those things into my prayers first. Other days, I just wanna hang out with God. So I just talk and share. This is something I love about prayer. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you’ve never tried it. And so maybe you wanna give it a try and see how you feel.

I personally am not a person who has issues with vulnerability. Even what I share on the podcast I share publicly. If you can imagine the things that I share vulnerably in public, I am very comfortable sharing vulnerably with people in my life. And then God is like the innermost circle where it’s like, even the things I won’t say to myself in my own journal, I will say to God, things that I won’t say to my friends. And to be quite honest over the years, a deeper part of my practice has been, if I would say it to God, I should say it at least out loud to one person I really trust as a practice of not hiding. But not everything is about hiding. Sometimes things are just between you and God and that’s appropriate. But I love saying anything to God and I also, ’cause here’s something, and this comes back to that piece of God being infinite intelligence. When we’re communicating with other people, part of the challenge of communication is needing to find the words that make the most sense to increase the likelihood that a whole other human being with a whole other set of lived experiences, wounds, traumas, education, knowledge, wisdom, perspective, perceptions of things, will understand what the hell we’re talking about. And the reason I feel like God, the divine prayer is just such a nourishing practice is because God is infinite intelligence. We don’t need to find the right words when we’re talking to God. We could just say whatever and it’s gonna be heard, received and understood. And to me that is just such a relief, especially as a person who uses like communication, writing, podcasting, speaking, these things, teaching are such big parts of my life. My life is largely revolves around finding the best possible words to help things make sense and help people understand or get the point or receive whatever they need to receive from whatever it is that I’m communicating. And with God I’ll have to do that. There’s no work. I could just say whatever and know that it’s received.

Which by the way, I mentioned journaling, prayer could be a journaling practice. I learned this many years ago, the book, “The Help”, which came out in 2009 so what are we in 2022, 13 years ago. One of the main characters, I think her name was Abilene would write out her prayers. And I started doing that while I was reading that book. And so I love that because something about the body- mind connection to writing out my prayers, I’ll type ’em sometimes too. I use a journaling software to keep notes sometimes. And sometimes the way things are like pouring through me, I need to type it ’cause I’m a fast typer. I feel like I can’t possibly write as fast as I need to express. So I’ll type if it’s like really pouring through, coming through like fire hose. But if not, if that’s not the energy of the day, I actually prefer the experience of handwriting in a journal. And again, there’s actually science and I believe it’s specifically neuroscience to support that brain-body connection. But it also energetically just feels like it adds an extra layer of depth.

So what else? For me active listening is also a part of prayer. So since last summer, when I did that 40 day prayer practice with “The Source of Miracles” book, I don’t meditate as much as I used to because listening and getting quiet so I can notice and receive energetic shifts and guidance in response to my prayers is now my contemplative practice of choice. And that involves noticing. Speaking of Noticing. When you pray, your prayers are always heard and they’re always answered. The reason why you might think they’re not is because when we don’t have a practice of listening, when we haven’t developed our two-way communication with the divine, we’ll sometimes think our prayers aren’t answered because we’re not getting the answer in the way we want to or expect to or the answer isn’t what we wanted it to be. And so we won’t perceive it. And so we need to actively train ourselves to perceive the divine response to our prayers, whether that’s sign symbols, synchronicities, inner knowings, some of you might have listened to my podcast episode earlier this year, will link to it in the show notes from, it was just a few episodes ago, I think maybe 375, maybe or 374, of having my emergency gallbladder surgery home, trying to sleep on my couch my first night home. And it was brutal. And the real issue was getting up and down off the couch with incisions in my belly. And I couldn’t get in and outta my bed either. And in that moment, when I woke up that next morning, I was a little devastated. I was like, “How am I gonna do this? How am I gonna get up and down? How am I gonna sleep for like the next five, six, seven, ten days, I didn’t know how long it was gonna be. And in that moment, like that was my prayer. What am I gonna do? That was my prayer. And then what happened was I got this flash of an image in my mind of my grandpa standing in front of a medical supply store, which sparked a memory of this lift chair that he had towards the end of his life, ’cause he couldn’t get up and down on his own. And then one minute later I’m Googling, trying to find these chairs, find a company where I can rent one. And literally I called them at 10:00 AM on a Thursday and by 1:15 PM, three hours and 15 minutes later in that afternoon, that chair was in my living room and I had a solution to, what am I gonna do? And I love that story because it’s just such a great example of the divine being infinite intelligence. The divine knows you, the divine will use whatever will get your attention and makes sense to you to get the guidance through, that’s how prayers get answered. So in my perception, the divine used my grandpa, who, for me ever since he’s been on the other side is basically kind of always just hanging out, waiting until I need to be protected, or I need to be taken care of and then he helps. And again, this is that two-way communication. This is becoming perceptive for how your prayers are being answered. Things clear up. Solutions arrive. But if you’re closed off, if you’re focused on what’s wrong only, if you don’t have faith or trust that your prayers will be answered, if you offer them, you will not be receptive to the response. So let me repeat that your prayers are always answered.

Part of prayer practice is becoming aware of how they’re answered and increasing your ability to perceive the answers to your prayers, which a big part of is not being attached to the answer, being what you want it to be, or for your answer coming in the way that you want it to come. Your answers will come in ways that you’ll be able to perceive, but you have to, it’s kind of like one of my favorite Rumi quotes, what you seek is seeking you. You will only be able to perceive if you’re looking for it, if you’re open to it, right? If you’re just looking for the answer you want, or if you’re just looking to get it in the way that you wanna receive it, you might miss the answer when it comes. So this is the part that you have to do. This is the part that we have to do, being receptive and perceptive in our prayer practice. This is like people who pull Oracle or Taro cards and put them back and pick another one, they don’t like the one that they pulled. Even if you do that, like you can do that, but it’s pretty rude to just disregard the original card you pulled that you didn’t like because there was guidance there for you. And when I say rude, I’m saying like rude to the divine, because even those different nation practices, there’s communion with the divine in those practices. And so by the way, I’d actually put this in my notes later on, but let me say it here, ’cause it makes more sense. A way that I like to use prayer in conjunction with divination practice is I will invoke, I will open up, holy mother, father, God, or divine beloved, creators of all there is whose essence is within us and on all things, be with me, surround me flood this card pull with your grace with clarity, help me to be receptive and perceptive to the meanings that are most aligned with my highest and best, with whatever it is that you want me to know right now. So I invite these beings, whether it’s God, my angels, my ancestors into the energy, into the container before I pull cards and then always say, thank you at the end.

So let’s talk about, about consistent practice. Part of you know anything, to strengthen anything from a muscle, to memory, to practice, to learning knowledge, experience, we need repetition. Repetition is the mother of all learning and it’s not just learning, repetition is the mother of all deep, potent, powerful anything. But consistency doesn’t have to look like, I say my prayers same time every day in the same way. I light at a candle, I do this ritual. That could be what consistency looks like for you. But consistency is just about repetition. So even if you don’t pray every single day, it doesn’t matter how long you pray for. Even if you just pray a couple days a week, couple times like just, this is why I call it holy consistency. It’s personal. It’s for you. What works for you? For me, at this point, prayer is my most consistent practice. I do it all day, every day. Like throughout the course of the day, I pray several times. Sometimes my prayers are these little conversations throughout the day. Sometimes they’re deeper, more focused, intentional, structured prayers, but that I pray is the consistent thing for me every single day. How I do it might change based on the day or what’s going on. So again, it doesn’t matter how long, it doesn’t matter what time, or that you show up at the same time every day or that you sit in a particular place, you do a certain thing. Doesn’t matter. Just pray. God is not out there or up there, if you are perceiving God up in heaven or something like that or that heaven is even up anywhere. The point I’m saying is the divine is not tracking your practice and giving you gold stars or X marks on some spiritual report card. God isn’t human. Again, remember that. Then there’s also praying for others and praying things which was mentioned in that passage in Carolyn Myss’s book. This is something I’m gonna give you. I know I’ve talked about this at least probably in the divine support squad workshop, having a memory of talking about this at some point in the last year, but maybe on the podcast too. I don’t know. I talk a lot. One of the things that I have retained from my Catholic upbringing that I love, love, love, and will really credit my mom for this is lighting candles when I pray. Growing up on Staten island, I don’t know if it’s still there, but there was this place called the Alba House. That was pretty much in between my grandparents house and my house growing up. And we would often, my grandparents would pick us up from school, we’d eat dinner there. And then my mom would come pick us up when she was done with work. And so we would often be driving from my grandparents house to our house, like on our way home at the end of the day. And pretty regularly we just pull in real quick to stop in this little chapel and light some candles and say some prayers. And so I have a deep connection with the act of lighting a candle and saying a prayer. And later on in my life, not until like my twenties and thirties, when I started studying spirituality in different contexts and even like energy and alchemy and learning about the different elements like fire did I gain an even deeper relationship to understanding of and appreciation for the physical act, the ritual of lighting a candle while I pray. So there’s two types of candles I always have in my house. I always keep the pillar candles, like the glass pillar, just plain white candles in my house. And I always keep tea candles in my house. And when I am saying certain kinds of prayers, like if I’m setting really deep intentions, because those pillar candles will burn anywhere from like three to seven days, I think they might make ones that burn even longer than that, and I get the ones in glass, so they recycle, I’ll write intentions on them. So I have different alters in my home. And so right now on my ancestor altar, there’s a pillar candle that says gratitude and respect. And then on my Mother Mary altar, there’s another candle. And I just use like a Sharpie marker to write on the outside of the glass thing. And then I will light candles for people.

So one of the ways that I like to pray for others or pray for groups, which by the way, if you’re listening to this podcast, I’ve prayed for you. I light candles fairly regularly for my community. You all, people who listen in the podcast, people who follow me on Instagram, the members of my programs, the people who are in my trainings, like I’m praying for all of you, regularly. I don’t even need to know your name, who you are, even if we’ve never interacted and you’ve just lurked on all my shit for years, I have prayed for you. And I love that. I love that so much. I love that we can have those connections, right? When I, Ooh, this is making me wanna cry. When I was having my surgery and recovering before I like told people publicly, like I had to tell people in my groups and people were sending me prayers and candle stairs, and I felt that. And part of what made my healing process miraculous was actually knowing that literal, there were people all over the world praying for me. And that’s just so potent. That’s so beautiful to make praying for others, even if they don’t know who you are, even if you don’t know what they need, praying for other people. So even in times like this on the day I’m recording this, it’s just yesterday morning that we woke up to the news that Russia was in invading the Ukraine. And so people are thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers and a lot of people wanna shit on that. But prayer is energy work. Prayer is potent. Prayer is powerful, especially in groups and especially in volume. So your prayers do count. Your prayers are powerful action. There might be other action that you need to take too, but don’t discount prayer. Other things I do. I have alter all over my house and I tend to demarcate my alters with like images or statues. So I have my Mother Mary altar, I have a big Mother Mary statue, and I buy I the Mother Mary pillar candles. And then on my bookshelf, I have an image of Jesus that I love. I forget it’s called like “Jesus of Divine Mercy” or something like that. But to me it looks like Jesus doing a care bear stare, which is a combination of two of my very favorite things. So it delights me to no ends. But when I pray for my family, I put pictures of my family on the same column of my bookcase, because what I like candles and pray for my family, I’m constantly like “Jesus, these are your people. Take care of them. I can’t do it.” Like anyone in my life, which specifically is my family who I’ve had codependent relationships with, I use prayer to help me not be codependent. Like I can’t control them, I can’t change them. I can’t do anything about their choices. Jesus take care of my family. This is you do this. I can’t. And I light candles for my family next to their pictures. And so I hope like prayer, it can be fun. It can be too joyful. It could be personal, integrate whatever. Some people love to light incense and imagine that the smoke is carrying the prayers up to the heavens, again, metaphorically.

Heaven is everywhere. Heaven is within us and around us. We co-create heaven right here on earth, right? Like there’s no like heavens up there. Hell is down there. Like hell is also right here on earth. We co-create this shit all the time as well. We’re seeing it everywhere. War is fucking hell on earth. And humans have created that. That’s not down below in some fiery pit where Satan lives. Like that shit’s active all day, every day, right around us. So something I wanna say here is do your best to keep your will your, preferences out of your prayers. So in fact, and very practically, the way I actually do this is I often pray for grace to dissolve my willfulness if or wherever it’s blocking me. And when I pray for other people, this is so important. I pray for them, for whatever grace, whatever energy, clarity, courage they need to align with their soul’s path or with God’s plan for their life or however it is that you wanna describe that. I don’t pray for I think is best for them. And this is important, ’cause again, remember that prayer is energy work. So this is something I’ve been working with my mom for years. My mom can be a worrier. She’s worries much less now. But I used to say to her always, always, always when you worry about me rather than worrying about me, rather than focusing on your worry thoughts, just say some prayers for me, send some angels, right? Don’t send me that worry energy, send me the prayers. I think this is one of the reasons why my grandpa helps me all the time because my mom is always telling him, go be with Lizzy, go take care of my baby. That’s what she says. And she’ll say to me now, and I love I’ve trained her ’cause it works. It’s important. She’ll be like, “I’m doing my best not to worry. I’m just saying prayers and I’m sending you good energy.” And that’s what we get to do for the people in our lives.

This is what I mean by not bringing our will into our prayers. We don’t wanna be praying for people to have the experiences we hope for them or wish for them because that might not be the best thing. So we wanna pray for what’s best, pray for them to have the strength to move through what they’re moving through. Again, the grace, the guidance, the courage, pray for them to be free from fear, anxiety, judgment, whatever. But those types of general things that don’t have us attaching to, or putting specific things on them with the added energy of prayer. So keeping your prayers intentional. And it’s not that it’s broad, but it’s just not being so specific that you’re putting, your will your ideas, your perception of what’s best on anyone. And the same goes for you, right? Like when I’m praying for myself, I’m constantly praying for things is like the clarity to know what’s best, the courage to make hard choices, the ability to perceive what God is wanting from me in this experience, in this situation, what’s the best, most aligned action, what’s in the highest and best, what benefits all beings. Sometimes people use these terms very nonchalant or even make fun of them and that’s okay. But they are also quite serious and they do carry energetic potency. So we talked about praying before divination practice.

And then let’s also talk about closing your prayers. We talked about opening. We talked about what’s include in prayers. Many cultures and religions have their ways of doing this. And this is important if you don’t have, you don’t have to say anything that doesn’t resonate for you, ever. For example, at the end of yoga classes, personally, I’ve literally never been able to say namaste with them with the teacher at the end of yoga class. When they say that in the whole class just repeats it. Because of that thing I mentioned earlier, it reminds me of church. It reminds me of just repeating things because that’s what is said at that part of the mass. For me like namaste, that’s not my word. That’s not mine to say. And I’ve literally, always felt that block. I feel it in my throat at the end of a yoga class, I say amen, because that resonates for me. And I know it doesn’t have the same meaning but again, reverence and prayer are never about conforming to norms, but genuine expression and connection. So for me, I say, amen. I like general things like, may it be so and so it is, some people say Aho ashe, but again, some of those things are rooted in other people’s cultures. So personally I’ve never been one to use those terms. And by the way, please, especially don’t use terms if you’ve never even looked it up to see where it comes from. That’s one of the reasons like namaste I knew came from yoga, I knew that was Sanskrit, but even like Aho, ashe, I don’t know the roots of those terms. And I specifically haven’t looked them up because I don’t need to know because I don’t use them. But if you’re gonna use something, please make sure that you know, where it comes from. And so that you can use it with proper reverence and respect to wherever it comes from. Or also perhaps invoke some discernment that maybe it’s not yours to use. I also like to sign off my prayer with thanks. Even if I have included gratitude in my prayer practice. And this is just the general, thank you. I had a teacher once who would do that and I counted it. She would say, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Which is seven times. And I find myself, I do that often and I love that. I even will write that into my prayer sometimes.

So I could keep going. I mean, we could do a part two on how to pray at some other point. If you have any questions and you wanna send them, I could keep those questions and then we could do do another prayer episode another time. But I wanna wrap up with another prayer I’ve loved and work with over the years, it’s called “The Great Invocation”. And this prayer was originally offered, it’s a world’s prayer for light and love. And you know, those are terms that get watered down, weaponized and misused, but they’re still real. We can use them with reverence and respect. And this prayer is used globally as an act of service to humanity, to aid the plan of God to find the full expression on earth. And so there’s two versions. One was released in 1945 by Alice Bailey. And it’s the Tibetan. I might not be saying this, right. It looks like it’s D-J-W-H-A-L is the first name and then K-H-U-L. So I’m gonna take a guess that it’s Djwhal Khul but I could be totally wrong. And then there’s a newer adapted version to accommodate the world’s changing consciousness, which I really love and appreciate ’cause here’s the original version, “From the point of light, within the mind of God, that light stream fourth to the minds of men, let light descend on earth from the point of love within the heart of God, let love stream forth into the hearts of men, make Christ return to earth. From the center where the will of God is known, let purpose guide the little wills of men, the purpose which the masters know and serve. From the center which we call the race of men, let the plan of love and light work out and may it seal the door where evil dwells, let light and love and power restore the plan on earth”.

Now a couple of things actually, and I included that prayer in one of the rituals in my Oracle Deck. If you have the Oracle deck it’s card number 32, what we have in common and that card is about how we are all made from divine love. And so I included this in the deck, ’cause I wanted to give context. I’m gonna read this to you about this prayer. “The Great Invocation” is a world prayer. And what is meant by world is that this is a non-denominational prayer. This is not a religious prayer, although it does reference God and it does reference Christ. And there’s an asterisk on that. Its use invokes divine energies of light and love and spiritual power for all humanity. The beauty and the strength of this invocation lie in its simplicity and in its expression of certain central truths. The truth of the existence of a basic intelligence to whom we vaguely give the name, God. The truth that behind all outer seeming the motivating power of the universe is love. The truth that a great individuality called by Christians, The Christ, came to earth and embodied that love so that we could understand the truth. That both love and intelligence are effects of what is called the will of God. And finally, the self-evident truth that only through humanity itself can the divine plan work out. And so whether you have any interest or connection to Christianity, Jesus as a teacher, which is what they mean as the Christ, is someone whose teachings anyone can benefit from outside of the context of Christian religion. Because remember, and most of you probably know this, and if you don’t know, now you will know. Jesus wasn’t Christian. Jesus was Jewish. The religion that was created based on Jesus’s teachings is called Christianity and people not Jesus created that religion. Not that Jesus wasn’t a person, Jesus was person, a whole person. And so here is the version that was adapted of “The Great Invocation”. And this was adapted by someone named again, the spellings, when you haven’t heard things said out loud, it’s L-U-C-I-S Trust, I’m gonna guess that’s Lucas or Lucius, maybe. So here is the more inclusive version of the prayer. “From the point of light within the mind of God, let light stream forth into human minds, let light descend on earth. From the point of love within the heart of God, let love stream forth into human hearts. May the coming one return to earth. From the center where the will of God is known, let purpose guide all little human wills, the purpose which the masters know and serve. From the center, which we call the human race, let the plan of love and light work out and may it seal the door where evil dwells. Let light and love and power restore the plan on earth. And so the things that were modified in this one were man and Christ. And so maybe that one resonates a little bit more with you.

If you Google “The Great Invocation” prayer, these things will come up and you can learn a little bit more about the history and where they came from. So I hope any of that was helpful you or inspiring. And again, I want to remind you that you can take and work with any kind of prayer and make it your own. If you’re seeking a personal relationship with the divine, you must know that the divine will not be mad at you for experimenting with finding the words to talk, pray and communicate. The only response to that is love and joy and acceptance and communion and reciprocity. So again, you can’t mess this up. If you have a desire to connect with the divine, prayer is just such an incredible vehicle for doing so. And again, prayer is energy work. I also have this old, old blog post, it’s from 2013, 23 prayers and 29 mantras. Will put a link to that in the show notes as well. Again, just to give you jumping off points to give you starting points. And again, even if you’re not just starting you might be a person like me who’s had prayer has been some part of your life, literally for your whole life, but you’re always refining and tweaking and deepening and trying out different things and seeing what works or maybe something works for a season or a couple of years and then you shift into some other kind of practice. Let your prayer practice be fluid. Let it be nourishing. Let it be so, so, so supportive.

So I hope you enjoyed this. Again, this episode was episode number 378. So the show notes can be found at untameyourself.com/378. Share it up, use it to commune with your people. Let me know how you liked it. Feel free to send in any questions. We could always do another prayer episode any time. Feel free to share your own prayer practices. You know, I always post these things on Instagram. That’s a great place to post. If you have your own practices or people whose prayers you love or whatever, share that on the post. And if you’re a member of the Wild Soul Sacred Body membership, we talk about the podcast and the membership all the time. So feel free to make a post ask a question in there or ask a question on the monthly Q&A. Thanks everyone. See you later.

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