The Body Is Where God Speaks. In this episode of Exiled & Rising, Ana Mael — somatic experiencing therapist for trauma recovery and ancestral healing — explores what it truly means to decolonize prayer.

For centuries, prayer was shaped by systems of domination — religions that demanded obedience, erased Indigenous and ancestral practices, and taught that the Divine could only be reached through worthiness or submission.
To decolonize prayer is to reclaim it: to bring the sacred back into the body, the land, and the breath.

Ana guides listeners through a gentle reflection on how prayer can become an act of embodied liberation rather than control. She explores how trauma, faith, and colonial conditioning often intertwine — and how we can begin to pray not from fear, but from belonging.

In this episode, you’ll discover how to:

• Reclaim prayer as a living, breathing dialogue with the Divine.

• Restore your relationship with your body, ancestors, and earth as sacred sources of guidance.

• Recognize and release the inherited beliefs that say you must be “pure” or “worthy” to be loved.

• Learn how somatic healing and spirituality can merge into a prayer practice rooted in justice, tenderness, and autonomy.

Ana teaches that to decolonize prayer is to return to intimacy with life itself — to remember that divinity was never outside of you. It’s within your heartbeat, your lineage, your breath.

“The body is not an obstacle to God — it is where God speaks.”

• (00:00:01) - What Decolonizing Prayer Means
• (00:13:28) - Decolonizing Prayer for the Soul