The danger of prayer

I have been deeply engaged in a process of visioning my life, creating goals for this year, and dividing those goals into measurable, achievable steps, and then following through. The process has been amazing and challenging and quite a learning experience. Suddenly I am making things happen in my life that I have wanted for a long time and felt like I either couldn't make time for or had no control over. In the process I have to get very real about what's important to me, what I truly desire, and what I'm willing to commit myself, my energy and time and resources to. How much do I want it?

One of the things I am realizing is that in the past I have relied heavily on wishful thinking, waiting for a miracle to take me out of my current predicament in some area of my life and bring me my dreams. I have used prayer to ask the Divine for what I want and need in my life. While I continue to use prayer in this way, what I've been seeing is how I've been praying in this way while not committing myself to making the things I am praying about happen for me. I haven't felt empowered to create the life I desire, to manifest my dreams. I have felt helpless and hopeless, like the best I can do is ask the gods and then maybe these things will show up and maybe they won't. Hence I vacillate between periods of great optimism and great despair, because I don't feel I have any agency in the situation.

Now I realize this is totally wrong. The whole recent craze around "The Secret," "The Law of Attraction," and manifesting your life has gone overboard with the sense "I can have anything I want" without regard for what is right alignment, what is good for all beings, what is there that I might need that I don't know about and that at the outset I might reject, how sometimes the difficult or unpleasant situations of our lives are exactly what we need for our highest good. But on the other hand, the idea that it's all out of my hands, it's all up to the gods and there's nothing I can do about it, is no good either. We are here to co-create with the Divine within us and all around us. In fact, in the past I have approached the Law of Attraction in just the same disempowered way as I have approached prayer. I have written affirmations and done visualizations (admittedly, sometimes with startling results) all still hoping for a miracle, for it to be done for me.

There is a saying, "If you take one step toward God, He will take ten steps toward you." I think I believed my one step to be prayer, or affirmations or visualization, but there's more required of us. This is what I now see. The value of prayer is releasing the results, the outcome, to the Divine. After you create your vision, this is an important, in fact, crucial step, that is missed in the whole manifesting craze. What I see now is the step I was missing, which was not this one.

So here are the steps:

1) First you get very clear about what it is that you desire to create in your life. You name it. You visualize it. You feel it in your being, and in the feeling, you make sure you really want it, and it isn't just something you think you should want. You get clear and real about the details. You define. If I want to publish my writing in literary magazines, I need to have a clear idea what that means: I'd like to publish in five magazines by the end of this year, for example.

2) Then, you change the wishing and wanting to a commitment. I commit to publishing my writing in five magazines this year. I find in changing my desire to a commitment, feelings about it and resistance may arise. This points to work I need to commit to doing, to clear out what is in the way inside of me that keeps my desire away from me. This is my job, to feel the feelings and beliefs that hold me back, and work on them.

3) You state your commitment to friends. You make it known. You have accountability and support. And you ask for help where you will need it to make this dream a reality. Don't try to do it alone.

4) Then you can do your prayers or affirmations daily to keep it in your consciousness, but as you do them remember it is up to you to take the step toward God, to act. This next step is the step I was missing.

5) You take actions congruent with your desire. You make your life congruent with what you wish to create. If I want to publish in five magazines, I need to write and I need to submit work on a regular basis. I need to make a schedule and have commitments to make this happen, not just vaguely decide I'll do it "sometime". Otherwise all the prayer in the world isn't going to make this happen for me.

6) A very important step many people miss: You surrender. You hand it over to the Divine, trusting that the highest and best for you will be done in this situation, even if it looks nothing like what you asked for. You let it go. Even though you continue to conduct your life congruent with your desire, until you receive information/feeling/sensing that it is no longer right for you, you still release the results. If I keep writing and sending out my work, and it does not get published anywhere this year, I trust in the process, and most of all, I remember to enjoy the process, that the process is everything, or nearly everything, because the process is my life happening now.

So it's not enough to engage in wishful thinking and magical practices. You have to go out and change your life, take action, be the creative force in your life, make all of your behavior congruent with your desire, be accountable, be empowered, and then release the results. No one, not even the Divine, is going to do it for you if you don't care enough to make it happen in your life.