LOL Your Prayer Will Destroy You
…and perhaps that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do.
This thought very rudely arrived (as thoughts of this nature will), while I was in the shower reflecting on what it means to actually receive what I’ve requested.
To be honest, I did not imagine at the outset that a prayer might destroy my precious reality. I suppose that’s the good girl in me, conditioned to believe that prayers are about fixing some abomination or correcting some impurity. But now I’m starting to see that prayers are the epitome of absurdity.
(Given what I was taught about god early on, I can understand how one can miss the technology inside the mythos.)
I’ve made a career out of dissecting the roots of such things. Yet it wasn’t until this year, when I got what I wanted but only on the conditions that I let myself be utterly destroyed, that I started to actually understand something necessary about this paradoxical undoing process: prayer is designed to reverse false beliefs that imprison us inside the human mind.
Prayer returns us, in a sense, back to our original nature.
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I talk a lot about the game of life, because I believe the more you play, the more wisdom and liberation you can gain.
Here’s the thing though: being alive is a default setting.
And by play I mean: rolling the dice in ways that will ultimately test the edges of what is assumed or accepted to be real or right. Prayer isn’t binary. No, it reveals the territory of your consciousness. A good prayer exposes the true state of the person speaking. Prayer, like life, is an evolving mirror, always revealing the playback of your input.
What are you willing to open yourself to in order to experience your answer?
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the game of life is designed to extend and expand consciousness, not inhibit or restrict it. We do that by walking the plank of our comfort zones and finding the limits of our control. There is no easy answer of yes or no.
And the more I revel in this, the more I am unlimited.
Often, what is referred to as a ‘breakthrough’ is a way of seeing an opportunity or path that was masked by the limitations of one’s prevailing perspective. Or as Einstein famously once said: We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.
What this means to me is: in order to move past an existing mental block, you must step outside the bounds of what you believe to be ‘true’ or ‘right’ and become ABSOLUTELY UNREASONABLE for a minute.
You exist outside your dominant frame of reference.
At the outset, doing something that runs counter to your normal way of operating might look and feel insane. But when a standardized formula fails to generate results, perhaps it’s because the things you desire exist outside the operating conditions of your current paradigm.
You already have what you want — it’s as easy as that.
So in order to become someone else, you must destroy the story of the old self. You must let go of a belief that limits possibility. Getting what you want requires some form of immolation. You cannot be in two places at once. A completion of some kind opens the space for future gestation.
It is here — in this liminal space — that miracles live.
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I started praying again in 2017 for real real, not just when it got turbulent on the plane. And by real, I don’t mean that I did it right or well. I didn’t have a god growing up, although my parents certainly did their best. I could just never fully buy into the concept of a judge who governed from above us all, creating strange rules and casting down plagues. It felt laughable and slightly deranged — like so many human games.
No, when I say pray for real, I mean in the way I did as a child, when devotional acts didn’t have a name. Instead prayer was a conversation, a way of being in intimate relationship with the breathing energies around me. Let me roam freely on a warm summer’s day and eventually I would fall out of the human realm and into ecstatic exchange with the universe.
It just looked a lot like playing in the dirt.
Nature’s church had no gatekeepers, no punitive judges, no sacred book scripting the rules. Yet it was no less miraculous than the concept of heaven. God, to me, felt like the ability to be with anything. That’s what the earth taught me: to recognize the true worth of every bug as much as the next Elon Musk. To hold it all as necessary.
If you want to unlock life, use this key: everything has meaning. Are you listening? There is a secret message inside each moment if one is willing. That translation has always enthralled me the most: decoding the living world in order to learn her wild language.
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When I started working with divination as a modality, my teacher shared something that rattled my white girl bones. He was the first person who encouraged me to get feral in my prayer. To speak ruthlessly from my heart regardless of the form it took. To connect with core truths that came from my feet.
To scream, if need be.
Prayer can be spittle in the hand spread on the ground.
Prayer can be the petting of a tree or a hair to the earth.
Prayer can be the feeding of a river.
Prayer can be weeping the bittersweet until the blood is clean.
Prayer can be loud reverie.
Prayer can be a song only you and your ancestors know.
Through him and the practices of an ancient medicine grounded in a people back in Africa, I have come to know prayer as a visceral, full-body experience. Through this lineage, I have come to engage in a conversation that permeates every level of my existence.
I keep remembering: divinity lives inside this connection.
Whereas in the paradigms I grew up with, prayer was a simple blessing said before bed or over food. Do you see the difference? Docile and humble, it taught me to be good rather than REAL.
I couldn’t put my finger on it back then, but I sensed that in order to invest in this thing called religion, I might have to castrate something essential within myself. It took me the better part of my life to figure out why: true wildness can’t exist in a colonized mind.
Ironically, prayer has fucked me up good, and just in time.
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I am no expert in the ways of the Dagara.
But what I have learned in the few years I’ve been privileged to work with this lineage has radically re-written my script and smashed my old self to bits. Maybe I never cared for the sanctioned books because it seems so utterly obvious now: God is wild.
Prayer is a ritual that assists people in communing with the rhythms of existence. Look around you: the world is absolutely writhing with supernatural forces that move beneath our naked, naive eyes. So much is here, now, that resists human explanation. Why else, when we find the ends of our mind, do we screech for divine assistance? The gods exist because we need them.
Especially since prayer is not a bargain or a plea but an agreement.
The Course in Miracles teaches that miracles occur when right seeing is practiced. You must decide to see clearly, even if you have no clue what that means. Eventually you will discover what it looks like to clean up the distortions blurring your all-seeing vision.
Animistic traditions such as the one I work within believe that intelligence infuses everything: rocks, trees, and water all contain an essence that can be interacted with. Life speaks. No matter how hard we have tried to rationalize this unruly consciousness it only continues to do what it does best.
Teach humans how to live in right relationship.
It is not about who is right or wrong. That is the wrong question to be asking. At the end of the day, prayer is a commitment to tending places that remain constricted within us. To get out of the way so that more can blossom. It is never about fixing the world around us. Resist such imperialist thought forms. Nothing is broken. It is your perspective on such matters that you are asking to remedy when you pray.
For it is wholeness that restores.
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Over the past few months I’ve been receiving a big teaching about how medicine moves through a system. When I say medicine, I speak of healing. But healing is never a singular, isolated event. It is a conversation between a node and the surrounding collective. A helpful way to think about healing in this context is that it is connected to the release or revival of a pattern, story, or behavior. When one person addresses and repairs a dysfunctional, harmful, or false pattern or story within themselves, the energy of this correction is felt across multiple lineages.
(Some might call this atonement but I find that word has a lot of baggage.)
Everyone who carries a similar pattern in themselves who is also connected to the person of origin will be impacted by this shift. I notice this often in my divinations. The healing stories that surface have what could be described as an imprint that extends in all directions, showing where there is mutual resonance and wounding. I think of it as mirror medicine: when the beings reveal the shared territory of healing between me and another person.
Call it whatever you want, but this point of connection is the critical lever of the healing that wants to happen. The energy of this belief, experience, or story magnetizes medicine to itself through opportunities to be seen differently. This is how wholeness is restored: through the all-encompassing compassion of true recognition.
There is one piece in particular that likes to speak. Symbolized by a blue whorled shell, the lesson is usually about how someone has forgotten their original place. Often, it asks people to go to a spot in nature that calls to them and visualize themselves as necessary beings there: nodes in a shifting, cycling web of energy.
Change means something is alive.
This process invites us to remember the primal connections and tectonic changes that feed and sustain us on a psycho-spiritual level. Many of the Westernized concepts of success I’ve internalized and rationalized as my bottom line feel more empty with every passing day when I think of what really feeds my soul. It’s so basic at the end of the day. It is telling to me that so much of what I find abhorrent is the treatment of life as a commodity that can be bought and sold, taxed and patrolled.
There are many trapdoors of wokeness, but I think one of them that deserves some real clap back is this transcendental view of living above the blood and dirt of life. Of literally extracting yourself from cause and consequence — as if you could. I’m no longer interested in being that disconnected. I’ve been there and I almost didn’t find my way back from such fantasies.
And by fantasy I mean any ideology built on human supremacy.
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What Sunday school didn’t teach me is that true devotion activates the inner abolitionist. Because prayer does a funny thing to you. It makes it impossible to ignore the parts that are enslaved.
Prayer re-arranges reality because it operates at the level of energy. Devotion manipulates things at the atomic level. Here, disorganized matter is struck like a gong until it falls into a pattern.
Things fall apart and fall together.
What I notice is that I have an idea of how things are supposed to happen. Call it an ideology, because sometimes it do be that punishing. And by that I mean: my annoying need to be right. To be one step ahead of the game of life as it is unfolding — rather than exactly where I am. (Which is usually in the question.)
Now I see more clearly that much of what I’ve rejected or rebelled against when it comes to certain doctrines is the idea of spiritual enslavement. Of handing over the mechanisms of my most precious life to some faceless god figure. Yet here I am, perpetually dis-eased by my own need to know what’s next and imprisoned by the fact that I don’t.
Truth be told, the times I’ve felt most alive are when I forget my humanness, that civilized mask who has all the answers, and plug my brain back into the pure, primal pulse of the earth — that unholy consciousness which comes from the dirt.
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I’m someone who prefers direct revelation.
You are welcome to walk wherever you want, but for me that’s the path to liberation. I’m done giving my power away to dudes in the sky. I don’t desire to live in Elon Musk’s man cave on Mars. I want to be here, rooted in the rich funk of my own ground.
Even as it burns down around me.
The law of cause and effect is quite real for us humans. So it seems that when you pray to receive something, you will be granted your request. In some way, shape, or form, your answer is bound to manifest. Only with one crucial caveat: it will most likely look nothing like you expected.
I thank the gods for that last laugh.
All the things I wanted before? Gone. The old me is in the process of shucking the most precious skin, the one I groomed to be so perfect for a life that no longer makes sense. Maybe the one I thought would get me into heaven or at least somewhere noteworthy on the ladder of success. But no.
Instead I have been gifted the stripping of my falsehoods.
I’ve never felt farther from the concept of godliness espoused by Christianity or Kanye West and yet I’ve never been so dark and holy, petaled open, returned to some essential, wild source. Cleansed of my need to know it all in advance, I awaken to what is.
Maybe I am insane depending on where you sit.
I feast on my past life to feed the new and I spit my thanks on dirt. From a larger perspective, I have lost nothing and gained everything, for I am being absorbed back into the breathing fabric of the living world.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
