PRAYER AND MY ILLNESS
In this story I will tell you about a very serious illness I was dealing with and how prayer was the only thing that helped me heal. But first, I will tell you how I dismantled a “negative” belief system around prayer, which paved the way for my healing.
If the word prayer turns you off then you likely have a belief system surrounding prayer that you may want to look into. I know this was the case for me. One day someone casually said to me “Well, I know you are not into prayer”. I was a bit shocked and then annoyed by the comment and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew it was something I needed to look into. Had I unknowingly renounced prayer? Why did that bother me so much? I first thought about my family. I was raised in a family that was Catholic, but not overly so. I learned some basic prayers growing up and we went to church, mostly on holidays. I then remembered that as a child I said prayers when I went to sleep. These were my own little prayers that I recited in my head as I went to sleep. They usually involved my family members and wishing them health and happiness. I would say the prayer and drift off to sleep. I then realized that I actually said these prayers until I was an adult around the age of 29. The timing of things is VERY important when you are doing healing work and unwinding belief systems. At the age of 29, I had a very bad surfing accident which made me very ill for a while. It is actually what triggered my interest in natural healing. However, I realized that it was at the age of 29 that I gave up on prayer. WHY? Because I felt that life had turned against me and that ultimately I had no control over anything, so therefore prayer was pointless. None of this registered in my conscious mind until about 10 years after this incident, so I was walking around for 10 years renouncing prayer. So this gave me an awareness of the “belief” but it did not get me to start praying again. I would need something far more significant to occur and I would have a lesson to learn.
The timing of this realization was quite significant because I was soon presented with a life situation, in the form of an illness, which would test me on all levels. One day I will write the entire story, but for now I will share how prayer factored into my healing. I have encountered illness before and was always able to find the right natural remedy which would get to the root cause of my illness and bring my body into balance, usually within a short time. This time, nothing would work, and I mean nothing. I was literally brought to my knees for a period of months. It was at this time that I remembered a quote (which, I don’t know the source) but basically said that the best time to pray was when life brings you to your knees. Well, I didn’t know what else to do, so that is what I did. I got on my knees and prayed. And as I prayed I was sort of laughing because I realized that I stopped praying because I felt that I had no control over life, BUT that is the exact time when you need prayer the most, when you feel utterly helpless and like you have absolutely no control over life. As dramatic as this all sounds, it is what I did. And my prayers were not to God or any deity, they were just silent words that I recited. And for some reason I wasn’t praying to be instantaneously healed. I was asking to be shown the lesson I was supposed to learn from this experience. And this was not just a one time prayer. This was a new spiritual practice which I performed usually at morning and at night, but often at other times when things got really hard. After about 2 weeks of this, I woke up and no I was not healed, but I KNEW what was preventing me from healing. And in order to remove these self-imposed barriers I needed to do some healing work. The type of healing work I needed to do was psychological and spiritual. And because prayer had illuminated the road for me I could now do the work. It would still not be easy, but I was no longer operating in the dark. From here I began to slowly improve. Now I know that to embark on the healing journey, prayer is not optional, it is necessary. And I know that I trust life again, because I started saying prayers again each night when the lights went out.
P.S. I later learned the importance of prayer in many ancient healing traditions. Prayer can heal, very often instantaneously, when the proper words are paired with the proper intent and in the proper setting. This is something that anyone can do and it is a critical part of the healing work that I do when I work with people.