Welcome
to this week's issue of our e-zine--we're very glad
you're here!
We hope that this week finds you doing very well,
and that you're able to
make the most of all the opportunities that are in
your world right now!
The
most rudimentary form of prayer is worry.
How, you ask, could worry be a form of prayer? Worry
is not only a form of prayer, it is the form most often
practiced by the most people. How can this be?
Our
understanding of prayer beings with one basic principle:
To
think is to create.
Every
thought you think tends to manifest according to its
nature. Everything in your life began with an
idea. If you are going to build a home, you start
with a blueprint. If you are painting a portrait,
the model sits before you as you set your hand to the
canvas. If you are traveling from Chicago to
Seattle, a thought precedes your first step. The
notion of something coming into existence without a
thought preceding it is as preposterous as a flower
growing without a seed to start it.
This
brings us to our second prayer principle:
All
thoughts create according to their own kind.
Apples
make apples, and oranges form oranges. An apple seed
has never grown an orange, and it never will. In the
same way, thoughts of love, light, and joy beget more of
the same; and thoughts of fear, lack, and smallness
attract their own kind.
To
change your life, begin by changing your thoughts.
Because
most people do not understand that every thought is a
prayer, they attempt to change their lives by rearranging
the outer world without addressing the negative thoughts
they are holding about it. This is called a
"geographical cure," which does not work.
It is useless to try to change your outer world unless you
first change your inner world. If you attempt to
make external changes before doing the necessary inner
transformation, the outer world will just keep repeating
the same pattern. The movie Groundhog Day
illustrates a very entertaining lesson in how we keep
re-creating the same situation over and over again until
we change our mind. The moment our attitude shifts,
so does the situation.
If
you want or love something a great deal, you will attract
it into your life. And if you fear or worry about
something with emotional intensity, you will attract the
object of your fear. The universal manifestation
machine is unbiased in turning your thoughts into reality.
If
you are not aware that your thoughts are powerful, you
will spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about
what you do not want, and you will receive more of the
same, and on and on, until your life is a mess and you
have no idea why. You will identity yourself as
victim, find people who agree with you; and discover news
stories, scientific studies, and all manner of evidence to
prove that life is unfair and you are just a pimple on the
complexion of the universe.
There
is another way. You weren't born to live small, and
you don't have to. You can shift your attitude now
and begin to think about what you do want instead of what
you don't want. Then, the universe will have no
choice but to give you what you are concentrating on in
your favor, instead of against it.
Worry
is the power of creation turned against your own best
interests. The same engine that runs your car in
reverse will move it forward if you but reposition the
gearshift. To shift from reverse to drive, reframe
your experiences to find the blessing rather than the
problem. Then you will become the master of your
universe, rather than its victim.
What
you become is not a result of what happens to you; it is a
result of how you think about what happens to you.
Six-year-old Tommy's parents were aghast as they watched
their son repeatedly throw a baseball in the air, swing at
it with a bat, and miss it by a foot. Finally,
Tommy's dad could take it no longer. He approached the
boy, put a hand on his shoulder, and compassionately told
him, "Well, son, I guess you're just not meant
to be a hitter."
"Hitter?"
the child looked at his father questioningly.
"Who cares about hitting? I'm going to be the
greatest pitcher who ever lived!"
When
Jesus taught, "As a man thinketh, so shall it
be," he was reminding us that we must keep our mind
on our hopes, not our fears. We must focus on our
heart's desires rather than our nightmares.
Here
is your antidote to worry: Choose a phrase that
brings you release, relief, and empowerment, such as
"Peace, be still," "The power of God is
within me," or "Love is the answer."
Whenever worry begins to set in, consciously and
meditatively repeat your positive phrase until you return
to peace. The mind is capable of paying attention to
only one thought at a time. If you focus on ideas
that uplift you, your mind will be unable to dwell on
fearful issues. Eventually you will develop the
habit of positive thinking, and the worry that once
haunted you will have no reality. Begin to master
the power of prayer by replacing self-defeating thoughts
with visions of your brightest future.
Today
I set my mind and heart on a new path. I focus my
energy on love, appreciation, and my highest
possibilities. Today I claim responsibility for my
own success, and step forward with a new enthusiasm to
manifest unprecedented good. I use my mind to create
only the best, and I draw unto me all the support and
resources I need for positive change. Thank you,
God, for opening the door to a life filled with blessings.
We
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To
celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life
taught me.
It
is the most-requested column I've ever written. My
odometer rolls over to 50 this week, so here's an update:
1.
Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2.
When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3.
Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4.
Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
5.
Pay off your credit cards every month.
6.
You don't have to win every argument. Agree to
disagree.
7.
Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying
alone.
8.
It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9.
Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10.
When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11.
Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the
present.
12.
It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13.
Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea
what their journey is all about.
14.
If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in
it.
15.
Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But
don't worry; God never blinks.
16.
Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy
living, or get busy dying.
17.
You can get through anything if you stay put in today.
18.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
19.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But
the second one is up to you and no one else.
20.
When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't
take no for an answer.
21.
Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy
lingerie. Don't save it for a special
occasion. Today is special.
22.
Overprepare, then go with the flow.
23.
Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear
purple.
24.
The most important sex organ is the brain.
25.
No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
26.
Frame every so-called disaster with these words:
"In five years, will this matter?"
27.
Always choose life.
28.
Forgive everyone everything.
29.
What other people think of you is none of your business.
30.
Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31.
However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32.
Your job won't take care of you when you are sick.
Your friends will. Stay in touch.
33.
Believe in miracles.
34.
God loves you because of who God is, not because of
anything you did or didn't do.
35.
Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
36.
Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.
37.
Your children get only one childhood. Make it
memorable.
38.
Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.
39.
Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting
everywhere.
40.
If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone
else's, we'd grab ours back.
41.
Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it
now.
42.
Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or
joyful.
43.
All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
44.
Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you
need.
45.
The best is yet to come.
46.
No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
47.
Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
48.
If you don't ask, you don't get.
49.
Yield.
50.
Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.
* * * * *
Regina
Brett currently writes for The Cleveland Jewish News.
You can visit her at reginabrett.com
.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
We are motivated more
by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will
toward truth,
freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to
escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain,
and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive.
Stephen Levine A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were
Your Last
Prayer
I feel uncomfortable with the
fact that the idea of prayer seems to have been hijacked by
organized religions. In the process, the people who have
done the hijacking have attached all sorts of rules to
prayer--what to say, how to say it, when to say it, what position
the body should be in while we pray--all sorts of limitations on
prayer that have mostly resulted in turning people off of prayer.
The fact is, though, that prayer is a form of communication
between a person and God, whatever that person believes God to
be. I simply cannot say something like, "Your prayers
aren't heard because you aren't praying to my version of
God." The truth is, of course, that God exists on
his/her own level, and it's not within my realm of knowledge to
know what God does and does not do, what God does and does not
accept. My only task in life is to what I believe is right
in God's eyes, and not to tell others that they have to behave
based in ways that correspond to my beliefs.
That said, I have to say that prayer is a wonderful source of
peace and clarity in our lives--or at least, it can be. In
my life, I neglect prayer pretty regularly because I get caught up
in doing the things that I need to be doing. I do pray, but
not as much as I could or in the ways I'd like to. It's a
shame because prayer could be bringing me much more peace than it
does.
Prayer does not change God,
but
changes those who pray.
Prayer is
simply a dialogue between us and our Creator.
Even those people who don't believe in a God have a
place for prayer in their lives, for somewhere along
the line, we all were created. Whether we see
that creation as the work of a deity or a simple
occurrence on this amazing planet on which we live,
there is place for prayer. We can pray in
thanks to the world for our gifts; we can pray in
admiration of the beauty and abundance of the world;
we can pray in awe of the fact that the atoms and
molecules and cells that make us all up somehow have
given us this life to live for the time that we're
here.
And when we pray, we are changed. When I pray,
there are several changes that I feel
immediately. First of all, I feel a sense of
clarification about the issues for which I
pray. If I'm having problems and I pray for
strength to deal with them or peace of mind while
dealing with them, my prayers help to put them in
perspective. Am I expecting God or the Tao or
the Force to intervene
and just cancel out all my problems in one fell
swoop? Absolutely not. But I do feel a
certain peace just in knowing that I'm addressing
those problems and that I recognize their importance
in my life--and that I'm acknowledging them and
accepting them just as they are, in the hopes of
dealing with them effectively.
Prayer also changes me in that when I pray for
someone else, I'm creating links between me and
others, even if those links are merely the positive
thoughts that I'm sharing on their behalf. I
can never be sure if my prayers for others are
actually answered or not, but I can be sure that I'm
putting positive energy into the world when I pray
for good things for other people. There are
enough people putting negative energy into the
world--we need more of us sharing our positive
prayers. Life is all about energy--think about
how you feel around someone who's constantly
negative and critical versus how you feel around a
person who has positive encouragement and love to
share. You feel different based on the energy
that is a part of who they are, and thus a part of
the environment in which they find themselves.
What kind of energy do you contribute?
Prayer
is not an old woman's
idle
amusement.
Properly understood
and
applied, it is the most potent
instrument of action.
Prayer can also
bring about change. While it shouldn't be used
as a substitute for necessary action, it does serve
many valuable purposes on its own. When
changes are necessary in life and many people are
praying for the same changes, then there are
results. Unfortunately, the results aren't
always what we consider to be our desired results,
so we think that prayer has failed. Life,
though, is much better at knowing which results are
necessary for better things to happen, and we
shouldn't lose faith in the strength of our prayers
just because we were mistaken in the results we
hoped to see.
I believe in the power of prayer because I've seen
the results in many people I know. These
people make prayer a central part of their lives,
and they do see benefits from it. They're not
people who are specially gifted or privileged, or
any closer to God than you or I, but because they do
pray regularly and realistically, their prayers make
sense and they're very often
"answered." Is an answered prayer a
direct result from asking God something? It
doesn't seem realistic to me to think that God says,
"I think I'll answer Jimmy's prayer today, but
not David's." It makes no sense.
But if they're praying, both Jimmy and David are
putting themselves into the flow of life, and they
both will see benefits from that action, even if not
at the same time.
Both of them also are focused on allowing a higher
power to influence their actions and words and
thoughts. It's important to note that they're
not becoming passive people just waiting for God to
do something for them--they're still living their
lives, just under the influence of unconditional
love and compassion.
The
value of persistent prayer is not that
He
will hear us.
. . but that we will finally hear Him.
William
McGill
And this,
indeed, is where the greatest strength of prayer
resides--in the love and compassion of the Creator,
and allowing that love and compassion to work in our
lives and accepting that love and compassion for
ourselves. We are loved, all of us, even if
sometimes we feel that we aren't. Our prayer
lives allow us to know that we are loved and that
compassion is ours--all the time. And if we're
the recipients of compassion, then we can share
compassion ourselves; if we're the recipients of
love, then we can spread love in our lives as well.
What are we listening for when we pray? It's
simple. We're listening for the words "I
love you," and for the input that will allow us
to change situations for the better. That
knowledge is already a part of us, just as God is a
part of each of us, and prayer helps us to unlock
that knowledge and put it to use. Perhaps what
is needed in a situation is to let it develop
without our input, and the best thing we can do is
stand by and wait until the time is right for us to
contribute. This is something that we've
probably already noticed on a subconscious level,
and our prayers can help us to bring this knowledge
to the conscious level. This is what listening
is all about--acknowledging a higher knowledge and
accepting what it tells us is best for everyone
involved, and following the advice. The voice
of God isn't a commanding or demanding voice that
booms down from the heavens; rather, it's a small
voice inside of ourselves that we can hear in the
silence of our prayer time.
Prayer is not an antiquated, out-of-date strategy
for getting what we want. Prayer is one of the
most important elements of a life that if full of
love and peace and compassion, and it would be doing
a great service to ourselves if we were to take
prayer seriously and make it an integral part of who
we are. Many will benefit if we do so.
We do not succeed
in changing things according to our desire,
but gradually
our desire
changes. The situation that we hoped to
change because
it was
intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not
managed to surmount
the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined
to do, but life has taken
us
around it, led us past it, and then if we
turn around to gaze at the
remote past,
we can barely catch sight
of it, so imperceptible has it become.
Marcel Proust
Perspective
can cause us to see a
beautiful sunset as a boring, ordinary part of daily life, or it
can help us to see the beauty in the many "ordinary"
things that surround us. Almost everything we see
or have access to is a miracle, either in its simplicity
or complexity. The flowers that grow in our gardens have gone
through an amazing process of turning from a seed to flowers.
The rivers that flow are fed with water that has gone through an
incredible cycle of evaporation, falling as rain, flowing to a certain
area where it can join the river. The fact that I can write these
words and put them on the internet so that friends I shall never meet in
South Africa and Hong Kong can read
them is one of the greatest miracles of our times, yet
the internet has quickly become "normal," a
tool for businesses to make more money.
But I've recognized something very
important--I can refuse to see the world and the things
and people in it as "normal"; I can choose to
see the marvelous qualities of everything, but I have to
work at it, for our societal norms tell us to value
conformity and the status quo. I'll always look for
the beauty in trees, the soul in the eyes of the people I meet, the wonder of the flowers that come out each spring,
the loveliness of children at play. And I'll do so
because I choose to do so, for those are the important
things in life. I'm not here to make money or
become famous--I'm here to love and to live. If I focus on that and maintain a great deal of responsibility (yes,
i will work), then I can't help but live a full life, for
there are many more rewards available to those who are
easily satisfied and entertained, and I choose to be more
than satisfied with the reward of a child's smile or a
friend's "thank you."
The
tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of
others
only a green thing which stands in the way. To
the eyes of people
of imagination Nature is Imagination
itself. As we are, so we see.
William Blake
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
