The Ritual of Prayer
A woman's way to pray.
Upon hearing the word “prayer” many of us will picture or imagine a formal or an intimate moment in which we make a supplication towards the Divine. We may consider the neo-spirituality’s tools like “manifestation” as a form of prayer as well — through repetition of affirmations or “changing subconscious beliefs” one seeks to create an internal shift which as a result, will cause a change in on our external reality as well. Prayer is a creative act — whether we pray with our voices or bodies, what we seek to accomplish is a creation of a certain reality.
However, today, I invite you to consider a more embodied and lived experience of a prayer. I often mention how at the heart of anything Feminine is the embodiment — to embody the etheric abstractions so that they may be experienced, causing movement and transformation within ourselves and our surroundings as a result. Her body is the seat of gestation of all realities. If she does not embody “Divine Names” or “deities” or “archetypes”, there is no formal support for our inner experiences. This can make us prone to fantasy, delusion and overall isolation from the tangible reality since there is no space that can hold us (and others) together.
Today I wish to give you some ideas and inspiration for how to pray by existing — so that the prayer and the creativity that it seeks to invite become a permanent mode of your existence. The embodied and lived practices usually resonate with women far better than those that are not so.
If you are religious or spiritual and have a formal practice — you can consider including these as something to accompany it (if you feel called to). If you are not, these can still be included, as they do not seek to relate to a dogma. These are aimed to be simple practices that will allow your life to feel like a prayer. The mindset behind is the following: “I am in the state of prayer every time I am in full communion with my experience and reality. I may be experiencing an illness, and I may wish for that illness to disappear, and one day, it may, but in this moment, it is here, and I shall enter a communion with it. I will talk to it, I will hear it, I will let my body experience it. I do not know and I am afraid — but this ignorance and this fear is me as I am today. Today, I may feel that the Wheel of Fortune has finally turned in my favour, and instead of allowing the fear of future sorrow to steal today’s bread from me, I shall eat and drink what the Fortune has brought me. Tomorrow she may look in another’s direction and sorrows may accompany me again; but another one will be glad and I shall commune with my sorrow.”
The ritual of prayer, is in essence, intimacy and communion with Life and what is.
Presence and Noticing - Presence is, as you can imagine, the very first conditional of life as a prayer. Before we enter a formal prayer, usually we perform certain rituals — maybe we wash and cleanse, or we make an intent to pray. This is because prayer is a space that we are to enter, and so we must be in a state that is appropriate for it. In prayer we are invited to be present and it is often assumed that the more heart we put in it, the higher the chance of it coming into our lives. More heart means more presence, more energy, more engagement — we are feeling our prayer and moving with it, its essence fills our body and then we have that moment when we just know it will be. Approach life and your daily existence the same way. Be present in all you do—brushing teeth, chopping vegetables, putting on your clothes—feel the textures, hear the sounds, smell the air. If you are really ambitious, you can make even the most dull experiences — your mundane, soul-sucking job, become a “prayer”. This is not devotion towards the job or the market or anything such, but towards your own life that is moving even in conditions that are far from the ideal.
Be Aware Of and Carry Your Desire - Instead of avoiding your desire, be aware of it and carry it tightly within yourself. Our genuine desires are our guiding arrows towards the fulfilment that we seek. Often, women may feel that their desires or hunger are “too much”, and as a result they give them up or replace them with more “socially acceptable” desires. Develop a relationship with your desire without identifying fully with it. Then gently allow your actions to align with that desire — wha frequently happens is that our desires and our actions are out of sync. This is usually because we feel vulnerable in relation to the object of our desire — desire implies, among other things, an emptiness that only the presence of the “Other” can fill up.
Love the “Nothing” - “The nothing” here means an activity or an experience for its own sake. It is to resist our tendency to make everything into a means to an end. You may find yourself experiencing something—an event, a person, a feeling, a sensation—and before you even had a moment to digest it, to sit with it, your mind wants to “make use of it”. It looks for ways to use the experience to support its own biases or beliefs. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it blocks us from the purity of experience since there is a constant mental filter between us and that which is experienced. Practice the small acts of loving “the nothing” — learn something that you do not have any practical “use” from; do it simply for the love of knowing. Learn to just sit, to rest, to sunbathe, to do nothing but experience the moment. Then take that into other experiences — experience something or someone and love that something and someone even if nothing more than the experience comes from it.
Devotion Towards that which You Extract and Benefit From - We live our lives benefiting from things outside of us. We may rest in a beautiful landscape, and this beautiful landscape inspires a poem or reflection within us — the landscape and its beauty have given us something. The same can happen with another person or what they create — they inspire us, move us, heal us, and so, contribute to our own being. A way to nourish that which we benefit from is to have a devotional attitude towards it, which simply means that we approach it with love. We will come to see that our devotional and loving attitude inspires revelation — the landscape reveals more, the more we love it.
To Love is to Know - This one continue from the previous — consider love as a way of knowing. We may wish to know something or someone, to know the essence of that which captures our minds, but very often our minds try to reduce something or someone to its limits. The mind is also very frustrated when it fails to do so — reality and persons are infinite and the mental categories will never be able to fully contain them. However, through love (which simply means opening up to something or someone without the mental filter) you can experience them and through that experience “know”, even if putting into words seems impossible.
Thank you so much for reading Volupta. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, feel free to join the conversation — via comments, chat or reaching out to me personally.
To all of those who celebrate, I wish a very Happy Easter.
With Love,
Naida
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