The one thing that i also find very powerful is the power of prayer; there were times i prayed only when i had problems. When something bad happens in my life, i 'd start praying and begging God to take this pain away. Iyanla Vanzant and many other authors speak about a spiritual practice; they speak about maintaining a connection with God through a spiritual practice. Yes, this was very difficult for me, i would forget to pray and only realised that i have forgotten to pray days after i haven’t prayed.
This went on until when i realised that praying is a way of life. Praying is a lifestyle of thanking God for what he has done for you and continues to do for you. In fact all thoughts are prayers and when our thoughts are negative then our payers are negative, we receive negativity in our lives. We must remember that God regards all things as fine as part of his creation. Whatever we ask God answers whether it is our judgement to see as negative or positive, God sees as part of his creation and if his children want that they will receive whatever they ask for.
The way i was taught to pray was every time i get to bed and every time i open my eyes, i recite out words and no one told me anything about the connection between the words and me, my mind and my body, the connection with GOD. I realised that when i am in pain my prayers are actually effective because i give it all my energy and i pray to connect to God and sometimes it happens because i start feeling better but the moment i stop something bad happens again and i start having the same excruciating pain again.
What I have done is that i realised i needed to remind myself to pray and i set a reminder on my phone to remind me at a specific time and at the beginning i use to excuse myself to go and say a short prayer depending on where i am and what was important on those prayers is the connection with God i made.
Many times we just recite the words and don’t feel any connection and we think we have prayed and as time went by i realised that sometimes i didn’t know what to pray about or even don’t know what to say so i started thanking God. So i would have a reminder and just bring that feeling of gratitude towards the creator to my mind when my alarm goes on. And this can be sufficient. I truly believe that all God wants from us is the connection, we can go church every day and recite long and complicated prayers but if we don’t intent to make that connection to God, it is as good as not praying at all.
Many people judge others who do not go to church and look at them as if they are already gone to hell. Some even judge others for praying to the wrong church but the question is, who are we to judge? Only God who created everything and anything can judge any one of us.
Many of us are prone to brainwashing, we allow people to tell us to do things we do not agree with. We are confused as to what is right and what is wrong, hence we allow other people to decide for us and we allow them to brainwash us into whatever their beliefs are. Learn to listen to yourself from within because in you there is wisdom, God created this in you for you to use and for you not rely on other people for direction. Even when you are reading this blog, God gave you the wisdom to hear and understand if what I am talking about gives you a sense of peace and relief if you go deep within yourself.
When you don’t know what to pray about and you don’t know what to say, the book from Iyanla Vanzant titled “Every day I Pray” helped me quite a lot. There are various prayers that can help you put in words what you can’t put in words and as you say them loud, you realise exactly what you want for that day. And of course you can write you own prayers but it is very important to have a spiritual practice. By a spiritual practice, I mean we need to have some kind of a practice that keeps us connected to the Almighty, to our creator. You know when i was growing and i think i still hear people saying that we must fear God, maybe I misunderstood the phrase but to me when you fear somebody it is somebody who will hurt you if you misbehave, it is somebody who have the power to do something bad to you when you have been naughty.
I feared the teacher at school because they can spank you when you haven’t done your homework or making noise in the class but with God, i feel we need to have intimacy with God, we need to commute with God. If he is really a father then we need to have fatherly love and intimacy with God, we need to be open with him, we need to miss him, miss talking to him, and miss listening to him. Of course many of us were never taught to listen to God, in fact we have different images in our heads of what God might look like but if you keep praying and seeking the connection with God you will find it and you will be able to miss that feeling of that connection and you will seek it with no extra effort, the same way you would miss a lover or a father or a mother or a son/daughter, friend and sibling. Praying has nothing to do with religion, it has nothing to do with the ritual, it has eveything to do with the connection to source, if you can feel, i believe how you do it is irrelevant and therefore we need not to follow a certain ritual or religion to do unless we are most confortable with the specific process.