I am not going to write you a prayer. I am not of your faith and it would not be mine to write.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. What I can tell you is what changes structurally when this is done as a petition rather than as a working, because three things do, and one of them will be a relief.
A working instructs. A prayer asks.
That is the whole difference and everything else follows from it.
In a working, you are the one doing it. You hold the thing, you turn it, you send it back down the road. The direction runs through you.
In a petition, you describe the situation and hand it over. Somebody else does the directing.
Neither is stronger. They are different positions to stand in, and the rules are different because the position is different.
Three things that change
You may name the person
This is the relief, and it is the opposite of what I tell people doing the working form.
In a working, a name supplies the aim, and supplying the aim makes you the maker of whatever happens. That is why I say never write it.
In a petition you are not directing anything. Naming somebody in a prayer is telling, not aiming.
So if your tradition expects you to name the situation plainly, name it plainly. The rule that worried you does not apply where you are standing.
It does not have to be aloud
A working has to be spoken, because hearing the words is the only way to catch them drifting.
A petition does not depend on exact repetition, so silence costs it nothing.
This is the practical answer for anybody living in a shared house, a family home, or anywhere with thin walls. You are not losing anything by doing it silently.
Constancy replaces the count
Three times on three nights is a form, and forms hold things still.
A petition is not held still by a count. It is held by returning to it, which is why every tradition that prays has some version of daily.
Morning and night, the same two times, for as long as it takes.
Nobody is counting, and that is not a weakness. It is a different way of holding one thing steady over a long stretch, and for some people it is the easier way.
What does not change
Two things, and they are the two that matter.
Wanting them to suffer. A wish is a wish in either frame. Asking for somebody to be brought low is not a request to be relieved of something, and I would not dress it up as one.
Ask to be free of it. Stop the sentence there.
What happens at the other end is not your business and does not need to be in your words.
People find that harder than the ritual parts, and I understand why. It is the one instruction on this page that asks something of you rather than of the situation.
Wash first. Every tradition I know of has a cleansing before a petition, and mine is no different.
A handful of coarse salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off from the head down.
No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Salt in wet palms over the back of the neck and both wrists, rinsed downward.
Then salt at the door, cones on two small plates, changed each morning.
How it is done here
Japan has both positions too, and keeps them apart more sharply than English does.
What I do is a working. What a person does at a shrine is kigan, a petition, and the form of it is worth borrowing whatever you believe.
You say who you are. You say where you live.
You state the situation plainly and without decoration. Then you ask, once, and you stop.
The address at the start is not politeness. It is how you are identified, and people leave it out because it feels obvious.
Nobody here pleads and nobody bargains. It is closer to reporting something than to begging for it.
If you take one thing from this page into your own words, take that shape. Name yourself, state it, ask once, stop.
The prayers used in English against curses follow their own pattern, and it is set out here: the prayers used against curses, and how they are used.
If you have prayed and it came back
That tells you about the shape of the thing rather than about your prayer, and I want to be careful about the difference.
Relief that lasted a fortnight and then ended is the signature of a route that is still open and still being used.
Nothing about that is a verdict on your faith. It is the same pattern I see after a cleansing, and a cleansing is not a failed prayer either.
Some things need a route closed as well as a weight lifted, and closing a route is a working rather than a petition: the working form, in full.
You can keep praying while that is done. Nobody has ever been asked to stop, and I would think less of myself for asking.
Tell me when it started, how long the quiet lasted, and when it came back.
