On Sunday, June 4, 2023, a special three-hour Spiritual Writing Roundtable was held during
Spirituality Week in New York City — a brand new community-produced, annual citywide festival that
has emerged post-pandemic from a need for people to experience a wide range of spiritual development, healing and community without leaving the City, and either free or low-cost.
Richard J. Marks was one of 150+ teachers who contributed to the first-ever Spirituality Week in New
York City. In 75 venues across all 5 boroughs of New York City, 6,000+ attendees practiced 230+
programs.
The three-hour roundtable was titled “Prayer is for Everyone: How prayers are the ground from which we
discover new ways of doing life: to pause, to heal, to give thanks, to help us have newfound freedom.”
Non-denominational and all-inclusive, each participant was asked to bring a prayer from any culture or
language, as well as to be prepared to write, and to share during the event. This was not a session on
how to pray, but on how prayers themselves are a vital action.
Participants unlocked old and new narratives to clear out trapped emotions that cause our spirit, body,
and relationships to suffer. Using traditional cultural formats from Cherokee and Hawaiian, to collects and
centering prayer, they got into what prayers do, how to discern and write our own, get them activated, and use them in our real lives. Open and able to talk about their blocks, they were willing to write and discuss private things openly together. They went from writing about what “needs to go” (to end, to be done in their lives) … to the next step, which is to reconnect with love and their dreams. They wrote prayers for each other. They created symbols of them for meditation. The day finished with the deeper work of releasing how we oppress ourselves and others.
