praying to a God i don't understand
& finding peace in anxiety
My anxiety is higher than I can ever remember, full of what if’s about the unknown. My thoughts have felt like untamable little chaos agents. What do you do when you don’t feel safe in your own mind? Where is there to go? This time, I went to God. I prayed for the first time in years and it went poorly. That’s probably because my God is not tied to a religion, so I don’t know how to contain the prayer. I found myself starting with, “Hi,” then asking to be granted a sense of peace, presence, and gratitude, then sort of doggy-paddling around my brain to try to find a closing statement that wasn’t “Amen.” I ended up saying, “Thank you for considering my prayers.”
I find prayer confusing. I strive to trust that the Universe is taking care of me. I believe “God” is just a power greater than me: the circle of life, the Great Natural Unfolding. Does that mean, in my prayers, I can’t ask for what I want? If I say, “Please make XYZ happen,” am I rejecting the Natural Unfolding of things? Am I putting my own ideas of what’s good for me over the Universe’s ideas of what’s good for me? If I trust that the Universe is taking care of me no matter what happens, then why pray for anything?
At my most overwhelmed, I went to the woods by my house. I had already napped, journaled, meditated, cried, and processed with Peter, but I was still in a tender state. I walked while batting off my anxiety, attempting a few different approaches. I noticed my thoughts and then let them go, redirecting my senses to the nature around me. I noticed my thoughts and then challenged them, meeting them with more positive, reality-based thoughts. I repeated my prayer like a mantra: I pray for the highest good for all. I pray for peace, presence, and gratitude. The anxiety always came back.
Then somewhere on my walk, I saw a great-horned owl perched over the pond. I stopped and looked in awe. It flew away, that magisterial wingspan weaving between trees. I tried to trace where it went and followed it. I found it again, now resting on a different tree nearby a larger owl. I’d never seen two owls together except last March, when a mother guarded her three fuzzy babies in a nest tucked into a storm-torn tree trunk. I wondered if I might be seeing the mother and a grown baby. I cried.
As I stood there with the owls, something amazing happened. I became peaceful, present, and grateful. Watching one of the owls swoop into the distance while the other rotated its beautiful head, saw me with its big eyes, I forgot about my anxiety. I noticed that I felt good.
But immediately after noticing this, fear and panic arose in my body. I heard another voice come into my mind. It said, “You can’t feel good. Don’t forget, the thing you most fear happening could still happen.”
There I was, receiving the very thing I prayed for, but blocking it from myself. I was granted a pocket of peace, and with that, the subtle sense that everything was going to be okay. The part of me that wants to control things didn’t like that. That part said: how could everything be okay when I don’t know what’s going to happen next?
I don’t know why it’s scary to feel joy in the midst of uncertainty. The fearful part of me thinks that, if I allow myself to feel peace, presence, and gratitude, and my worries do come to fruition, I will feel stupid. As if I should have been more on guard or protective of my heart, as if I should have done a better job preparing for possible future hurt. But if things don’t unfurl the way I want them to, I will feel pain whether I allowed myself to experience joy or not.
Feeling peace in the midst of uncertainty is just about giving my anxious mind a moment to breathe. It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s an answered prayer from a God I don’t really understand. A light in the darkness. I’ll take it.
+ News: Honored to have written an essay for Sub Club for all yall who are, like me, trying to publish regularly on Substack while also writing a book. I’ve got a few tips on how to make it work. Read here <3
+ Reading: Loved Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, a novel about finding art and beauty in unexpected places. Very excited to learn from her at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in two (!!) weeks.
I receive a small commission for books purchased through bookshop.org affiliate links. Check out my shop here for more book recs <3
+ Extra Thoughts: I haven’t kept track of my metrics since my last post and it feels amazing. I turned off email notifications, and while I can’t totally avoid my dashboard, I realized I can sort of blur my vision or at least lightly raise my hand to cover the “Subscribers” section when I navigate to draft a new post. Unfortunately, these are the lengths I have to go to at this moment. When presented with numbers, I start thinking about them. When not presented with numbers, I don’t.
This aligns with a writing revelation I had this week when integrating The Fountain’s 3-Step Flow into my writing practice. I won’t share all that it entails here because you should just join the community, but I will say it’s the first time I have truly set a container for my writing, which included silencing notifications, removing the Messages app from my desktop dock, and fully turning off the internet. I’d always told myself I can’t turn off the internet while writing (I simply must WordHippo), but I decided to try it and instead just flow through those moments I think I must find the “perfect word” to move on. The change was so simple, but I was genuinely shocked by the depth it brought. Without the internet there to immediately serve up a buffet of synonyms, I was forced to pause and really consider what I could come up with on my own. This led to more creative, unique ways of expressing ideas that could never have been contained in a single synonym anyway.
I bring this up to say that both instances have taught me that I just can’t be trusted to act with intention if I have full access to everything I “want” access to. My mind (and behavior) runs wild when all the websites, all the communication, alllllll the statistics & information is available. I didn’t have a lot of structure growing up, so it’s counterintuitive to give it to myself. At the beginning it can feel like strictness or punishment. But I’ve come to realize that containers and structure are a form of self-love. They help me act in alignment with my intentions. They keep me focused on what really matters to me. They make me feel organized, grounded, and safe.
I feel similarly! I believe in a God, in a divine hand in the universe, but I'm not exactly sure what that means or looks like, so sometimes I pray, but I think it's just as likely those prayers will go unanswered and unfulfilled because sometimes I myself don't know what's best for me. Some of my unanswered prayers have ended up being the absolute best things for me.
I really love this kind of mental/spiritual reflection, Lindsey. I also pray to a god of mystery -- what I have recently started calling, after hearing someone else use this phrase, "Gus" (God, Universe, Source) -- and I also struggle with prayer since, being forced to pray as a child and essentially faking it then, now, as an adult, my prayer can seem somewhat awkward and superficial. I don't want it to be, though. I feel you on the need to find some higher purpose and meaning beyond what ego tells us and wants us to believe.
My view of ego is that it is a kind of built-in, body-based mechanism designed primarily to keep us out of danger and, like you're talking about, aware of potential threats. One practice that has really helped me over time is a kind of daily surrendering to Gus where I essentially re-declare my faith each morning and often throughout my days -- the idea that I believe in the fundamental truth that I am on a path of progress, and that I recognize that difficult things are laid in my path for me to learn from (kind of similar to what you're saying about the Great Natural Unfolding -- love that phrase, by the way). Because of this surrender aspect, my prayer has become more like a conversation. I don't feel the need to close my eyes or get down on my knees. Some days, I'm just like, well Gus, this fucking blows, man, but I trust that you know what you're doing. That sense of trust is the only kind of faith I'm aware of. And so I'm not sure prayer in the conventional sense is right for me. It is more like an open talk with the source of all this beauty and all this bullshit. Thanks again for you work. It is eye-opening for me every time.