If you give your life as a prayer, you intensify the prayer beyond all measure. To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live, then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.