The Practice
There is nothing to learn before you begin. The practice is small, and it is the same each day.
1. Choose one or more peoples, places, plants, or animals that you love.
2. Commit to prayer or reflection with positive intention each day, for those peoples, places, plants, or animals you love, and the ecosystems they live in.
For example: if you choose bears, then each day pray for them and for the whole forest they live in.
These are suggestions, not rules. Each person can follow their own tradition and conscience. However you pray, reflect, or simply pay attention, you are welcome here.
Eco-Prayer Principles
1. What You Love
Daily prayer and intention for what we love grows with practice. Choose peoples, places, plants, animals, and ecosystems, such as a local forest, that you love. Each day, pray and hold good will for it and for the whole environment that supports it.
For example, if you care for hawks, pray for them to thrive, or simply picture them healthy and free, and pray for the sky and the trees they live in. You may choose to include the people who live in and shape that ecosystem, too.
As the practice deepens, consider widening it. If you began with something close to home, choose something on the far side of the world as well, so your prayer reaches from the local to the global.
2. Get a Picture
Find a picture of the place, plant, or animal you have chosen, and put it where you will see it every day: on the bathroom mirror, the car dash, or the refrigerator. Let it catch your eye and remind you to pause. See our individual ecosystem pages, or the Resources page, for places to find images.
3. Positive Focus
Each day, hold Eco-Prayer and good will for what you want: blessing, beauty, healing, purity, abundance, balance, thriving, or health. You can even just hold it in your heart.
Avoid praying against what you do not want, such as "stop the oil spills," or praying to control people. Fear, anger, judgment, blame, revenge, and scapegoating, the search for someone to blame, disconnect us from the power of positive intention. Dwelling on what we are against may only give it more power. Focus on love, hope, and connection.
4. Big Picture
Our limited human view does not know all that is happening within the complex web of life, or how best to help. So pray for a plant or an animal and its whole ecological system at once, rather than only for specific problems.
5. Non-Directed
Non-directed prayer, for the highest good rather than for one fixed outcome, may be best. It leaves room for a creative answer larger than the one we would have written. The highest good can be expressed however your tradition or conscience understands it: health, healing, purity, peace, balance, beauty, thriving, or blessing.
6. Guidance
Ask for direction. How should I pray? What should I intend? What should I do? Be open to new and creative answers, and to guidance that arrives from unexpected places.
7. Open Expectation
Expect an answer, but hold no expectation about what it will look like, or when it will come. Our ideas about what should happen are often too small, or too bound by time. Stay open to unexpected possibilities. A change in your own attitude may itself be an answer.
8. Service
"Pray like it is all up to God. Act like it is all up to me." What should I do? Should I change something in my own life? How am I called to help? There are a million good causes in the world. The question is what I am called to.
9. Gratitude and Humility
Gratitude and humility help create a beautiful world, and widen our ability to be of service. There are people who care all around the world. Friends, allies, and support may come from people we never expected. A change in attitude may be the miracle.
What you can expect from the practice
We will not promise that a single prayer mends a forest. Eco-Prayer is not magical thinking, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What we believe is something steadier. No prayer is ever only one. When thousands of people hold the same care at the same time, that attention becomes a real force in the world. It shapes how we see, how we speak, what we choose, and how we act. Held by many, day after day, care for the living earth becomes something that can change it.
Your one minute is never only yours.
A note on the word "prayer"
We use the word "prayer" because it is honest to how this practice began, and because it carries a warmth that softer words lack. We do not mean any one tradition by it. If "prayer" is your word, use it. If "reflection," "meditation," "intention," or simply "paying attention" is your word, use that instead. The practice is the same.
Begin
The simplest thing you can do is begin. Take a minute now. Bring to mind one place, one creature, one stretch of the world you love. Hold it gently. Wish it well.
You have begun.