Pray Outside The Box 

By Alan Cohen

In my seminars I lead an exercise called "My Ideal Day." If you were participating, I would ask you to take a piece of paper and write down in detail the most wonderful day you can imagine. The only requirement for each activity you list is that you would choose it from a sense of joy and delight rather than routine or obligation. When seminar participants do this process, they become very animated and usually come up with inspiring ideas about how they could actually create such a day - and life. In one seminar, a woman read aloud her essay describing her ideal day. After relating many delicious experiences, she read, "and then in the evening my husband and I go into Toronto to see our favorite opera performed by world-renowned singers. We ride in a big limousine, which allows my husband to stretch out his arthritic legs."

When I heard her words, some-thing struck me as out of tune. "Why," I asked her, "would you include arthritis in your ideal day?"

"Well," she answered, "I guess my husband has had arthritis for so long that I can’t imagine him without it."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "that is one of the reasons the condition has persisted." We must be careful to build our experience around our visions, rather than building our visions around our experience. Your history is not your destiny. Imagine a prisoner doing the "Ideal Day" exercise.

"I get up in the morning, go out into the prison yard, and shoot some hoops with the other inmates," he might envision. "Then I come into the prison cafeteria and find they are serving meat loaf for lunch."

But why include prison in the vision at all? If you have been in prison for a long time (metaphorically speaking), you may have a hard time envisioning yourself out of it. But if you can, you are well on your way to freedom. Any vision that includes the prison is not doing you justice. While I was a guest on a radio talk show interview featuring my book Handle with Prayer, a caller shared an inspiring story.

"When my daughter was scheduled to go for surgery, I asked my prayer group to pray for a positive outcome to the surgery," he recounted. "At the prayer group someone asked, ‘Why accept the surgery as a done deal? Let’s pray that your daughter be healed without the surgery.’ So we prayed for a natural healing. When I took my daughter for her next exam, the doctor informed me that her condition had cleared up and she no longer needed the surgery."

I cite this story not to influence you against surgery, but to invite you to pray outside the box. Sometimes we do not ask for what we want, but for what we expect we can get, or what others tell us we should have. But if what we expect is less than what we want, we have sold ourselves, our prayers, and our God short. Abraham has said, "Never accept any reality unless it includes all of what you want."

To avoid booby-trapping your visions or affirmations, weed out elements contrary to your goal. Always think and speak about where you want to end up rather than where you are coming from. For example, never try to lose weight; seek to gain fitness. Do not seek to avoid aging; instead, tap into your sense of youthful vitality. And don’t try to get out of a bad relationship; get a clear picture of the kind of relationship you would like, and ask the current relationship to transform, or a better one to show up. Never say anything about yourself that you would not like to come true; state the best about yourself rather than what you fear or resist. Your powerful subconscious mind tends to manifest any picture you hold, so make it a good one.

Your words are the least part of your prayers and affirmations. The purpose of words in prayer and affirmation is to focalize your energy. God, which is spirit, reads and responds to your energy flow. So if you are saying "I want" with your words, but "I can’t" with your energy, "can’t" wins. You can’t be immersed in complaint about what is not working, and get things to work. You simply can’t get there from here. The universe is not fooled by words, and don’t you be, either. Another name for God is "Yes." Whatever you focus on is "yes." If you are pushing against something, you are saying yes to it. So be sure to focus on where you want to go, not what you want to get away from. Attention is investment.

I often see people defeat their own goals by defending their problems. In some counseling sessions I make a suggestion to a client, and then she tells me all the reasons this will not work. When this happens repeatedly, I realize the person has more of an investment in being right about their limits than in having what they want. They are not ready to receive their request. When they have more to say about where they want to be than where they are, they will have their dream.

You, too, shall have your dream, but you must be in harmony with it before it can show up. You must become an advocate for your possibilities rather than your shortcomings. Get on your own team. If you were a sports team coach who discovered some players running the wrong way with the ball, you would not let them onto the field. In life, your best players are all the thoughts, words, feelings, and actions that match your ideal. Send only them onto the field and watch them score big time.

Alan Cohen is the author of the best-selling, The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the award-winning, A Deep Breath of Life, and the acclaimed, Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It. This August join Alan in Maui for his life-transforming Mastery Training. For information on this seminar and a free catalog of Alan’s books, tapes, and seminars, phone 1-800-568-3079, visit www.alancohen.com, email admin@alancohen.com , or write P.O. Box 835, Haiku, HI 96708.