Connecting Through Prayer

Join Rachael and Dan in this podcast episode along with Jill Dyer, Facilitator Care Coordinator at the Allender Center, to delve into the transformative power of prayer as a part of the healing journey and connecting with God and ourselves amidst harm and trauma.

We understand that the thought of prayer can evoke different reactions. While it may bring comfort to some, it could also trigger further trauma and avoidance for others. 

With this in mind, this discussion explores various forms of prayer that authentically emerge from within, going beyond structured words and embracing our embodied expressions of prayer. Jill shares how prayers can take many forms, from expressions of laughter to heartfelt laments, all of which can be powerful ways to connect with God. 

The conversation also delves into the importance of attachment with God and how prayer can aid in repairing and deepening that connection.  Join us in considering the profound impact of prayer on the journey towards healing and growth.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Today on the Allender Center Podcast, we are so honored to be joined by one of our friends and colleagues. And, dare I say, one of our favorite pray-ers because here at the Allender Center, we know and take very seriously the need, necessity, and role of prayer in our story work, in our work of healing, and in our work of really trying to reconnect with God in places where we’ve known a lot of harm. And we have been richly blessed by intercessors and people who pray with a lot of courage and wildness, and in some ways push outside of the boundaries of even what we think about when we hear the word prayer. So today we’re joined by, I’m with Dan and we’re joined by Jill Dyer. And Jill is, I think, wears many hats at the Allender Center. She facilitates. She has a very pastoral leadership role. She stewards and leads our intercession team, but she’s also like has a role as the facilitator care coordinator. So she also helps us think about what it means to care for our team. She is a wife and a mom, and an incredible story coach as well. So we can talk more later about where you can find Jill online or reach out to her for services. But Jill, I just want to say thank you for joining us today.

Jill: You’re welcome. It’s so good to be with you, Rachael, and you, Dan.

Rachael: Yeah, I know as we enter this topic, even like for some people, they hear the word prayer and they already have in their imagination where we’re going to go and what we’re going to talk about. And so I think I would just invite you to stay along for the conversation. I think we’re going to get into what do we mean when we talk about this and what is the role of prayer in our healing work, in our relationship with God and with each other? So I hope you’ll stay tuned.

Dan: Well, which is an interesting introduction because I think what you’re actually saying is that there’s a natural turnoff when you begin to say the word prayer. And I can guarantee you that the three of us are people who pray, but also reluctantly at times. And often some of my prayers are a form of screaming. So let’s just open the door to the fact that one of the ways that I have felt the presence and kindness of Jill, in prayer, has been her poetry as well. And I would say she’s one of the Allender Center’s poet laureates, in a way that combine the ability to bring language to the heart, but also the heart of God. And that is a rare gift. And so I want to begin with prayer if that would be workable for the two of you. But what I find and we can enter into this conversation is that many times I need help praying, I’m a man of words, but often in the engagement of the deepest parts of my heart with the reality of the living God, I need to borrow the language of others. I need to be able to find my own words. But oftentimes it comes through an engagement, as I said, with Jill’s poetry, but also with other forms of prayer. So I’m going to read from a book called The Book of Mercy, which is written by Leonard Cohen, who was the infamous singer of the song, Hallelujah, but also was a brilliant poet, a fiction writer, a secular Jew, but nonetheless a man with a deep sense of transcendence. And so this is what I’m hoping that even as I read the prayer that it awakens within us what prayer is meant to bring us. He writes, “Awaken me, Lord, from the dream of despair. And let me describe my sin. I would not fall into the bewilderment to which your name invited me. I established a court and I fell asleep under a crown, and I dreamed I could rule the wicked awakened me to the homeland of my heart, where you are worshiped forever, awakened me to the mercy of the breath which you breathe into me, remove your creature’s self-created world and dwell in the days that are left to me, dissolve the lonely dream, which is the judgment on my ignorance, and sweep aside the work of my hands, the barricades of my uncleanliness, which I commanded against the torrance of mercy. Let your wisdom fill my solitude from the ruin and raise your understanding. Blessed is the name of the glory of your kingdom for forever and ever. What I’ve not said, give me the courage to say what I’ve not done. Give me the will to do. It is you and you alone who refines the heart. You alone instructs mortals who answers the trembling before you with wisdom. Blessed is the name of the one who keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust, who has saved me again and again to you is the day and the conscious night. To you alone, the only consecration bind me intimate. Bind me to your wakefulness. And may that be.” I’d love to know, have you read any of Leonard Cohen’s 50 Psalms of Prayer? And if not, how did you react to that one?

Jill: Yeah, I have not. And it was beautiful, Dan. What came up for me first was that line or what stuck out to me was homeland of my heart. And I was remembering actually this morning, I actually have a manuscript of a book on prayer, which I titled my Native Tongue. And I like that book or that manuscript when I go back to it feels like sort of ano a lifetime ago, another part of me, because I have changed so much in how I pray, and it’s really also sweet to read because that is what prayer has been, the place that I could speak the things that I couldn’t in any other way or to anyone else.

Dan: Wow. Thank you. And Rachael, just quick response to Cohen’s invitation.

Rachael: No, I, yeah. I also have not spent time with those psalms of prayer. And yeah, similarly, I think I loved so much of the embodied nature of how he’s writing about the body’s role in prayer, which I know we’re going to talk more about and Jill that’s something I’ve learned so much from you because I definitely grew up learning a very specific way to pray that was very cognitive. And you did need to find the right words and different types of different styles of prayer, different types of prayer, but certainly not one that would have incorporated my body as a trustworthy voice in the conversation or in the relationship really. And so, I think that’s what I love about poetry and what it invites. It’s often so bodied, and I’ll just shout out, Jill. Yeah, Jill, you teach so much in our trainings and our offerings, and you also help us think through ways to engage the body as we’re leaning into the work. And those grounding exercises often feel like prayer to me, a way of praying in a way of posturing our bodies and hearts. And so I always appreciate hearing new psalmists because I know psalms are just another way to pray. So thanks Dan for introducing us to, I mean, I know who Leonard Cohen is, but thanks for introducing me to more of his work that I was not aware of.

Dan: Well, and I think for me, at least as I said, I know when we come to prayer that it is for me the most vulnerable and naked communication I’m going to have almost more so than any other experience. And I didn’t grow up in the church, I didn’t grow up in a context of how people prayed regularly. But certainly one of the early experiences was this notion of ACTS: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. And remember thinking, and I won’t use the language that through my mind because then we would have to put a statement on Apple that there might be offensive words, but I’ll just say it struck me as nonsense. Yeah. Good. Okay. Well, somebody gave me a structure, but I’m more able to lean into just either weeping or crying or screaming or so often prayer for me was an engagement with the floods of being overwhelmed, a desperate cry. So I know there are thousands of ways to pray and no right way to pray. But I guess I want to just begin to ask, Jill, what’s been your story of prayer? What’s been your itinerary, the trajectory? Where’d you begin? Where are you? And fill in a little bit of the spots in between.

Jill: Thank you. That feels like a big question. So I’ll answer what I can. I think I have prayed since I was a small child, and I think it was often the prayer of help. And in a prayer of I actually don’t have someone I can ask in my real world for these things that I need. So I don’t know where else to ask. So it’s often been prayers of desperation. And I also remember a significant time early in my marriage, and my oldest was probably about a year old, and my husband and I were in some conflict. And I remember it was sort of a breaking point. There had been so much in me that lived how I was supposed to live, and I tried to feel how I was supposed to feel. I did not have permission to actually feel what I felt. I don’t think I even knew what I felt most of the time. And so I have this one very distinct memory of just leaving the house and leaving the baby. And I’m a pretty contained person. So that kind of response for me is not very normal. And I remember leaving, getting in my car and driving very, very fast for a very long time and just screaming at God, just screaming all the things that I had felt for so long, but never wanted to say. And it was not, it was full of expletives and none of it, it was like, I hate you, how have you done this to me – Prayers. And the goodness of that is when I had spent myself, what I found was this almost this interior knowing that God was speaking back to me. Thank you for finally telling me the truth. So those are the things that come up first.

Dan: Well, so from young, you were young. And again, how young?

Jill: Like praying? You mean when I was a child?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah.

Jill: I mean, I think my prayers as a child were like, I think you’re supposed to be good, and if you are, I’m going to ask you for help. And I would say, I can remember 5 to 10, I can remember something specific around when, but I remember those kind of more like global, just help prayers… 5 to 10.

Dan: And I’m assuming, I don’t know if I’ve ever asked this Rachael, but I’m assuming that you had such a awareness of God at such a young age that prayer was also a very early part of your experience.

Rachael: Yeah, I think very similarly to Jill coming out of just help feeling like God was kind of up in the sky and thinking it was pretty cool that I got to talk to this, that God had listened and heard me. I think for sure what you said about ACTS, that kind of got introduced to me and I wanted to pray, right? I wanted to do things. And so I was so concerned about doing things the right way. So I think I did have a long season of trying to fit prayer into a very specific way. But I mean, I didn’t have the same kind of breakdown that you had, Jill, but I do remember hitting a breakdown point, and mine was my engine check in. God is so funny with me in these really practical ways. It was my check engine light was on and I was driving raging. And it felt like in a similar way, it was one of the first experiences of like, oh, it’s actually honoring for me to bring my full self to you. And this is actually an expression of faith that I, I’m taking you at your word that you’re a good God. But the playfulness was, God was saying, if you don’t check your engine soon, there’s some things there that there’s going to be like you’re going to stop functioning and stop working. And I think for me, that playfulness of like, oh, there’s actually an invitation here to see what’s going on in the interior landscape. God’s not afraid of that. And I wish I could say I think I’ve learned that. But even I was talking to my spiritual director the other day and I said something like, I need you to help me figure out how to root out this bitterness that’s in my body so that I can hear from God. She’s a really good spiritual director. So she was like, Hmm, have you taken that anger to God? And I was like, no, I’m telling you, we got to get rid of it so that I can hear. And she was like, I think maybe it’s time to go break some things like almost like you need to throw some things, break some things. And I think it was just another moment of having to be like, why am I trying to protect God from really warranted anger that I’m feasting on in a way that is not necessarily good for my soul, but that sense of this is something I got to deal with, can’t actually, this can’t be in my can’t not okay for this to be in my body. And it’s not okay for it to be in this relationship with God, this attachment with God. And I just think how often we leave these huge parts of us outside of our imagination for what we can put words to, or even the unspoken, the un-language cries of our hearts, which are a form of prayer. But somehow that’s that one’s off limits. So it’s such a good reminder.

Dan: And lemme go back to what you underscored Rachael with regard to the gift that Jill has been to us deeply. So when I know it’s such a silly question, when did you bring your body into the process of prayer? Of course you can’t pray without bringing your body in, but there has been, I think a growth or a movement in understanding that. And I’d love for you to put words to that, Jill.

Jill: You know the first time. Well, no, that’s not true. I actually think there was something, as a young child, I grew up very conservatively of hymns being part of embodied prayer. So I think very early on I would recognize that something about singing would connect my heart and body. And so that was always a really beautiful place. And so that did start really young. And then the other thing I might say is somewhere around, somewhere around 35, so that’s about 15 years ago, long time, I had an experience at a retreat center where we were supposed to go off and sort of ask some things of Jesus and pray. And I don’t actually hear words from Jesus. So what happened for me is I was really, I think just crying out to can I know something that you’re saying back to me? And what happened is I had this really, I came upon a cross at this retreat center. I had this really embodied sense that I was supposed to hug it. And I’m not, I’m not a very demonstrative person. I would be highly embarrassed for anyone to see me doing something such as that. But I just kind of went with it and I hugged this cross and I began weeping. And to this day, I don’t exactly know what I was weeping for, why? But it was prayer. It was some meeting with of my body and of God.

Dan: And again, as you have invited us through our different training processes, often you’re the one who will lead us in the beginning. Can you put words to what that looks like for those who have not had the opportunity to go through that labor with us?

Jill: So you’re speaking of grounding exercises, that type of thing.

Dan: Yeah. And then again, because the grounding is our body, but our body is in an engagement not just with one another on the screen, but also with the living presence of our God.

Jill: Yeah, I think I always have this mindset that I’m just kind of turning my attention towards God, towards myself, my body, and towards another person. So whether that’s a group of people or so, I’m always kind of trying to be in that posture. And then also through story, being really curious about what parts of my body might be activated, what parts of our collective bodies might be activated. And so how can we bring that into the present moment in a prayerful grounding? Did that answer you, Dan?

Dan: That’s beautiful. Yes. Again, it may not be the best of uses, but if there’s just something about when, a recent time you invited us to put our hands on the part of our body that most needed as we engage the work ahead that we knew we needed. And at one point you said, and, if you want to turn your screen off, and I did it immediately, even without knowing, because I had that sense that I needed to touch my face. And you said, if you want to put your hands on your face, and it was even the sentence brought tears. It was like, oh, I’m having someone confirm what I think my body needs as I lean into engagement. So that would be one example of like, oh my gosh, I think as I read Cohen’s prayer, I need sometimes someone to lead me. And in that being led, I’m not forsaking my own initiative and capacity, but I know I’m near things that deeply are unsettled or moving or complex. And I need to some degree, a kind of containment that Cohen has offered, Eldridge in a lot of his work on prayer has offered, St. Patrick has offered. So that question of, you know, have led many in prayer, how is it that you in one sense come to the ability to do so?

Jill: That’s a good question, and thank you for reminding me in that way. So would you like me to just do that real quickly?

Dan: It’s for us, so if anybody wants to join may they ever.

Jill: Sure, sure. Okay. So I’m just going to close my eyes because that makes me be aware of my body and what’s coming. And so Dan, to answer your question is I try to actually listen to my body, what is happening for me, and then really trust that somehow God will be in that to bring something to another. So for me, right now, what I want to do is I want to touch my throat because it has been very dangerous for me to speak where other people can hear me and I can feel emotion in my face and behind my eyes I feel a little stinging. But I would invite you both to touch your throats too, because I know that your words have been costly as well, even if it might be different than for me and for our broader audience that’s listening, I would just ask you to imagine put, if you could put your hand on your throat right now, what might it say to you and what might God say to you about the words you have spoken and the words you are intended to speak, and if nothing else, I just always think that if we’re touching a body part that has caused us harm, it’s so good to remind ourselves that part of our body is inhabited by the living God, is loved by the living God, and is called good by God. And so just so I don’t take too much time, I just would say we could gently be aware of that gratitude for our throats and our voices and what they do for us and take a good deep breath and come back.

Dan: Thank you. I’m curious, Rachael, what happened for you in that process of embodied prayer?

Rachael: Well, it’s interesting because in a lot of my body work, when I get acupuncture or different kinds of body care, there’s often stuff happening in my throat. It’s a place that just holds a lot, which makes a lot of sense to me. And just what you’re naming Jill like to bring words and how costly it can be sometimes. And even something as simple as I just read survey results from one of our trainings that I shouldn’t have read, and sometimes people don’t love, don’t love us, or they love some of us. And I found myself feeling that sense of I will withhold my words and the kind of pain that brings too. So that was one thing that was coming up, how do I have gratitude? And then the other piece was I think I, there’s a lot of grief stuck in my throat. So I was feeling an invitation from the spirit to let that grief have expression when it feels safe to do so. I felt a real tenderness and I think I just wanted to name. And then Dan, I would love to hear what happened for you, but I just want to name that I think, Jill, you are such an intercessor, and when I think about intercession, it is that joining of the spirit to bring into a palpable, tangible reality. What is something that God is trying to do or bring or speak? And I want to thank you for letting your body and your vulnerability and your story be a living sacrifice for us. Because even just that symbol pausing is bringing me into my body in a way that feels so honoring, a little bit scary, but also so relieving and kind. So I would love to hear Dan, where you went in that moment.

Dan: Well, it was brief, wasn’t it? I mean, I don’t know the exact seconds, but what I would say that within five seconds, I, my hand or my left hand was on my neck in a way that I was squeezing hard. And what I heard was, are you strangulating me or you. And the moment those words came, tears came and I said, to whom I think was speaking, I don’t know, maybe both of us. And what I heard the Spirit say is then relinquish your grip on your throat. And it just felt so kind. So in some sense, prayer is always an engagement with someone who wants to be in a mutual and honoring but I find also amazingly playful relationship. My first encounters with prayer really was seminary. Even though I’d heard Treper pray and some of his friends pray, and I always remember as they were praying in different places, I just stare at them, what are you doing? And that’s an interesting thought or sentence or request. But it was always like, these are people I know and have great care and love for, but I just… I’m not about this. I don’t pray. But there was something real about it and good. And even if it was awkward and odd for me to actually watch this private process go on, but when I went to seminary and I’ll just say there was a lot of good, lot good, I’m grateful for that time, but if anything, I came to hate prayer because it was performative. Oh my God. People’s voices changed from their normal, how they would talk to then a kind of “God. Dear God. We thank you” and I’m what are you doing. And now I’m really staring because I’m thinking that bats are going to come out of their mouth because it’s just wacky. So just saying, I’ve always had a significant level of ambivalence with God and therefore with prayer, and yet there’s something that in the process I know moves my heart in a way that nothing else does. So even that experience of being invited to orient my body, that’s what I felt like in some sense you have so uniquely brought us, Jill, is that notion of bring your body, listen to your body, but bring your body to God and let God speak in and through, not just words in your head, but as well to what’s happening in your body. And just been for me, I mean I can’t even tell you how many years you’ve been with us, but it feels like about four or five years I’ve been thinking more in terms of how I orient my body. So what was happening for me and for you Jill, what was happening for you as you intercede, that means leading us into that conversation with God?

Jill: Yeah, I mean think what was coming up for me is I think my first response, I didn’t respond to you, Rachael, when you asked me to do this podcast for a little bit and Dan, I said, I don’t want to do that. Right? So that’s sort of what I was bringing. I don’t want to do that because of what the threat I feel when I bring my voice. And so all I was doing was tending to what was happening in me and moving towards God and then letting you all be with me. And that’s all I had to bring. But it did, it made me feel really tender too to slow down and be in my body. That’s how I felt. I felt really tender towards why that’s true for me. And in that tenderness, it did feel like there was something of God there with me.

Dan: So Jill, as you have looked at something of your own history, what happens when you know that you are particularly reluctant to pray and in many ways don’t want to pray? You don’t want to pray. What happens?

Jill: Yeah, I would take that back to attachment. Where am I in my attachment with God in that moment? If I’m not wanting to pray, then I’m in a pretty avoidant place. If I’m only really moving in, and God, you’ve got to hear me and I have so much to say that I’m probably in a little bit more anxious place and I can vacillate right between those two. So I felt very avoidant when about this podcast.

Dan: Yes.

Jill: Right? I did.

Rachael: Which I appreciated your honesty with us, but also you could have easily been avoidant and just not responded and been like, if I just don’t respond, then I don’t have to.

Dan: Ghosting us and ghosting God.

Jill: Yeah, absolutely. But there’s enough, I’ve lived long enough to know that it’s worth pausing, right? That it’s worth pausing, saying, what is this? Oh, this is fear. Is that what I want to live from? No, it’s not. So it’s worth the risk.

Dan: And in that question of I’m, what I’m thinking about particularly is on the walk that Becky and I had this morning, I was sort of walking through a bunch of things that had happened over the last week or so, and we were almost 10 minutes away from the end of the walk and she just looked and she said, do you consider this conversation, prayer? And I’m like, no. And she said, but your ache your struggle. Do you feel like you’ve just been talking to me? And it was like, yes to nobody else. And I was pissed and I’m like, what is going on that she’s calling out that actually I’m in the middle of a lament and complaint and I’m not actually letting my own heart engage. That this is more than just between the two of us. So that I think there’s so many more times we’re actually praying than we’re actually aware.

Jill: Yeah, that’s lovely. And so true. I was actually thinking of two different moments. I had this weekend with our team. We were finally together for a little bit and they were moments of laughter. I was crying, I was laughing so hard, and I really, and what I felt in my body after that was probably a serotonin rush, but I felt so grateful. I was thanking God for laughter and it did feel like prayer. It felt like so much of my body was engaged in joy, that it felt like a form of prayer.

Rachael: It’s so interesting as we’re talking about this because I do think my journey with embracing different ways of praying has been so liberating, especially when I’m working with spiritual abuse and in the realm of spiritual abuse because so much spiritual abuse really harms these key core places where we have an attachment to God. It really disorders and distorts that attachment. And even though we maybe want to go directly and repair that attachment directly, it doesn’t always work that way. And I remember when I became a part of the Vineyard Association of Churches for a season, it’s when I was in grad school, that’s where I did my internship with Rose Madrid Sweatman. And it was so fun to play in more charismatic circles, which again, I’m aware a lot of people have spiritual abuse from those structures as well. But for me, what was so fascinating in that season, and I’m going there because it’s kind of come back to me in this season, is I thought because I’m such a verbal person that my prayer language I would get in the charismatic realm would be very verbal, or that the ways that I would be gifted to uniquely pray in the spirit and in intercession would be words from God. And I do hear sometimes like that, but it was all bodily. And there was a lot of, I knew the spirit was speaking or moving if I started swaying left or right or humming, just hearing a melody and just giving voice to it. And it was around that time that I really started playing with Romans 8 and that language of the spirit who intercedes with language too deep for words when we don’t know how to pray, which in my own healing from anxiety, from trauma, from spiritual abuse, I found so much peace in that I’m not just praying alone, that there’s a spirit that’s interceding with language too deep for words when I don’t know how to pray and I can trust. And for me, that did come in the form of melody and lullabies almost. And so I’m in this season where I have a lot of, still with my eight month old nighttime wakings or moments that I feel really dysregulated and I’m supposed to be regulating and helping regulate a little body. And my spiritual director, and I think, Jill, you gave me some of this language too when I was pregnant, could I imagine myself as I had this baby in my womb being in the womb of God and these very motherly images of God? And there’s just been a lot of times recently where I think my greatest prayer language is actually just rocking, is singing lullabies that I don’t even know if I’ve ever heard before, but it’s just a melody that’s coming of in some ways as Evie is dysregulated and needing soothing, not feeling like, okay, I have to, in some ways we’re both crying out for soothing. And that’s just been a really restorative and just good reminder for me again, kind of what you’re saying, Dan, these ways we’re not even aware that we’re praying, that I think when we can start to acknowledge there’s some kind of communion happening with God, that is a conversation. But even more that is an attachment. And that attachment is not just ephemeral, it’s it’s connecting with my neural pathways and my body. And so I have felt very mothered by God in a season where I think I was just talking about this on the podcast the other day, I need so much mothering in order to mother well. And so letting mother God mother me by singing lullabies, by feeling my body sway as I sway with my daughter and imagining I am being rocked too. It’s just been really, really healing. And again, I already confessed that there’s also some anger that I am still not quite feeling comfortable enough to really let become a prayer. I think I’m getting closer.

Jill: That’s beautiful

Dan: And as I’ve underscored, anger has been far easier for me to express with the living God. But I think what I’ve begun to notice, even just over the last number of years is I’m quicker to bring gratitude into some embodied gesture, just hands in the air to be able to go, thank you. I don’t even need to say the words, but also a sense of awe in the presence of spring in the Pacific Northwest where it’s green, it’s green, but then it becomes green. I can’t even describe the greenness of green and the greening of spring. And there are just moments where I look at a tree that I thought I saw yesterday and it’s now it’s been transfigured. And to not be in awe where you’re just either quiet or shouting something of, wow. So back to that notion that there are so many ways in which we set ourselves up to struggle with prayer when so much of our daily world is a reflection of praise, of lament, of complaint, of just simple requests that actually are, even if they’re human to human actually are larger. If we would just hear going back to Cohen’s word, awaken us. Awaken us to what it’s that we’re most meant to hear and to receive. And in that, again, we’ll come back to your unique work. One more question before, I just wish we had a lot longer, but as you work with people as an amazing story coach and guide, how do you see story work in the context of prayer and prayer in the context of work? I know it’s a small question. A few minutes left.

Jill: A very big question, but I think maybe what I would just start with is I was realizing this actually as you were talking, Dan, if we go back to the grounding stuff, really what I’m doing is anchoring into my place of secure attachment with God and then offering that. So I think that’s what I do in my work too. It’s like if I’m anchored to God and maybe someone needs to anchor to me for a bit in painful story, then that they’re actually anchored to God, not to me. I’m just a bridge for that anchor. And so I feel like story teaches me how I might pray for someone, how I might pray for a collective. It’s like it’s the soil, it’s the down in the ground of what type of prayer might be needed, what’s in the way, what needs to be revealed, all of those things. It’s story shows me kind of how to internally tune in to what’s needed.

Dan: Thank you.

Rachael: Jill. I would love for our listeners to know if they are hearing you and knowing that not only are you an incredible pray-er, but you do great story work and just how you talked about how story work in informs, how could they find you and what maybe put a few words to the work that you do with people.

Jill: Sure. Rachael, thank you. They could find me at www.lifethroughstory.com and man, it feels hard to put words sometimes to the work I do. I would say I work with a lot of traumatic attachment and I do all of it through the lens of story, and that’s probably the best way to say that.

Dan: Thank you. And I’d like to end with prayer as well. And I’m reading from another Cohen prayer. “Help me in the rain, help me in the darkness. Help me at my aimless table, bend me down to the rain and let the darkness speak to my heart. Blessed are you who speaks from the darkness who gives form to desolation.” We invite you all to taste the goodness of prayer.