I Pray You'll Feel Good

Here's something I don't wanna tell you—

the first way I contained myself was with prayer.

It sticks in my throat, though I'm typing, not speaking. that's how much I don't want this to be true.

But prayer is an attentional practice, one with a devotional tone, and that, constantly, is what it took to change my practice of rage with the ones I claimed to love.

I like to say, prayer works best when it's "thank you for what I want, please for what I have."

In those early days, all I knew was the information represented in part of the book The Secret, (I had burned discs, one of them ruined), that my thoughts were creating my reality. It was enough for me to go on.

My prayers, then, were incessant, and they sounded like "Please let me listen. Please help me shut up. Please show me how to love. Please let me listen just a little bit longer. Please help me be silent. Please help me to love what is here. Please help me to release my reactivity and be present to this person in front of me who is different from me and having a valid experience. Please put my attention on what I can be grateful for. Thank you for this. Thank you for this. I don't know why but thank you for this. How does it get better than this? how does it get better than this? how does it get better than this?"

That practice changed my life, that humble devotion, that decision to make my experience AS important as everyone else's experience, which meant both requiring more attention and surrendering many doomed bids for it in exchange for the practice of OFFERING it. It was a tuning of a tone, over the course of time, with persistence and adjustment, allowing the ear and the string to find one another. A process without strain or striving, patient, unachieving, ongoing, so nowhere to go.

In those days, I wanted to feel GOOD and I claimed it every minute. I asked for it humbly, energetically on my knees, singularly focused on opening my heart, loving my loved ones and my life.

Later years were for claiming the rest of the spectrum of experience, my choices, my cravings, my real-time practices which revealed my deeper values, and the abiding non-dual neutrality that allows me now to freely claim and holistically evaluate any polar position.

It gets a lot of shit, but deciding to feel GOOD is a great place to start. Feeling good makes every other choice easy, every responsibility lighter, every action more playful. It is good enough for you to ask for it, every minute of every day if you have to.

And you are good enough to have it.