Monday Motivation: Pray! (Seriously, not kidding)
Whatever relationship you have with religion, prayer is a great way to get in touch with your wants and needs.
According to the developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan, the transition from adolescence to young adulthood is defined as going from being defined by your wants and needs to having them as inputs for you to work with. That is to say, as an adolescent, I might be driven by my desire to play baseball, but as a young adult, I realize that society rewards me more for studying, or working, or being a present parent.
What often happens is we wind up muffling the voice that tells us our wants and needs. Maybe it gets in the way of us being perceived as admired or normal by other people, or maybe we learned through a traumatic experience that our wants or needs can be shameful or dangerous. We keep them locked away, and then we lose touch with a very essential part of ourselves.
Across cultures, humans have found a way to establish a connection with what it is we really want: through prayer. In a prayer, we ask for help in achieving something we want. We could pray for rain or for sun; for health for ourselves or loved ones; for victory or for peace; for strength or for wisdom. Some of these wants we might be proud of, and others not so much. But the important thing is we’ve identified and expressed, even silently, what it is we want.
Historically, we’ve had the spiritual sense that there’s something or someone who is more capable than us in helping us achieve our desires. That could be an ancestor, a spirit, a god, a saint, God, the universe, Mother Nature, or anything, really. But what makes prayer really work is that you acknowledge there’s something out there from which you can’t hide your wants — and then you can’t hide them from yourself. This surrender, even if just to the overwhelming power of the universe itself, allows you to be really honest about what it is you want. And once you have your wants — once you know what they are, laid out in words — you can begin to decide what you want to do with them. You can acknowledge them and move on. You can act on them. You can inquire as to why you have those wants.
The key thing is that having and saying and knowing your wants keeps you from being driven by them without your conscious knowledge. You inner adolescent has a lot of wants and needs, and who you are today benefits from having a healthy relationship with that inner adolescent and being in touch with those wants and needs.
So I encourage you to take some time to pray. If you’re religious, you might be more comfortable with this. And if you’re not, just give it a try. Find some quiet, close your eyes, and, literally or figurative, get on your knees. Ask for what you want and need. Don’t judge what comes to your mind. Just be really honest with yourself. And ask for the help you need.
I’m not arguing that prayer has a supernatural power, and I’m certainly not saying anything about “manifesting” or anything like that. My point is that prayer is a really effective way of understanding something absolutely vital about yourself, and that I get the feeling we’re not praying nearly as much as we used to. I pray that I can live in a world where more people know — and get — what they want.