How do I actually get better at praying?
When you pray, you are devoting and giving your time to God in the best possible way you know how. That does not mean you are a master of prayer. There is a beautiful saying from St Porphyrios, where he basically says, nobody can teach you to pray. The only one who can teach you is the Holy Spirit. How do you get better at riding a bike? You ride a bike. You may read something or watch a video on how to get better at bike riding, but ultimately you have to put your feet on the pedals and cycle.
It is the same with prayer. Books are there to encourage us to pray, and they are a fundamental aspect of understanding the life of prayer, but the most important way to get better at prayer is prayer. It is time under tension. The amount of time you dedicate to prayer adds up over the years and begins to show you how to focus your mind into your heart, how to become very resolute in that time of being focused only on Christ himself and nothing else.
But we have to have the humility to understand that we are giving God the best we have, and the best we have is like a child with a crayon drawing. When your child gives you a crayon drawing, you do not think it is a Picasso. But you love it, because it is what they gave you, the best of their ability. Likewise, when God sees us struggling to give our best prayers to him, he knows we are not titans of the faith.
He knows we are like children. But he is so overjoyed that we are spending the time with him, that we are dedicating that time to him, that we are making an effort. And when we are new at prayer, we should not be expecting anything. We should not expect grandiose spiritual experiences. In fact, the holy fathers tell us, as St Paisios says, that the people who look for grandiose spiritual experiences are sometimes given them even by the devil, because it puffs them up and makes them prideful.
The goal in prayer is to connect with God in whatever way God sees fit. Grandiose spiritual experiences, for basically all of us, are not really beneficial to our souls, because so many people get puffed up and prideful and deluded and begin to think they are spiritual. And the minute you think you are spiritual because you are praying, you have just undone all of the work of prayer.
