Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 28: what happens when sacred medicine prayer enters your body

Beautiful Magicians,

Last Sunday I talked about meeting The Song of the Morning of the World rosary for the first time and noticing how radically different it is from any rosary or other prayer beads I’ve ever touched.

And I’ve touched a lot!

• I’ve chanted Sanskrit mantras on beautiful mala beads that people made for me.
• I’ve prayed on a dozen rosaries, maybe more, all handmade for me.
• I’ve prayed (or rather tried to pray) on my mother’s crystal rosary which was blessed by the pope.
• I’ve prayed on countless chaplets, smaller strings of beads created for specific devotional practices like Stella Maris. I’ve prayed on chaplets created just for my prayer intensives.

So I know prayer beads. Or rather, I thought I did!

Last Sunday I wrote about my first impressions of this radical rosary, the very first one that is completely untouched by religion. The first rosary with no god, no theology, no supplications.

My first impressions:

• It’s heavy
• It’s alive
• It has a voice (a rather loud voice)
• It’s beautiful, not pretty.
• And its greatest difference: this rosary heals division. It’s sad but true that most followers of the world’s patriarchal religions beseech their god to punish and destroy members of other religions. We are watching this on the world stage right now.
• This rosary carries echoes from thousands of years of matrilineal communal living without violence, weapons, or war.
• My conclusion is this rosary is a FIELD. Which is an amusing echo of the name of this newsletter: Notes from the Field.

Well, now I’ve lived another week in intimate communion with this rosary.

I’ve lived with it physically: I put it on the moment I get out of bed and don’t take it off until I get back in.

I’ve also lived with it mystically: I’ve spent the last week doing nothing but getting ready for the opening gathering in Praying in the Dark, coming this Tuesday. In Praying in the Dark, we are going to pray five life-altering prayers that heal the five life-destroying crimes of patriarchy.

In past newsletters, I’ve told the story of how I stumbled upon the 5 crimes when I tried to pray on my mother’s rosary and could not. Could not repeat the theological horror story of a man being tortured to death for the supposed redemption of sins. A redemption commanded by his father, a god.

With that road impossible to walk, I did something, that as far as I know no one has done before: I pulled the camera back from watching the execution of one man until I could see all the crimes committed by all the patriarchal religions and governments over the last five thousand years.

I thought it would be hard to distill such a big story. But it wasn’t. It was quickly evident that there are five major categories of crime that all patriarchal religions and governments commit. These crimes have ruined the lives of women by taking away our power and agency.

But, it is critical to remember, these crimes have also ruined the lives of men by forcing them into a distorted understanding of who they are and how they are supposed to live as dominators of the land, of women, and of other people.

The five crimes are:

1. Theft of our birthright dignity
2. Silencing our voices
3. Rape
4. Greed
5. Murder

That list came quickly, but it took me months to come up with five prayers that have the power to heal those crimes. I’ll tell the story on Tuesday, but a funny part is that a hurricane had something to do with it!

Once I’d settled on the wording, I began to pray the five prayers to restore our feminine birthright dignity, awaken our powerful voices, protect our bodies from rape, greed, and murder. And I loved them. And felt they were important.

But until this week, I didn’t understand the full healing power of these prayers.

All week, I’ve been not just saying those prayers, and wearing this feral rosary, but I’ve also been getting the prayers into my body.

And not just my prayers. My prayers are only half the story. Tony Goncalves has written five masculine prayers that initiate the seven feminine beads that heal each crime.

On Tuesday, Tony will speak the opening masculine prayer first, and then women’s voices will follow with seven healing prayers. Tony has devoted himself to listening deeply into echoes of true masculine voices to hear how the healthy wise loving masculine would pray to restore harmony.

I’ll give you just one example. Tony opens all five of the masculine prayers with:

Hail Sacred Fathers, gentle and strong

Right away, listening to a male voice say that, my female body begins to relax. I want those sacred fathers, men are both gentle and strong, to surround us and hold us and pray with us.

Then, in the next line, he heals the same crime that affects women, acknowledging that it has wounded men as well. So for the first crime of theft of birthright dignity, Tony says

Our sacred dignity is restored once more.

And my body relaxes even more. I’ve been so focused on all the ways patriarchal religion has harmed women, that I failed to see the reality that men’s true dignity has also been stolen.

Tony continues:

Blessed are we amongst the sacred web of life
and blessed are the stones upon which we stand.

Hearing that, any sense of us vs them dissolves into mist. We are all the sacred web of life.

In the final section of the prayer, Tony invokes the men:

Sacred Elders, Keepers of the Old ways,
teach us courage, mercy, and right relationship. May the beauty of our worth blossom and may all remember who they are.

And that’s just the first of five blooms that heal the sins of patriarchy!

I didn’t anticipate how powerful living with these prayers would be. But after a week of typing every word slowly and carefully into documents for the members of Praying in the Dark. And typing them again, slowly and carefully onto slides for our opening gathering.

I realized something had happened.

As a deep soul writer, I know the power of writing. By hand. That includes typing. I always begin writing by hand in my journal, but to put anything out into the world, I have to use my hands to type. And—as any writer will tell you—I speak what I type aloud to be sure I have it the way I want.

So my hands and my ears are literally absorbing these prayers.

And as I make the slides, my eyes are taking the words in. As well as all the mystical images Cathy creates for us.

So my eyes are absorbing mystical truths.

This rosary is a full-body immersion in prayer. And my body is responding in ways I have never experienced.

• I feel different. Can’t identify exactly why, but I feel new.
• My dreams are different. Very different. The struggles have ended. A sweetness has arrived
• I wake feeling rested, not anxious.
• My body is calmer. I’m less jittery.
• My sense of trust is expanding. I trust my intuition, my guidance, my creative instincts
• I feel hope. Which might sound crazy in a world that is collapsing, but I feel hope in us, in prayer, in our ability to remember how to live.
• My heart feels like it is expanding.

Now I’m a prayer artist. I know a thing or two about prayer. I have played with prayer, experimented with prayer, redefined prayer. And this is new. This is different. This is deeper. Wider. Holier.

It's medicine! I had a big AHA in the night as i was wondering WHY these prayers were so healing. The second definition of prayer is Sacred Medicine.

Prayer, real prayer, sacred medicine prayer:

• caresses your body
• embraces your heart
• enchants your soul
• rearranges your brain

This experience of sacred medicine prayer is not something I can bestow on you. Or something you can read about.

You have to pray for yourself. You have to feel the healing words and images and sounds enter your body. And discover for yourself what it’s like to pray in the dark, knowing that your prayers are somehow shifting our world into what Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine called “an island of coherence.”

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

This is exactly why we pray!

Please register now, so you have time to get ready.

We will be praying this rosary through the end of 2028 and probably beyond, so you'll have two or more years to hear your own echoes of the song of the morning of the world. Links to purchase the rosary, companion journal and posters are all on our Resource Page which you'll get when you register.

Click to read all about this prayer intensive, get the schedule, peruse the bonuses, and register.

AND, be sure to watch the brand new video I made to introduce this radical thrilling intensive.

We meet on 4 Tuesdays: July 14, 21, 28 and August 4 at 6pm eastern, a time that works well for the Americas and the Pacific Rim.

Then, to serve everyone who can't make the Tuesday gatherings, I'm hosting Watch Parties on Thursdays at 1pm eastern.

Plus, because we need to just sit and talk about this radical new prayer practice, we'll also have three Sunday cafes.

I've kept the fee very low and even made it possible to invite a friend.

Praying in the Dark

Life is fragile, handle with reverence
and radical, beautiful, sacred medicine prayer
that creates an island of coherence

Janet
PS: if you have questions, write to me at janet@janetconner.com

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