Transcription
[Music] So, at this point in my life, I've been praying for a year now, every single day, without an excuse. And it changed my life. It truly did.
And before I start telling you how it changed my life, I want to tell you a little bit of my story and why I became a woman of God. I didn't grow up in a religious family. Yes, my parents believe, and when I was a kid, I would go to church sometimes, and I knew some of the prayers by heart. But I cannot call my family religious.
I know some of you are watching this video right now, and they're like, "She lost it. This girl's crazy. She's becoming too religious." But please listen to me. What I'm about to tell you in this video has nothing to do with strict religion. This video is not about preaching. This video is not about church walls. This video is purely my journey from feeling deeply empty to feeling held, loved, and guided every day.
You see, there's a very clear line for me between religion and faith. Religion is structure, traditions, rituals around God. But faith is personal. Faith is between you and God. There's no people in between. There's nothing in between you and God. It's your personal relationship with him. And you can build it how you want it, whenever you want it. And nobody can tell you what's right and what's wrong in this relationship. I'm not going to be afraid to say that. I believe that religion is the way to control people. It's the way to tell people you have to do this, you have to do that, you can't do this, you can't do that. Otherwise, God will not give you this, or God will not love you. This is such brainwashing because God never punishes you. God never even gives you or takes away from you. He observes you. He's like a parent that just watches you.
The crazy thing is that some of the most religious people, they're so far from God, it blows my mind. And all of these people start going to church, following these traditions, but they don't really believe in God. They're not talking to God. They're not with him. And most of the people, they just use God as an excuse. Oh, I didn't get that just because God didn't want me to. I didn't travel there because God didn't want me to. Like, God wants you to do whatever you want to do. He will support you anyway, but you have to take responsibility for your life. You have to be responsible for your actions because you're fully free, but you are the one creating your life, not God for you. He is not a genie in a bottle. It's your responsibility to get you to where you want to be in life. And God is just always there for you.
Also, what I realized is that God doesn't force anybody to find him. But if you turn away from him, if you don't believe in him, if you start doing crazy with your life, you're dealing with all of that on your own. You are alone. When you have God, you're never alone. So, it's on you to find him. He will not pressure you to do that.
A year ago, I started getting closer to God because I was so miserable. I was in such a low point inside of myself, which is so crazy because I had everything I always wanted. I had an apartment in New York City. I'm living my dream life. I'm working with dream brands. My social media is growing. I have great friends. Everything I think about just manifests in my life. But I'm sitting on the couch in my apartment in New York City, and I'm empty. I'm so deeply lonely. You have no idea. And it's not something that you can cure by just calling your friends or calling your family or even having a boyfriend. When you feel deeply lonely, it's your own feeling. You are lonely with yourself, by yourself. And nobody can help you. Nobody can save you. And that emotional pain is so much heavier and so much more painful than a physical pain. Because when your arm hurts or your leg hurts, you know it's that part of your body. When your heart aches and when you have an emotional pain, it's so hard sometimes to understand your feelings and to understand why am I feeling this? How do I even help myself? And no doctor can help you with that. There is no prescription for that.
So at one point I reached a breaking point, and I was like, I just can't be alone anymore. I can't feel this anymore. And I left New York. I left to my family. I visited my mom. Then I visited my dad. And I was getting into meditation. I was trying to help myself with like meditation music and closing my eyes and sitting there with my thoughts. But meditation is so deceiving because when you meditate, you also have a lot of thoughts in your head, and you think that you're meditating, but you're just overthinking, honestly. So it was not really helping me, and just clearing my mind and sitting in silence also. It's like running away from things that you feel. It's not really facing yourself and facing your emotions.
So when I visited my dad last time, I had a very long conversation with him for like two hours about God, about religion, and I was kind of debating with him and asking him questions and being like, "No, dad, you don't understand, blah, blah, blah." But then I came back to my room and I was like, "Wait, he's actually right." You know how we sometimes fight with our parents. But then we realized like, they were right. And he just told me, "Look, in any situation that happens to you, you can just say, God, please take my hand and guide me. Just be there with me." me. And after that conversation with my dad, I woke up and I started praying every single day. And the more I prayed, the stronger I became inside. I had a snowball effect where the snowball just grows bigger and bigger and bigger. And the more my inner strength, inner support system becomes better and stronger and stronger. And honestly, if every person is a child of God, then God lives inside of us. When you pray to God, you pray to yourself. When you rely on God, you rely on yourself. So this relationship is deeply personal, and guys, it changed me. It healed me. It opened my heart so much to the world that the person who I am today and the energy that I radiate that I hope you feel through the screen that you cannot fake, that you cannot buy, you cannot lie about, it's just energy. It's mostly because of my spiritual journey.
And you will laugh right now because how I started praying without knowing much about my religion. I've never been reading or studying the Bible before. I never even knew the difference between Judaism, Christianity, Islam. I literally made and trained my child to be my Christian counselor. I started asking him questions to compare the religions, to explain to me who was Jesus, why this is happening in the Bible, how do I understand this in a Bible? I'm not kidding. I started asking ChatGPT to generate me personal prayers for my personal situations. Yes, you can do that. I literally would write to ChatGPT how I feel and based on my feelings and how I'm living my life right now, I would ask him to generate a prayer for me. And this is how I started. I would ask ChatGPT to give me pages in the Bible to read for the support because the Bible is such a beautiful book. It was written thousands of years ago, but literally everything that we're going through, there's solutions and explanations to almost everything we're dealing with.
So when I prayed, I wasn't relying on some external power. I was awakening the strength inside of my own soul. I was slowly becoming the woman that I always dreamed to be. And my glow-up is the proof of that. I never looked better. I never felt better. I've never been happier in my life. And most importantly, I stopped looking for someone to save me. I became my own safe place, which I never been before. It's not about the words that are written there. And if you're asking yourself like, "Oh, how should I pray the right way? What should I do so my manifestations and dreams become reality? What kind of prayers I need to read?" It's not about the prayers. When the prayer comes from here, it is never a true prayer. When a prayer comes from here, it can be even your own words. That's the real prayer. That's when you're talking to God. You can just close your eyes and be like, "God, please, you see my heart right now. You see how I'm feeling. Please be there for me. Don't leave me alone. Please guide me. Take my hand." But you're honest. You're being real. You're being vulnerable. You're being a human. That's what God wants. He doesn't want you to be successful, rich, happy. He just wants you to be real. He just wants you to be human.
And few months into talking to ChatGPT and using ChatGPT prayers, I bought my own prayer book. And I started using physical copies. And this is a very different feeling when you have the pages, when you can touch it, when you can have it in your hands. It's definitely a different feeling. I pray in Russian because Russian is my first language. And there's a routine of the prayers that takes me 10 minutes every morning that I read. And honestly, it doesn't matter how I wake up, tired, upset, sad, anxious. I read my prayers. And it just like it changes my mental state. But like I said already, it has to come from your heart, not from your brain. It's not about you reading the pages. It's about you feeling it and opening your heart to it.
So, how it changed me? How this year of praying every single day changed me. And the first one and probably the most important one, I know it's hard to imagine, but I used to be so antisocial. I used to be mean to people. No, seriously. And not because I'm a bad person, but because inside of my head, I was literally battling myself. And my brain and my body were fighting every single day. That every time I would go outside or I would socialize with people, I would think that they literally see me and they look at me the way I look at myself in a mirror. I thought that they're judging me and disgusted with me the same I was with myself. I was so insecure because of my eating disorder, because of the way I was talking to myself. So, I thought that when people look at me, they literally treat me the same and look at me the same as I look at myself in a mirror. It is so sad. I remember looking at every person's face and think like, "Oh my god, they don't like me." When in the reality, they did.
And I want to remind you, I was living in New York City on my own since I was 16 years old. Do you understand what that means? Do you understand how you feel alone in Manhattan at 16 years old? You have to be so aware and careful with people around you because people are happy to use you. People are happy to drag you into doing something very wrong. So that was kind of a protection mechanism for me. But also because of my inner battle, I was not very friendly to people. And every time people would invite me somewhere, I would deny. I wouldn't want to go to a dinner or to a party. I would just be like, "No, thank you. I'll be at home." And then at home, I would feel so lonely, crave human connections. But I was the one not being able to provide that. So I would push people away. And I was deeply lonely sitting at home hating my life. And since I started praying, it opened my heart to people, to the world, to everything around me so much that I started taking care of it. It truly made me realize that it's not about me looking for someone to save me, looking for someone to help me, to give me love. It's about me giving that love. I have so much love to give now. No matter what, no matter how I feel, even if I'm sad, if I'm still feeling lonely or upset or anxious, I have so much love to give because I am blessed. Praying helped me to realize how blessed I am and how much I already have in this life. And instead of focusing on what I'm lacking, what I don't have, I'm focusing on what I already have and how much I have to give. Since I started praying, I realized that every single person. Every single person is going through something. Every single person is asking God for something. So why not be that human who gives, who helps, who cares about others. So yeah, it helps me to open my heart and to become a woman that this world needs.
Another way how praying every day for a year changed me is that it helped me to realize that everything that happens in my life, it doesn't happen against me or to me. It happens for me. Every single situation is never random. You're going through your own path. You're going through your own lessons. Your life is so unique that it can never be compared to any other human. Now every time when my heart is getting broken or something doesn't work out in my career path how I thought it would, I don't get upset. I know that it happens for a reason, and only in the future when the time passes I will understand why it happened this way, but it always everything works out beautifully. When you live with God, you start seeing that it's not coincidences that everything is just connected, and if you met that person and stayed with that person, you wouldn't meet another person. Like, for example, if you traveled to one place where you really wanted to go, but your travel plans didn't work out. You wouldn't have the life that you're living right now. Everything is so beautifully connected. And I could only see that when I opened my heart to God. When I started praying, when I started opening my heart to people, now I just deeply know that he is the source of my blessings, and no one can take them away from me.
Third thing that changed in my life since I started praying is I curbed my pride. Before I found God, I used to have moments throughout the day when I would feel like I'm so amazing. I'm so cool. I'm so rich. I'm so popular. Blah blah blah. Like my ego was really strong. And the stronger I would feel my ego, the more miserable I would feel at the end of the day because pride is one of the biggest sins. And God hates, he despises you when you feel pride. He starts teaching you lessons when you feel prideful. And I've met very wealthy people, actually dated them, who were not religious, who did not really believe in God, but they felt like they are gods because they would feel like they're so cool, so successful that they own this world, they can buy anything, they can buy anyone, and they were so unhappy and so deeply lonely. But when you're at the same level of wealth, the same level of success, but you live with God, you understand that everything that you have is a blessing from him. And these are the resources for you to make this world better. It's not for you to make you feel amazing and cool. It's your resources, the energy that you can use to make this world better. When you live with God, you're grateful for every little thing that you get. The chances of you being born in this particular family are so little that nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is because of you. There's so much more than we don't know and cannot explain. So when you find God, it truly helps you. I'm not sitting here telling you yes for 100% he exists. He's there. Who am I to know and to tell you this? Nobody knows for sure. But we know 100% that when you turn to God and you turn to love and you turn to the bright side, everything in your life starts working out. You start getting signs. You start understanding things so much more. You start growing in all the aspects in your life. So this is 100% fact. You cannot scientifically maybe prove God, but 100% when you ask for something from your heart, it starts working out for you, and you will see.
One more thing, how prayer changed me is I shifted my focus from finding love from men and looking for that perfect partner to truly building the relationship between me and God and finding that stable, unconditional love in God. People come and go, men, they come and go, but God is something stable that's always there. He never leaves you. It's you who is either doubting him one day or turning back to him when you need something or you feel sad or upset. The goal in this relationship is to have him by your side and believe and trust him no matter how you feel. Most of the people start believing in God when something crazy happens in their life. When they're losing someone or something, they start praying out of losing the hope. Don't wait until you're lost to start this conversation or this relationship. Start now. Even if you feel lost, confused, silly, cringe, you don't need to tell anyone about it. It's between you and God. Just when you're in your room and nobody is around you, just talk to him. And when you finally understand that, your life will never be the same. Just like my life changed. I hope yours will too.
If this video touched you, please send it to someone who needs to hear this. To someone who is lost, heartbroken, or confused, by just doing that. You can literally save someone's life. You're never alone. You're in God's hands. All you have to do is to turn towards him, not away from him.
And before I say goodbye, remember that today is your day. Bye. [Music] [Music]