We would not stop this quest until we finally looked within and discovered the realm of the sacred—inside ourselves. I believe we are emerging into the organic era of the Divine: the era when we will finally recognize that the laws of mysticism and nature are coded into our blood and bones.
The Divine is all creation. Nothing exists outside this holy light. All is creation, and all creation is conscious. Look up, sideways, or within and you will never see anything outside the nature and power of the Divine. I converse with this God of life all the time. In prayer I share my thoughts, my problems, my dilemmas, and my musings. I have learned to attune my inner world to the subtle nature of heaven: the way it whispers and guides us, the way it waits until we are ready to respond, the way it blocks us from our own foolishness, and the way it lets us create our own mistakes or become masters of our own genius.
Introduction The Power of Prayer
Yet even as prayer is our primal language, it is also a lost language.
The power of the Divine is, and always has been, pure power, transcendent of human imagery.
Too few of us understand how this connection—or lack thereof—influences our thinking, decision making, and even our health. Too few of us understand that without the grace that is carried by sacred language, our souls will literally starve.
The childhood story “The Princess and the Pea” comes to mind. The princess kept stacking mattresses on top of a small pea, yet she could still feel it, which prevented her from sleeping. That pea is our holy interior.
Yet the sacred still calls to us. We will never feel quite right, never quite at peace, until we are communicating with our own soul, and the cosmos, regularly. At the end of the day, we are sacred beings. We forget that at great peril to ourselves.
When we do not know what we believe in—when we do not feel empowered to have an intimate, personal, conversational relationship with God—we are susceptible to believing the most potent voice in the room. And sometimes that voice comes carrying a darkness unimaginable.
When we pray, we ask the Divine to show us how to see, how to speak, how to create. We ask God to reveal, to illuminate, the right path for us. God, show me how to see this. Reveal your wisdom to me, Lord. Show me the way. One word will do. One word is all I need. Then, suddenly, the word hope arises in you. Or patience. This word, this revelation, becomes the most holy word you have. You can hang on to it; you can use it to guide you. This is the true meaning of prayer: a request for help in how to see.
During those years of my career, I had no interest in what someone believed or did not believe. Connecting people to the Divine, and to their own soul, was not my job. My job was to teach students about energy anatomy, guide them to access their intuition, and uncover their sacred archetypes. I was interested in matters of the mind and body, and did not feel it was my place to talk about the soul.
Mystical experiences are soul directed and soul driven. They are not involved with or attached to the grime and grit of daily human life. They are transcendent. They transform us, and we in turn transform life.
CHANNELING GRACE From that point onward, my inner habits began to shift. I needed more time alone. I gradually lost my enthusiasm for teaching about archetypes and sacred contracts, subjects I had adored and taught for nearly 15 years. In workshops I went from observing patterns in my students—like the archetype of the Wounded Child or the Rescuer—to noticing who in the room seemed to be the most vulnerable.
The classes filled immediately with people coping with every type of suffering, from terminal illness to chronic physical pain to depression. I should have felt out of my league, but I did not feel the least bit overwhelmed. Instead I had an ever-present thought, an active spark of grace, that my role was to teach about the soul—and heaven’s role was to heal. I truly got it.
I discovered that problems of the soul cannot be addressed by energy work or even archetypes. They must be addressed at the level of the soul. Just as physical disease may require medicine to heal, so a soul crisis requires its own medicine. That medicine is grace, administered via intimate, personal connection to the Divine through prayer.
This is where prayer comes in. Where it becomes an absolute requirement. Because in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the Divine, this vast, sacred, living, breathing, holy cosmos is also very intimate; for we each reside within the nature of God. And the bridge between this impersonal, cosmic system and each one of us is prayer. Prayer is how we communicate with the cosmos; it is the means through which we make ourselves known and heard in the vastness of space. And it’s how we receive guidance in return. Prayer is our channel of communication, the direct line between the soul and the Divine. We are built for this divine intimacy—and for the awe, belief, and inspiration it creates.
The experience of awe—of believing that something greater than ourselves is present and somehow involved with this human experience—is a constant in our fundamental nature, as critical to our sense of well-being as food and water. An experience of awe can inspire us to “rise from the dead,” to climb out of the darkness of depression and despair. It is the hidden force behind health and healing, the genesis of every observable miracle.
We need to learn to speak to God intimately, directly, and often. We can no longer pray to God; we must pray with God. And we must pray with and for each other.
I converse directly with God. I always have. And it has never occurred to me that my prayers are not heard, though I know they read as if I am talking to myself. But I am not, not really. I see my way of prayer as a form of mystical dialogue, an inner conversation in which I share exactly what I am thinking about, what I am struggling with. And soon—always—an answer shows up. Sometimes one occurs to me later, while I am writing.
I live in complete trust about the way heaven works, and I have never been disappointed.
Second, that it opens a channel between you and the Divine, between your individual soul and the impersonal, holy cosmos. Through this channel, grace can flow. Finally, that you don’t need to understand how it works—only that it does. In fact, releasing the need to understand is part of the process of reclaiming your holy sense of awe, your belief in something much bigger than your mind could ever understand.
Prayer reconnects your soul to the divine cosmos, and the connection is very personal. Some of my students read my prayers each night, contemplating how my words connect to their own lives.
1 HOW WILL YOU COME to ME, LORD? Prayer
My illusions, my flaws will be exposed like boils ready for a lance. And then when I am broken, too weak to deceive even myself, there You will be—already resurrecting my soul.
There is no such thing as a small spark. When I hold that image in my head, Lord, my soul is filled with awe. We can so easily do so much for so many.
They have no power other than the power we give them through our craving of them. And that craving costs us our real power—our soul, our light. No amount of stuff can convert into one act of compassion.
Tossing out the shadow but retaining the services of the sun. Clever how darkness works! We’ve shifted our vocabulary to anesthetize the words that describe evil so we can no longer see or recognize its influence. We cannot recognize its handiwork if we don’t have the words to describe
The word “negativity” has been substituted for “the Devil” because that word lacks an obvious connection to the myths of hell. It is a neutral word, bypassing the sacred completely. We’ve gotten very good at word games, Lord. Teresa of Ávila always told her nuns that the moment you believe you are safe from darkness, it is standing right next to you.
Teresa of Ávila prayed Lead me not into temptation constantly, knowing that pride was her adversary. She knew the dark whispers of evil—the reptiles in her soul—could penetrate her through her pride. They softly reminded her of her worst fear: that she could indeed be put on trial as a heretic, found guilty, and burned at the stake. Just as angels inspire us with grace-filled thoughts and often surround us with calmness and courage, demons know our weaknesses and animate them with fear. You’ve made this world an equal playing field. That’s for sure.
Grace Discernment is considered one of the highest graces. It is the soul’s aptitude to pierce through the illusions that diminish our inherent strength, clarity, compassion, and sense of moral justice. Illusions are easily created. We decide to take a comment personally that had nothing to do with us, or we conclude that we could handle a drink—just one drink—because we’ve been sober for two years and this is such a special occasion… Oh, how we know that voice! That part of ourselves that gives us permission to do all things harmful, weak, deceptive, and even nasty. We count on that voice to provide us with an excuse for bad behavior. This is where holding on to wounds is useful. The old “I’m weak because of my childhood” excuse. But the truth is, one day we each have to confront our partnership with darkness. We have to acknowledge that the partnership is a conscious one. We have to become discerning about our own actions, not remain helpless victims of our own emotions. We are not all that helpless. We just like playing in the dark…