It is said that four out of every five adults in the world pray at least once to a Higher Power during the course of any given week. That being said, I have decided it is finally time to add a new category to my writing that will deal with this very thing. While each and every entry in my blog up to this point has been a complete article about a specific topic, the entries I’ll be placing in this new category will be actual prayers that you can use throughout your daily life.
When it comes to prayer, there are many people who feel it’s a religious thing. I know there are those who totally refuse to pray because of this. So let me get one thing clear that will help anyone out there who might feel this way, I’m not religious, I definitely don’t like formalized religion, but I do pray. For me, praying is simply just another way of saying I’m reaching out to talk to my Higher Power.
I have many friends who tell me they struggle to do this because they don’t know what to say. What I tell them is that prayer doesn’t have to be some elaborate thing that sounds like what a preacher says from behind a pulpit. I wrote about this awhile ago when I said that even the most basic prayer is as simple as speaking these three words, “God Help Me!”.
There are a lot of studies out there that have been done to show that prayers like this work. One such study involved a group of physicians who took patients from the San Francisco General Medical Center and randomly divided them into placebo and test groups. Patients in the test group were prayed for while the placebo group were not. The results showed that the patients who were prayed for suffered “less congestive heart failure, required less diuretic and antibiotic therapy, had few episodes of pneumonia and cardiac arrest, and were less frequently intubated and ventilated”, than those who weren’t. Prayer has become an integral part of my life today because I have seen the results of studies such as this in my own life.
While my prayers don’t always come in the way I want or in the time frame I hope for, I have to say that I’ve always received an answer to them when I’ve spoken them from my heart. I say that in this way because there were times in my life where I used to pray for ego-based things such as “Dear God, will you help me win the lottery?” or “Dear God, will you make that person fall in love with me?” Anytime I’ve ever prayed for my own selfish desires and interests, I haven’t gotten any answers. But when I have brought a level of humility to a prayer, I have always received a positive answer to it at some later point in time.
Praying really is a humble action and I say my prayers on my knees for this reason. Many balk at the idea of doing this and I was once one of them. It took me years to figure out that the only reason why I didn’t want to pray on my knees was solely for the fact that my ego was in charge of my life and not my spirit. That’s not the case anymore as I now start each day on my knees in prayer and I end each day doing the same. I also say short prayers throughout the day as well when I am feeling my heart moving me to do so.
While there are moments that I do question whether my Higher Power is truly hearing my prayers, I still continue to speak them from my heart believing they are. After all, my life has improved greatly from the mess that it once was since beginning my prayer practices.
So it’s my hope that you will begin using the prayers I write in this category as I believe that they will help you to improve your life too. Please understand that while I’ll be using “God” as the reference to my Higher Power in each of them, substitutions can be made with any other word that might help you connect to your own Higher Power. There are many words out there to choose from such as Creative Intelligence, Universal Truth, Loving Creator, Spirit Of Life, or whatever else your soul guides you to use.
Regardless of whatever words you may end up choosing, I wish you well on your prayer journey and I truly hope that my prayers I share in this new category will guide you to developing a much closer relationship to your Higher Power, as they have for me.
Peace, Love, Light, and Joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson