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Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” On a recent three-hour flight—which turned into a 12-hour layover nightmare—I happened to be reading a new book by Heidi Smith, The Uncommon Book of Prayer: A Guide to Co-Creating With the Universe (Running Press). Over the next several hours, the book became an emotional support object, helping me remain calm.
Smith, a mental-health counselor and flower-essence therapist, discusses prayer as a method for finding language that resonates with our intentions. Even if we are not conscious of it, our spoken words and the internal dialogue of our thoughts affect us and the world around us. But trying to stay in the affirmative can be challenging when it feels like the world around us is in chaotic turmoil. I spoke with the author to discuss her intentions in writing the book as well as how she navigates the current world climate with grace.
Smith defines prayer as “an active agreement made between your soul and the divine.” The divine can be many things, she says. The crucial element is that “intentional prayer is a way to bring more agency to those places in your life where you struggle. Prayer can serve as an act of solidarity with ourselves, our community, and our earth.” She writes that “prayer plants the seeds of change. Co-creation is the progression of thinking to feeling to knowing to being. We get the opportunity to put this into practice whenever we take a moment and reflect on what we are co-creating, through the prayers we speak, see, hear, and live.”
Vogue: Tell me about your professional background and what led you to write this book.
Heidi Smith: I am trained as a mental-health counselor, and I elected to remain unlicensed because I wanted to work alongside the medical-industrial complex and not inside of it. After graduate school, I went on to pursue a degree in herbalism at a school called Arborvitae School of Traditional Herbalism.
I’ve also studied healing modalities and flower-essence therapy, which is a specific type of plant medicine—not the same thing as essential oils. It’s a very subtle and pretty esoteric approach to healing, working with flowers. I blend that with somatic work, a modality called Focusing, which is a somatic integration technique.
During the pandemic, I started to lean into my spiritual and healing practices more deeply. I had always had a relationship with prayer, but I had never examined prayer as its own thing. And then I [realized] there were no books on prayer that were cross-cultural and secular. Everything was super-religious. There’s certainly lots of books on meditation and mindfulness, but I wasn’t finding any that go into the mechanics of sound and language and looking at it more from a multidisciplinary level. I started praying more intentionally and more ritualistically, and talking to my clients about it.
But then when I started asking people about their relationship to prayer, I found people were either all about it and had these amazing miracle stories, or they were ambivalent or even frightened. So I started to think about the similarities between prayer practices throughout the world; I’m more interested in what’s connecting us than what’s separating us. And so it kind of evolved into a specific kind of syncretic methodology.
Do you have clients who are resistant to prayer?
For the most part, the people who are drawn to my work are drawn to my approach. And certainly there were some people who were ambivalent about prayer or had a negative association, but I do think that any place we are in resistance, that’s something interesting to look at.
I love the concept in the book that we’re co-creating our life through prayer rather than life just being something that happens to us. It’s such a beautiful way to frame prayer as something that changes our internal dialogue, so the way that we talk to ourselves can help create the reality we want.
Yes, exactly. It’s a way to think about how we are co-creating with life instead of a more victimized perspective that life is happening to us. Of course, victimization is a very real thing, but it can also be a mindset.
You utilize somatic therapy with your clients as well. How is somatic therapy and prayer linked in your practice?
I utilize a modality called focusing. We go into the body in a meditative state, and we’re just present with any physical sensations that are arising. And it’s like parts work, like internal family systems. We all have these different parts that have their own memories. They have their own consciousness. It’s frequently where we’ll encounter our inner children. And so it’s a way of shining a light on those parts of ourselves and being with the physical sensations that come with them, building more awareness. And it’s a way to improve distress tolerance and emotional regulation, because a lot of times, these are the parts that are running the show subconsciously.
What do you recommend when the negative spiral of thoughts is too overwhelming to be counteracted by the positive intention of prayer?
I work with complex-trauma survivors. A negative view of the self and a negative worldview are two common traits of complex-trauma survivors. I have personal experience with that as well. There’s no shortage of things to feel negative, overwhelmed, despairing about. One place to start is how that’s presenting in your life. When are you noticing the negative thoughts? Is there a trigger? Is it a time of day? Is it a certain event? And then starting to get curious with where is that connected in my body?
Once you start to have a little more understanding of how these negative thoughts are taking over, that’s when I would recommend creating a mantra—a very short prayer, one to three sentences. Something I was using right after the election was: “I released the need to have all the answers right now.”
What about when someone is literally in the midst of a traumatizing event or environment, when there is no safe space?
Not all trauma is in the past tense. Sometimes it’s presently occurring. And I think it’s important to note that it’s not always possible to override your biology with language. But when you make this a more consistent practice, you will be able to access more regulation in those moments, because you have a foundation, and then you have something that your body is going to recognize is familiar and effective. I also think that prayer doesn’t need to be something necessarily that we’re reaching for when things are catastrophic.
Prayer can be a word or a notion that’s very off-putting to some who are either not religious or who have had bad experiences with organized religion. You specifically titled this book Uncommon Prayer, so how do you make prayer more accessible?
I am seeking to reframe prayer as very accessible. It’s a practice that belongs to all of us, and there’s no universal definition of prayer. So I wanted to attempt to honor all of the various interpretations, but I define it as an active agreement that you make between your soul and the divine, whatever that means to you. And it’s a sacred practice that can be called upon to bring about states of grace, healing, and change.
What is the difference between intention, prayer, and mantra? Can one be substituted for the other if one resonates more with someone?
We could get into a very philosophical semantic debate about it. But just to simplify, I’m saying that they are interchangeable. I do think that there is a difference between intention and action—there’s what you intend to do with your prayers, and then there is also a prayer. Prayers can be more of an act of practice. It can be a place that you are committed to creating change, not just in yourself but in the world. And it’s a place where if you’re wanting to stay accountable to what you’re doing, you get to decide what you’re up for.
There’s a thin line between honoring other ancestral traditions and cultural appropriation. How do we know when that line has been crossed?
Just do your research. Where does this tradition come from? What is their cultural history? I think what happens a lot in the spiritual and healing world is that there’s a lot of objectification of Native Americans, for instance, and that’s a projection that’s not appropriate. And so you need to be thinking about your own spiritual work, not just taking from someone. Consider the origin of practices like sage and palo santo. Everybody is burning those now, but they’ve been overharvested and they’re being used outside of their sacred purpose. So to some people, that’s really harmful.
With healing modalities, there is a concern about putting the oxygen mask on ourselves first to make sure that we fill our own cup before we offer healing to others. How do we know when our own cup is filled?
I believe that it’s possible to put that oxygen mask on yourself first, but I think it takes practice. It is a practice for a lot of people because it feels different. It feels unfamiliar. It might even feel wrong. There might be feelings of guilt. Sometimes people have a difficult time even naming their needs or being able to articulate them. So the practice of filling one’s cup can really be a deeper invitation that takes time.
You say in the book that deep listening is a prayer in and of itself. Can you explain that further?
Up until the time I was 26, I hadn’t really considered what it meant to be embodied and present in myself. And so the idea of going inward and listening on that level was pretty revolutionary to me. We’re very focused on our five senses. I believe in the sixth sense; I believe that there is a whole world available to us when we tune out the outer world. And that is a process for many of us, because that’s not what our culture conditions us to do. This is the information age, this is the attention economy. So we’re constantly being pulled in this other direction. But to be able to get very still and quiet with yourself and to feel safe and comfortable and maybe even joyful in that, that is a different level of listening to yourself.
Do you recommend taking social media breaks? I’ll go on, and an hour goes by and I don’t even know where the time went and what information I just consumed.
Yes, social media is like taking an Ativan. You lose consciousness.
We’re in a difficult time—what is it that you hope people get out of your book?
I’m not saying that prayer is the answer to all the world’s problems, but I do believe that this is a practice. As the old world is breaking down, prayer is an accessible tool for all of us. It is available to help us create possibilities and solutions. It creates change on the spirit level, when, on a physical level, there may not be a resolution possible. And it can be really simple. It doesn’t have to be this thing that takes up all your time. You don’t have to buy a bunch of stuff. It’s just a shift in perception.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.