How do I start praying again

Start small and start true. Do not rebuild the old architecture first — the schedule, the vocabulary, the hour. Those were scaffolding, and scaffolding comes later. Begin with one honest sentence at one chosen time, today. Lord is a complete opening. So is I do not know how to do this. So is help. The tax collector’s entire prayer was “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13), and it is the one Christ commended. Length was never the mechanism.

Then give it a place and a body. Kneel, sit, walk — but let it be somewhere and somehow, because you are an embodied soul and habits attach to bodies and places, not intentions. Pray aloud when you can; the ear is involved in prayer more than we admit. Keep it plain: adoration, thanks, honesty about the day, intercession for the few names on your heart, and “thy will be done” (Matthew 6:10) over the things you cannot solve. The Lord’s Prayer is a floor plan, not a performance — “after this manner therefore pray ye” (Matthew 6:9).

And do not grade yourself in week one. “Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving” (Colossians 4:2) — continue, which covers the days it feels like talking to a ceiling. If you miss a day, resume without ceremony; a father does not require an apology for a missed call, only the next one. You are not learning a technique. You are re-opening a correspondence that never closed on His end.