What Ayahuasca Taught Me About Prayer
By Christian Alfaro
“If Life is a Ceremony, Then Our Actions are Our Prayers.”
This phrase came to me after my first Ayahuasca retreat. The co-hosts talked about living life as a ceremony, but what did that mean? I had no idea then. And a year later, I’m still early in my embodiment of the daily connection and aliveness of ceremonial living.
Or, as one teacher tells me, I am still a kid in my studies.
Meeting God
Speaking of being a kid, it’s important to backtrack to my childhood momentarily. I wasn’t raised under this or that -Ism. In fact, my parents chose not to raise us under any particular religion. To this day, this choice is one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me–the freedom to explore my own relationship with God.
At 20, I met my first version of God thanks to Lady Ganja, or as She recently reminded me, “The One Who Woke Me Up.” And for anyone else who’s had a mystical or transcendent experience, there’s no unseeing or unfeeling whatever unfolded in a momentary connection to something immensely Sacred and really ‘effing cool.
Can We Fake Praying?
So while I prayed half-heartedly from that moment on, I chose to take up an active, honest relationship with prayer in the months leading up to my first Ayahuasca ceremonies. And the more I devoted myself to prayer, the more I felt like a fraud.
I’d ask myself… Am I just making this up? Who or What’s even listening anyway? Is praying just an excuse to hear myself out or express what I truly want? Am I rambling to God or myself? All I say is thank you, aren’t I supposed to pray and ask for something? How do I ask for something? It feels selfish to ask for things…
Doubts rolled in, yet I continued to pray. What was there to lose? I decided nothing, so I prayed over and over for three things: For someone to take a chance on me professionally, to be in a community of like-minded and like-hearted humans, and well, I’ll save the third for a different day.
It’s been a year since my relationship with prayer genuinely kicked off, and all three of those prayers have been answered. Because as Martha Beck taught me, we can only receive our prayers when we’re in a state of peace.
What Is… God
So before I get into what I’ve learned about prayer since working with plant medicine, let me share What and Who I believe God to be in my life.
It is important to keep the popular maxim, “Strong opinions, loosely held.” top of mind. Who am I to talk to you about God? What do I know but my own experience and relationship with the Sacred? And what word or words can hold the Divinity of God in their characters? None. And yet here I am, doing my best to express my relationship with the ineffable.
And I believe our relationship with God, Source, Spirit, The Universe, The Mystery, Yahweh, Creation, Creator, Love, Tao, and so on is a very personal and deeply intimate relationship constantly unfolding in the privacy of our temples. It’s a beautiful relationship for us and us alone to explore. And then courage, respect, and understanding become the filters to express through if we so choose to express what God Is to us.
For now, my last belief on God is that God is more What energy than a Who energy. God is too… vast to be contained in the boundaries of… anything. So at the moment, I believe God to be more a Force than a Hand, more Creation than a Creator, and more a Source than an Entity.
So in my early days - 12 months ago - I’d ponder with the Sky, give high-fives to Tree trunks, branches, and leaves, listen to the Birds sing, and express my unconditional love to the Moon. An essential piece of building my relationship with prayer and God was being able to see God. I didn’t care for validation that my prayers were heard. I wanted to know what I was praying to was real.
Up until then, I observed that this God lives here and that God lives there, perpetually invisible to the human eye and always just out of reach from our soft hands. I had no interest in expressing my all to a God I could not see and feel. I could see the Moon, I could see the Sun, I could even see the Wind dance on the surface of Water. So I decided to pray to Nature.
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” ― Frank Lloyd Wright
Ayahuasca’s Teachings on Prayer
And then I found myself at an Ayahuasca retreat, definitely in dialogue with… Something.
In my first ceremony after receiving my first cup, I emptied myself of numerous intentions, none more important than wanting to meet the Spirit of Ayahuasca. And then, I began to rattle off my long list of questions. And to my surprise, a Voice chuckled and responded, “That’s quite the list you have.” To which I joyfully responded, “I have questions!” And this was met with the sweetest Presence assuring me, "We have a lifetime to work through all of these.” A big smile filled my face.
So Nature had been listening to me pray…
Even still, part of me still felt like a fraud, praying and speaking hollow words to a God too busy to turn Their attention my way in a space too vast for my prayers to make it… wherever it is that prayers are received. However, this, too, would be addressed in my next ceremony.
Throughout the ceremony, I learned and felt many things because my second Ayahuasca ceremony was the one that changed… everything.
And what I noticed throughout these first two ceremonies was the medicine holders saying gracias over and over and over again. At times, all they did was say thank you… and that caught my attention.
A Philosophical Pitstop
I love to pay attention. Here comes a quick detour… I often wonder why it is that humanity exists. Why were we gifted this highly developed brain and body? What’s the point of this awareness of our place in the cosmos? What does it mean to express one’s soul?
As of today, I’ve landed on at least five simple reasons.
We are here to be grateful.
We are here to pay attention.
We are here to live within Presence.
We are here to give and receive Love.
We are here to express ourselves creatively.
So as I noticed their overwhelming senses of gratitude as they led ceremonies, by the end of my second Ayahuasca experience, I could now give myself permission to believe that when I pray, and all I can do is express my gratitude; that’s the farthest thing from fake and hollow.
The medicine taught me, "When I say thank you from my heart, it is always enough.” Or as Meister Eckhart says, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
Some say that the highest vibrational states, if you’re into those schools of thought, are of gratitude and Love. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is the more gratitude I express; the more life reflects that back to me. Thank you for this Life, God. Thank you for living from your heart, Christian. Aho to gratitude.
Plants Teaching This Person How to Pray
So what else have I learned about prayer from the plants? Enough for a lifetime. And what a blessing that I’m not even a year into my studies with these wise, ancestral spirits.
I’m a young man shamelessly in love with the words. I often joke with my mom that my life is full of words. To which she laughs, shakes her head, and tells me she’s well aware. You should’ve seen all the words and stories that didn’t make it into what you’re reading now.
In my defense, I’m a marketing consultant who loves listening to stories, reading, and writing as much as he does eating, breathing, and stretching. I get paid to research what words people search on Google (aka SEO) and write words to match their digitally expressed curiosity.
So while my life can be jam-packed with words, what the plant teachers remind me is that many prayers don’t need words. Some of the best prayers are wordless. In fact, for many ceremonies, I’d ask the medicine to teach me how to express my gratitude without using words. And in these wordless states of presence, deeply seated prayers get revealed, addressed, or even sufficiently answered. And these communions with God come through in energetic forms that words could never properly translate.
“When we try to speak to each other--Me to you, you to Me, we are immediately constricted by the unbelievable limitation of words. For this reason, I do not communicate by words alone. In fact, I rarely do so. My most common form of communication is through feeling.
Feeling is the language of the soul. If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look at how you’re feeling about it. Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover--and even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth…
I also communicate through thought. Thought and feeling are not the same, although they can occur at the same time. In communicating with thought, I often use images and pictures…
In addition to feelings and thoughts, I also use the vehicle of experience as a grand communicator. And finally, when feelings and thoughts and experiences all fail, I use words. Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood…
Now the supreme irony here is that you all have placed so much importance on the Word of God, and so little on the experience. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around. ” - Conversations with God, Neal Donald Walsch
To Suck At Praying Is To Choose To Pray… More Often
Weeks ago, I sat under a teacher (a tree) on a windy day while working with some plant medicines. And as I looked to the Sky, I laughed and confessed to God, “I suck at praying. Can you help me?” To which I laughed and learned there’s no such thing as a bad prayer.
So before I end with a personal story about my dieta, I’ll pseudo-end by summarizing how my relationship to prayer has grown. In short, it sometimes feels like it hasn’t (reread the story above). I still largely don’t know what I’m doing, but then again, does anyone know what they’re doing, or are we all doing our best to figure it out as we be?
If anything has changed, it’s that I know God and Nature are always listening. Always. And this means I’m never truly alone, even if I’m feeling lonely. And that reassurance that God’s got my back, or as my sister recently put it, “If God’s putting me through this, God will get me through this.” is everything when life feels overwhelming.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I can pray through pure presence as I sit in front of my altar and bow my head. Without words, I can pray. Through my work, I can pray. At yoga, as I roll out my mat and feel my roots connect to Mother Earth, I am praying. As I pick up my pen and let the characters take form without thought, I am praying. Maybe praying isn’t anything more than a choice to be introspectively or expressive and outwardly present.
What I Have Is All I Need, All I Need Is What I Have
As you may know by now, I’m also a young man of immense gratitude. For years, I have felt and known I have everything I need.
The story begins as the final ceremony ends in my first master plant dieta. And even though the ceremony had closed, I was deep in the medicine in a gentle, loving way.
A conversation between me and the three women I’d done the dieta with prompted the question from Ayahuasca. The four of us spoke about desire, the material world, and what it means to have an honest relationship with wanting.
And as they decided it was time to make some oatmeal, eggs, and veggies, which would eventually lead to them deciding no one wanted to cook and that we might as well bribe the chef, I needed to make a pitstop at the bathroom.
Sitting on the toilet, smiling, hands connected in a prayer pose like one of my favorite emojis, touching my First Eye aka the Third Eye, I’m loving up on the Spirit of Ayahuasca. And, loving up was intoxicating the medicine with my gratitude. And with the conversation of desire fresh in my awareness, the medicine proposes a beautiful question to me… “What is there to get beyond what’s already been given?” After repeating the question to myself, I immediately responded, “Nothing.” Which draws the sensation of La Madrecita smiling at and with me.
I have been gifted a healthy body, a capable mind, a beautiful family, a fridge full of goodies, the best of friends (aka my Star Fam), work that stewards indigenous culture (s/o Delfi), work that transforms a person’s life, and SO MUCH MORE. This is why when I pray, rather than ask for anything else, I say thank you for everything I have.
I’m still learning how to ask for what I need and express my desires. It’s a slow process, but isn’t all healing a slow process? Healing my relationship with prayer is yet another gift I can thank Ayahuasca for. My journey with the plants is a year old, and in that year, my life has dramatically shifted gears.
May this be an invitation for you to build your own relationship with prayer and to God and watch as you transform your own life with the help of your hands, your presence, your words, your biggest wishes, and the Force of Creation the Lives Within.
And if you find it hard to pray, start by saying thank you. And if you don’t know what to say thank you, invite yourself to feel thankful because a prayer void of words is as powerful as any laced with them.
“No prayer… goes unanswered. Every prayer… is creative… The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude… The process of prayer becomes much easier when, rather than having to believe that God will always say “yes” to every request, one understands intuitively that the request itself is not necessary. Then the prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving. It is not a request at all, but a statement of gratitude for what is so.” - Conversations with God, Neal Donald Walsch
NEXT ARTICLE: Huachuma: Divine Masculine Medicine and the Pathway Back to our Hearts
About the Author
Christian Alfaro is a Marketing Consultant specializing in SEO & Email channels. He collaborates with organizations serving individuals & communities through their unique heart-based services, from retreats to masterminds, emails to blog posts. He's passionate about releasing information that builds a world with more We's than I's where the commitment to one's personal mission, purpose, or dharma is eco-centric rather than ego-centric.
Christian's path with plant medicine began in June 2022. Since then, he's continued to deepen his studies through Master Plant dietas, plant medicine retreat operations & logistics, & nonprofit work supporting indigenous leaders in their efforts to protect, preserve, & steward indigenous culture, ancestral wisdom, & sacred plants.
When he's not working with conscious for-profits & nonprofits, Christian's typically smiling, laughing with & learning from dear friends, reading or writing, being grateful, immersing himself in Nature, or deepening his musical & yogic practices.
