Image here.

“For me prayer is a surge of the heart…”

St Therese of Lisieux

I started attending sweat lodge ceremonies a long while ago now and as I did that, I heard all this stuff occasionally about the right way to pray. At first it offended, so I ignored the information and tuned into something going on inside my heart. Years passed and I began to hear other bits of wisdom at the lodges that were new concepts to me too and I began to find great value in them. So eventually, I listened when someone talked about the right way to pray. I still didn’t think I bought the message, but I listened and decided to just let it sit with me awhile and discover why it is I was so convinced this message was wrong. In time I was deeply upset. So deeply upset that I didn’t have any words. My throat was too choked with sobbing to speak them even if I could think of words for my loss and pain. This message about the right way to pray welled up in me from no where…so I let my sobs be my prayer. I didn’t use even any mental words…I just let my pain speak and in silent supplication I prayed for help.

I have only known more powerful prayers and more powerful answers to prayers when I or another has been in a similar state.

Wordless earnestness beseeching for something you can’t do yourself is the right way to pray according to the teachings around my lodge ceremonies.

You don’t pray for things you could do for yourself, but for those things you can’t.

You pray for healing and aid, not for stuff.

That emotion comes from the heart and soul, not from what you think you need. It is bereft of the knowledge to make it better. You are a blank slate willing to do whatever it takes. You are humble. Open. Ready to listen. Ready to earn your way to something else.

That is the right place to begin a prayer in this teaching.

Being completely without expectations or opinions about what should come in answer to your prayer is the rest of it.

Then there’s a vast universe full of answers to get in response.

And you are willing to recieve them.

And so they come.

In such a generous form that we’ll be stunned and made speechless at the beauty of the perfection of what we get.

No molecule is against us.