COYA, Church of Yachay Apus, beside the sun mark
Connect

Every day

Our Practice

The prayer is already going. What we practice is where we send it from, and what we aim it at.

The Four Altars
Connect

A prayer walk is a handful of days in a year. The practice is for the other three hundred and sixty.

Two foundations

Awareness, and responsibility

Awareness is naming what is actually in the room. Not what should be there, and not what would be more comfortable. Waking heavy and saying so is awareness, and everything afterward depends on that one sentence being true.

Responsibility is the harder of the two. Nobody else can be made responsible for what we are experiencing. The day a person stops handing it to somebody else is the day they can start changing it.

Both are practiced on ordinary mornings, badly at first.

A row of tall ribbed green columns growing along a low tiled wall on green grass, with Andean mountains and blue sky behind.
Rain falls from a heavy blue-gray cloud bank over saguaro and green desert scrub.

Through our relations

The people you find difficult are the practice

We heal in relationship. A circle puts a person back in front of their own relations with enough room to look at them.

The person you are angry with this week is not going anywhere, and neither are you. What we practice is setting the fight down and asking how to be of service instead.

Forgiveness here is a beginning. A person forgives so they can start again from where they are actually standing.

Letting go

It takes as long as it takes

Letting go is physical before it is anything else. The body does it first and the mind agrees later, sometimes years later.

A person in a wide-brimmed hat stands above still green water that mirrors the cloud, held between two steep dry hillsides.

What we are given to live by

Ten, and then one more

They came to us in this order.

  • The Earth is your mother. Care for her.
  • Honor your ancestors through your actions, not through your words.
  • Open your heart to the Great Mystery.
  • All life is sacred. Treat every being with respect.
  • Take from the Earth what is needed and nothing more.
  • Put the good of all before your own interests. Live with dignity and integrity.
  • Give thanks for each new day, every day.
  • Speak the truth, and speak only of the good in others.
  • Follow the rhythms of nature. Rise and retire with the sun.
  • Enjoy the journey, and leave no tracks.
  • And an eleventh, which is where the other ten resolve: do not take yourself too seriously.

Practices to bring home

Anything that puts a person somewhere they cannot be distracted counts: playing music, cooking, drawing, singing, walking a long way uphill.

Keep it simple. A day with one thing in it is a day with a prayer in it. Slow the whole thing down, do the one thing, let the rest wait.

A man in a wide-brimmed hat sits on a hillside playing a long flute.

Next

Walk it with us

All of this is practiced alone and then carried into the circle. If you would like to sit in one, that begins with an email.

Connect