For use with sets of three:

“All shall be well and all shall be well.
All manner of things shall be well.”
Julien of Norwich

For use with sets of seven:

Maintain peace of mind.
Move at the pace of guidance.
Practice certainty of purpose
Surrender to surprise.
Ask for what you need and offer what you can.
Love the folks in front of you.
Return to the world.

From The Seven Whispers, by Christina Baldwin

Navajo Prayer Adaptation

May there be beauty above me
May there be beauty below me
May there be beauty before me
May there be beauty behind me
May there be beauty within me
May there be beauty around me
The world is restored in beauty

Buddhist Prayer

May I be happy
May I be peaceful
May I be free

May my friends be happy
May my friends be peaceful
May my friends be free

May my enemies be happy
May my enemies be peaceful
May my enemies be free

May all things be happy
May all things be peaceful
May all things be free

- Buddhist Prayer

(Suggestion: change “happy,” “peaceful” and “free” to words that are relevant to your personal experiences, or to what you wish to bring into your life.)

Prayer Story

Once upon a time, I said my prayers every night. I even wrote my own prayer and memorized it, adding it to the Our Father and the Hail Mary I said every night in order to fall asleep. Once upon a time, I prayed the rosary to fall asleep when my worries kept me up too late.

Then, at sixteen, I “left my faith.” That’s the phrase that’s used but its not what really happened. What I actually left was a religion that was incompatible with whom I had become. What I went looking for was a new container, a new belief set that would be able to hold the faith I still felt in my heart. I was young and not quite sure if faith could exist without a religious context but I felt the need to try. Damage was done along the journey; things were lost. One of the things I lost was prayer.

Years passed and I explored my faith and what context of religion could hold it. I explored various organized religions, vetoing every one as not quite right and never quite finding a view of the Divine that I was comfortable with. I missed praying but couldn’t force myself to do it. I thought, how can you pray when you don’t know who to pray to? Prayers had to be addressed to a recipient, didn’t they? I still had no name for “God” and so I turned away.

When September 11th hit much of the world as I knew it fell out from under me. I didn’t know anyone first hand who died on that day. I did sit in a car half a mile from my home in Queens and watch the next day as the smoke plume rose over NYC. The event itself, in my “backyard,” was difficult enough but then illness visited our household in the same month that I found out I was pregnant with our second child. I spent the entirety of my pregnancy wondering about a future I had always taken for granted.

All this came hard on the heels of my brothers untimely death the summer before, as well as news of both my parents’ and my sister’s imminent divorces. It seemed all the world was suffering, both the world at large and more immediately in my family.

The year before I had set up a family altar in my living room. On it were pictures of my family and little figurines representing each of us – a little bird for Morgan, a smiling dragon for H and a meditating monkey whose smile reminded me of my own. There was also a candle, my symbol for Spirit.

In my need to do something amid all that turmoil, I would light that candle nightly. I would wrap my heart around the thought of all those people mourning their loved ones lost in 9/11. I would think of my own loved ones struggling with their own pain. I would ask some unnamed source to help me be kind to my daughter despite all the stress that made me cranky. Like Mary, I would “ponder these things in my heart.”

As I grew more comfortable with lighting the candle I began to write notes in my journal, neutral notes asking for blessings for others or strength for myself. My friend and life coach, Kay, had me work with affirmations. I began to accept that prayer could have a wider definition than just what I learned as a child. Prayer could take many forms. I also began to understand that I didn’t necessarily have to have a name for “God” in order to pray. Maybe, I could just pray and the prayers themselves would figure out where to go. Maybe it was the act of praying that was most important.

In all the anguish of the loss and uncertainty of that year I learned to recognize what my faith looked like. I hadn’t realized before that I still had it, that it had always been there.

Our health situation improved without the need for hospitalization and our attentions turned to the ups and downs of life with a newborn. With the birth of Jacob the sadness and hardship of the year before began to ease. Life began to return to normal for all of us in the family, as well as in New York City. Normal just looked a little different. For my mom it was an apartment five hundred miles away from my father and that much closer to her grandkids. For the average New Yorker normal now included cops on corners with semi-automatic rifles and a scar on the skyline to remind us all of what was lost. A new normal isn’t always easy.

For me, my new normal came with an awareness. I would never again be able to withdraw into the world of depression that so often kept me from engaging with the world around me. I was too aware of how easily everything could be swept away in the blink of an eye. My gratitude for life itself grew and with it the awareness that I am not alone, was never alone. Faith kept me company, and the way to remember my faith was to pray.

Gone were the days of guilt over losing the Our Father, replaced by how good and right it felt to pray in other ways. I was able to connect with Spirit, in a deeper way than ever before. That was my new normal – life with prayer and eventually with prayer beads and Story-Beads. Remembering still makes me sad, but the gifts from that time in my life were countless and life-changing. Those experiences and all that has come since, are dearly precious to me.

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