Affirmations and Prayers

I joined an art journaling group this year, and one of the prompts involved creating either affirmations or prayers for the coming year.  As I worked on it, I decided I wanted mine to be both affirmations and prayers.  Through my journaling on this prompt I got to thinking about how many people approach creating change in their lives and how we ask for and receive help.

The first thing that came to my mind was that I see a lot of affirmations and a lot of prayers, but rarely are they together.  Either we create affirmations, statements about how WE are going to change or we make prayers asking for the divine to bring change to us.  It is a pretty solid trend to promote using affirmations for anything we can possibly do ourselves, and then if there are things that are out of our control, we pray about them. 

I think this echos in our regular lives too...so many of us will do everything in our power to do things ourselves, and only when we are at the end of our rope or feel we can not possibly manage something do we ask for help.  Many people will wait until they are on the verge of collapse before they admit they need help, as if it makes them less of a person to ask for help (or that it somehow invalidates all the work they did up until that point to need someone's help to finish the last bit).

And yet, in many cases, people are much more likely to help us out when they see that we are already doing the work!  If they see you just waiting around and begging for help (without a reason to not be working), they won't have a lot of motivation to help you.  Not only that, but when you are working and you ask for help, the task gets done even faster!

I struggled a lot with the concept of prayer.  I have always sort of felt that prayer gets a bad rap, because so many people treat it like some kind of divine request line.  They pray about things instead of acting on them, and sometimes it's not even a heart-felt prayer, but more along the lines of just saying the words.  It's taken a lot of work for me to find my own way with prayer, to develop the type of connection that I feel constitutes prayer.  For me, prayer is a conversation.  I may ask for help with things, but I also share my life with the divine.

I have used affirmations for decades, ever since a rifle team coach introduced me to the process.  I always thought there was something really elegant about creating these statements about where you want to be and then stepping into the reality where they are already manifested.  I love that affirmations are becoming mainstream, so talking about them doesn't put you in the strange category anymore.

But I am coming to the realization that affirmations and prayer don't have to be an either or thing!  In fact, I am reminded of the oft quoted 'God helps those who help themselves'.  Life is a complex thing, and there are so many factors in our lives that influence how things turn out.  We may be able to control some of them, but we can never control them all.  Using both prayer and affirmations together help us approach a problem from multiple directions.

Affirmations are so powerful, and they work by combining the affirmation (which works on our inner world) with actual work (which works on the outer world).  If all we do is repeat affirmations, but we never do work, we are only actually doing half of the process.  The great thing about affirmations is that if we start with just repeating them, that inner work (the affirmation creating change in our mental state) will often spark the outer work (because we have changed who we are to be the person who embodies the affirmation...which means we have to be doing the work too).

But no matter how hard we work, sometimes there are just things that get in our way.  Other people, change occurrences, forces of nature...these are the things we pray about!  And much like affirmations, our prayers work best when we do work along with praying.  Things may happen in the world around us that we can't control, but we can always choose how we respond to these things (even if that choice takes a lot of work to implement!)

And more than just outside forces that we can't control, sometimes the work we are doing is so big that it feels like we could never accomplish it alone.  Even when we are doing our own inner and outer work, it feels like we are ants trying to shift the world.  This is where prayer steps in in helps build you up.  You no longer feel like you have to do it all alone.  You might be asking for help with things you can't control, but you might also feel like you need to pray for help in following through with your affirmations.  Sometimes, just knowing that someone else out there has your metaphysical back can be enough to pick you up when you fall or keep you on track when you are tempted to stray.

The affirmation prayers I made start with the affirmation.  Just like any other affirmation, they are present tense and positive.  The prayer part starts with 'May', and are worded like a petition.  It is me asking for something.  I know where my struggles are, and so those are the things that I worked into my prayers.  I am asking for help, but I am also agreeing to do my share of the work.  I don't think of them as an "If I do this, then you will do that for me," kind of thing.  I don't think of prayers or petitions as demands or expectations.  More like expressing my desires, so that divinity knows what I want from life.  Sort of like when you want to give something to a loved one, you may think back about things they are interested in or things they have said they liked for inspiration on what to give them.

I found that thinking about my intentions in this two-fold manner helped me separate out the things that I felt were in my control and the things that I felt weren't.  And because I was addressing both, it left me feeling more confidant about the outcome!  I also think that tying my prayers to affirmations helps me stay mindful of doing my own work and not just praying for things and hoping they miraculously manifest themselves.