Praying With Humility: How To Change Yourself And The World
It’s perfectly appropriate to defend our belongings, lives, and loved ones, and to yearn for specific relationships and life-experiences. It’s also suitable to desire titles, positions, gobs of money, and the highest levels of success. You might even have fantasies of domination or revenge. It’s all part of the play.
While goals and desires can be conjured through intentions and focused effort, prayers tend to require a separate set of conditions and attributes. If all whimsies and hungers were equal to prayers, then prayers for football team wins, stock windfalls, and military massacres would dominate the supernatural circuits, and crowd the fulfillment funnel.
For a prayer to be considered “fair trade,” it’s probably best it meets one or more of these conditions:
- Reflects a personal, life or death situation
- Is born from pure, heartfelt intentions
- Stems from a place of humility
- Reflects a measure of reverence
- Does not require that other living Beings be hurt, punished, or killed
- Results in improved conditions for one or more people, the results of which do not threaten other living Beings
- Enhances an individual’s or group’s health, safety, mental capacity, attitude, emotional state, spiritual wholeness, comfort, relationships, or general well-being, including yours
- Expedites a person’s psychological, emotional, or spiritual evolution, including yours
- Inspires and invites feelings of positivity, kindness, and generosity
- Provokes compassion or empathy from anyone who might hear the prayer
- Immediately increases the vibration of the person praying
If your prayer doesn’t embody any of the above attributes, it might be more of a hope, desire, or goal than a prayer. Authentic prayer does not generally involve the ego. For example: praying for a financial windfall is probably egoistic, but praying to receive money to pay for your Mother’s surgery, might have measurable appeal to the Universe’s vibrational, response-network.
How do we create and improve our realities?
To up-level our selves and lives, we start with a feeling or a sense, then we slowly churn it into an intention. Once it’s embedded in us, we imagine related scenarios, outcomes, and destinations. Within these elusive dreams, we form agendas and implement actions, thereby moving us toward the fulfillment of our desires.
To accelerate our journeys, we might use games, leverage, strategy, or cunning. We might also engage our friends, allies, and demons. These are the systems and rackets that rule our physical lives within our three-dimensional realities.
It’s perfectly moral to have goals, dreams, and fantasies that are self-serving. Even a measure of greed can produce positive feelings and outcomes. It’s also permissible to dance with shadows and invite devils to dinner. What separates goodness from evil is not our thoughts or associations; it’s the upshot of our efforts. If hints of our intentions, and hosts of our actions, produce favorable conditions, we still might be invited to sit at the right hand of the divine.
When we’re in the aggressive pursuit of achievement and position, it’s not necessarily harmful or bad, but it’s probably not prayerful. Prayerfulness requires our vulnerability. If our prayers are muddied with desires for pleasures and trinkets, they can become superfluous, even benign.
What if we wish to shift something unique, deep, and lovely? What if our desires are perfectly pure and egoless? What if we have the heart, soul-intention, and desire-base of a child? What, then?
Strangely, the Universe, born from light, has the heart of a child. This child is not infantile; rather, She is the embodiment of the deepest and most profound truths in all of reality, and throughout all galaxies and realms. Whether you see Her as a God, Avatar, Master, or Guru, or the embodiment of pure electromagnetic energy giving birth to matter and circumstance, She is truth itself.
When we beckon the Divine, we enter into courtship with eternal light. It doesn’t matter if we’ve named him Jesus, Buddha, or Elm Tree, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re rich or poor. What matters most is that we have chosen to bow to a Supreme Being, which is also us. As we embody the purest humility, we see through the eyes of the Divine, and into forever. It’s in this state that prayers are immediately fulfilled.
Once we are in a complete and humble prostration to the eternal Self, we can be anyone or anything. In this position, we can share every tidbit of our pain and let it all out. We can be sad, angry, or delighted. We can be full of love, rage or hate. We can be selfish, and we can beg. Most importantly, as we lay our hearts and burdens at His holy feet, we free ourselves. This is how every soul, regardless of religion, can be immersed in the bosom of eternal light, and be born again.
Genuine prayer is not easy. It comes at a price. To connect with and shift the fabric of reality through prayer, we must first admit that our self-identities and personas are temporary and barely real.
While we might not need to embody our purest selves at the start of our prayers, we need to be open to our unraveling. Without a doubt, to achieve a durable state of prayer, we must acquiesce to the All-That-Is, from the cores of our beings.
The Reality Of It All
When leading and participating in Native American and Pagan rituals, I’ve seen people heal themselves of hatred, depression, and disease. I’ve felt spirits exit bodies, and I’ve seen miraculous transformations in the most broken and horrid people.
Through deeply intentional and action-based prayers, I know that anything is possible. Even if for a moment, if we can strip ourselves of our false identities and desires, and open our hearts to the vibrations of pure light, we can co-create any reality.
To begin, sit in silence, and bow to the eternal master. Call out to your angels, guides, Gods, and helpers in all the realms. Yearn to be opened. Beg for the light to blow you away.
About the Author
The Three Questions With Don Miguel Ruiz
Everything we do is connected to an agreement we have made. This is the premise proposed by Don Miguel Ruiz, best-selling author, and renowned spiritual teacher. Ruiz has spent decades guiding people to personal freedom through his profound insights regarding the nature of human reality.
In “The Three Questions with Don Miguel Ruiz,” we get a glimpse of how we shape our own lives, consciously and unconsciously, through our interactions with others and the promises we make to them and ourselves. This discussion gives us pause to think about what we really know versus what we have learned from others.
The youngest of 13 children, Don Miguel Ruiz was born in rural Mexico to parents who practiced ancient Toltec traditions and used their healing abilities to uplift others. After graduating from medical school in Mexico City, Ruiz began practicing neurosurgery with his older brother in Tijuana.
Not long after, however, a near-fatal car accident completely altered his life’s course, leading him to leave his career in medicine in search of a more essential truth about life. With his mother’s guidance, steeped in traditional native teachings, he soon discovered his own path to awareness that evolved into a deep understanding of the physical universe and the virtual world of the mind.
Ruiz’s self-discovery led him to publish a number of highly successful books, including “Toltec Wisdom Series,” “The Four Agreements,” “The Mastery of Love,” “The Voice of Knowledge,” “The Four Agreements Companion Book,” “The Circle of Fire,” and “The Fifth Agreement.” The Toltec Wisdom books have sold more than 12 million copies, and have been published in 46 languages worldwide.
Don Miguel Ruiz’s message is simple yet profound: Our lives are guided and affected by information that is passed along generationally — right or wrong. But instead of simply adhering to the ideas of others, we need to “let everything we do and say be an expression of the beauty of our heart, always based on love,” and this will lead us to happiness, fulfillment, and helping others.
