Since I was a very young child, I remember being consciousness looking out through my eyes and hearing through my ears. A waterfall of life, cascading as myriad sensations through this elemental body. Utterly fascinated with the experience of the inner workings of my form.

Endlessly enraptured with the delicate sensations that could arrive on my fingertips via this watery, fiery, earthy, ever-still, star filled communication system. Enraptured with how big I felt, as if “I” spilled into everything around me and yet somehow mysteriously fitting inside of this little body. Everything experienced purely in the present moment without the extraneous tensions of the past or future.

I was completely enchanted with my home, called, nature. I could spend hours playing in the creek, delighted by squinting just so, gazing into the sun, making rainbow shimmer dances through my eyelashes — mesmerized by pill bugs, pollywogs and all things living this same language of my cells.

There was no distance between God and my own heart. ‘Myself’ as God — not as dogma, religion or concept — but as the ubiquitous center of all scintillating experience. Knowing how to pray a true prayer.

We all come in like this. Open, natural, innocent—one with the inner gold of pure perception.

Before all the broken promises, ruptures of trust and betrayals of innocence. Before the tarnished and frayed edges from all the wear and tear around the heart. Before the defended and protective personality that asserts itself over essence, inevitably driving and contorting how we come to see ourselves, the world, and one another.

We had not yet been carved into our ‘personhood’—sculpted into our humanity by the strong hands of Life.

What makes a human being then? What makes a true prayer?

Perhaps it is the journey of allowing all the hurts, the losses, the inevitable betrayals, and rejections to be grieved. To let life hurt as much as it does. To have your heart broken, not just once, but many times. When you’re done kicking and screaming and fighting the real wrongs you feel against your own belonging — to bear feeling defeated and yet not collapse under this weight.

Not so that you can pray the “this is what I want” and “I’m so empowered to get it all, now” prayer. Not the, “please support all of my defended, righteous, entitled, I’ll never make that mistake again, so I never have to hurt like this again” prayer.

Not the “woe is me, I’m such a f*ck up, loser, I’ll never have what other people have, so why bother, take pity on me,” collapsed prayer.

Nope. God doesn’t care about our inflated self importance or our counter swings into self-belittled landscapes of escapes into non-reality.

God listens when we sit still right here in the middle of ourselves amid the hot, holy, broken, whole, gorgeous mess of it all, and we stop with our plans, with our attachments to outcomes and our ideas of what or who is right or wrong.

God listens when we sit down here long enough to be a target to actually receive the blessing of ourselves, not as a future idealized self- image; but now, here, as we are, available to receive oneself as the ubiquitous center of all scintillating experience.

True prayer is not something that you do and yet it is the locus from which everything is done.

True prayer is who you are.

True prayer is the natural gratitude for your life, when you are rested in the truth of who you are.

True prayer is that which rises up through your channel and expresses as love, as power and wisdom in action as your precious Life.

I share this because each of us have an impact on the whole of ‘US’ whether we are conscious of this or not. There is a field of consciousness that is ‘US’ and who you are inside of this most intimate relationship, counts.

Please don’t take this sharing as another thing to use against yourself, as if there is some right way or wrong way to pray! Please take this sharing and anything you resonate with, as a reminder of what your heart already knows is true.

Let who you are, be your walk, your talk, your sacred offering.

But now inhabiting your edge. Having an edge to tenderly inhabit. This is the space and the place where true prayer spontaneously emerges. For just underneath this edge is the vulnerable, radiant, same innocence that has never truly been violated, lost, or stolen.

Life has simply been making your innocence realized and recognized as already whole. Enfleshing the original and pure intention at your inception, with your lived experience.