Praise | The Wild Mind Journaling Project | Day 4

Our poetic inspiration, followed by our writing prompt:

"What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,

many jugs being poured

into a huge basin. All religions, all this singing

one song.

The difference are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks slightly different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different on this other one, but

it is still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes, these time and space personalities,

from a light, and when we praise,

we pour them back in."

~Rumi ~

Micro-discipline/writing prompt: What is it that you praise ? And in what basin are you pouring that praise ?

* * *

I praise our Mother,

her vast and unending capacity to give

when all her children do is take.

I praise the dawn, the dusk,

the light, the dark,

the moon and sun,

the balance of all, the existence of One.

* * *

An Educational History of Praise

I grew up in a godless house. My parents assumed god’s existence, but didn’t subscribe to any of his catalogs or promote him much. Religion lived outside of our walls, and spirit, like money, was generally a private matter.

My exposure to god and religion came in the form of church choir or Sunday school, with my Christian cousins or neighbors, as an occasional extracurricular activity sponsored by the church but not requiring my direct belief. Just show up. Sing. Glue popsicle sticks into crosses. Listen. Smile. Here you’re just a little 10-year-old sinner like everyone else, being offered salvation through song. So you become a familiar face but no one really cares if you don’t come here on Sundays, you’re here on Wednesday afternoons, with your Japanese best friend who doesn’t go to this church either, eating doughy store bought cookies, drinking red punch made with tap water out of small, waxy Dixie cups, singing “My Sharona” outside under the shade of a sprawling pine in-between takes of “Jesus Loves Me.” I stick it out until the church musical performance wraps, and then move on to bowling lessons. Even though I wasn’t really drinking their brand of Kool-Aid (just their tepid punch), the church’s religious assumptions dictated what I thought was possible — their one true dominant male god, or nothing.

My sister’s best friend was Catholic and bewildered us with tales of Catechism School. We thought it sucked she had to attend more school outside of regular school (especially at church), and didn’t feel envious one bit. But she did teach us and impress upon us the meaning and importance of the Lord’s prayer. So I recited it silently each night in bed to myself, trying to attach to something, anything, the only thing I knew, to connect with whatever heavenly protection might apply to myself. I also adopted “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” as a nightly mantra, modifying “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take,” to, “Lord please guide me through the night, and wake me with the morning light” — because, just like all good Christians, faux-Christians and Americans in general, I had a more unwavering faith in and fear of death than I did of God. And so, my praise began as a facsimile of someone else’s faith. But I was certainly seeking something.

After a childhood of faking faith, I was funneled into a private Catholic high school. I became further intimate with religion as a social activity, being excuse from class to attend communion but smoking in the bathroom instead, attending mass so I could sit next to my current crush and maybe get a handshake or a hug during the “Peace be with you,” portion of mass (my favorite part). I was also required to take Religion as part of my core curriculum. My first assignment as a freshman was to look something up in the bible. After some “I don’t knows” and “I have no ideas” from my parents and a few frustrated tears from me (up to now, a most perfect and self-sufficient student), my family had to call my uncle (the most pious man we knew, and who attended the church where I’d learned to sing like Doug Fieger) to help us figure out how to find chapter and verse in our spanking new King James.

Through the subsequent four years of trying very hard not to be a good Catholic school girl, I became peripherally intimate with the bible, mostly as literature, as well as Catholic mass, which served me well when I toured Europe and sat through a beautiful Italian Catholic mass at the Duomo in Firenze, following along as an easily recognizable and automatic ritual. Despite not knowing a word the priest said, I knew what he meant when he said it and was able to cross myself and repeat his praises at every prompted juncture, proving that even though I’d been suspended a time or two and even though they hadn’t converted me, I turned out to be a pretty good Catholic school girl after all. Though I didn’t pick up any of their guilt until I got married. But that’s another story.

My mom always said I would “get religion,” but I never believed her because I thought religion was a one-size-fits-all situation. In college, I took a World Religions class and realized that there were other gods to pray to, other deities that commanded much of humanity’s behavior and conscience. I was relieved that what I most wanted to resist was not what I would have to succumb to if I hoped to embellish my worship. I remember reading about Buddhism and stopping to marvel at the concept of enlightenment. In the middle of the chapter, I closed my eyes (in what I realize now is my first-ever attempt at meditation), sitting silently in my grandparents’ hand-me-dow, brown tweed armchair in my small, stale one-bedroom apartment in San Diego, waiting for it to come. I probably waited about three minutes and moved on to the chapter on Islam. While I didn’t and still haven’t found enlightenment, I’ve continued to be an enthusiastic (if somewhat informal and inconsistent) student of Buddhism since that day.

But it wasn’t until after college that my prayers became my own. When paganism and the divine feminine started to shape my consciousness. When I took the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and turned it into “Mother Earth and Daughter Spirit,” making a full circle with my finger around the radius of my heart, and then a straight line from third eye to heart, creating the female symbol instead of the cross. That is when I actually felt a little stirring of growth, a realization that there was a seed of prayer inside me that longed to blossom into fuller spirit.

In grad school, I discovered yoga as a physical practice. But it wasn’t until more than 10 years later I discovered it as a life philosophy. All those years of moving and breathing led to a natural transformation and more depth to my phenomenological dive. (Shameless plug: that’s what yoga does.) … The Eight Limbs of Yoga aligned with the teachings of Buddhism I had been drawn to for years and so I have continued to evolve my understanding and practice of each

within the borders of my own reality and the opportunities afforded me in Northern California — meaning I haven’t traveled to India nor Tibet, the ancient and most revered places of origin and significance for my practices, but my dedication is genuine, and my desire to continue to learn and teach with authenticity. Now I have a daily sadhana along with my daily yoga and meditation, I visit the occasional temple or ashram, I chant, I participate in puja ceremonies and extended sits, lead women’s circles based on the cycles of the moon, and basically just integrate everything that feels good and true into my intentional being.

But, I am still learning to pray out loud. I still prefer the silence of prayer. Or prayer on the breath during asana practice.

There are parts of these traditions I yearn to know and never will. I am content to walk the path as I can in the body and life and existence I have been given. My heart is true and my experience is real and the transformation continues to happen, so I power forward in that truth with respect for all of my teachers and everything I learn, for my own growth, evolution, and divine connection. All of this, I have come to praise.