The Power of Prayer
Hopefully, when you pray, you sacrifice yourself, right? Because what that's it partly what you're saying is, I think if the prayer is proper, is you're saying there's part of me that needs to go. There's part of me that needs, I need to let go. There's part of me that needs to die, and it has to be given up to something higher.
What part of it is of me has to go? And that's there's a contemplative aspect to that, and you look to the highest to help guide you in that. There's a discriminating Spirit within you that can help separate the chaff from the wheat. The offering up of the chaff is the sacrificial gesture, and so that can be transformed into prayer.
One of the things that Jung would say about that, for example, is that if you give up enough psychologically, you don't have to; you'll cut your losses in actuality. And of course, that's sort of what thoughts for is, right? So that you can get yourself straight. You can give it up in abstraction so you don't act out the pathology, and then nothing dies in actuality.