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Something interesting happened to me yesterday and it seems important to capture it here. I take short walks during my workday just to get outside, stretch my legs, and do a few minutes of prayer and meditation throughout the day. It’s a good reprieve from my work, which can be consuming and intense. The natural world is also one of the ways I feel a strong connection to the spiritual world, so being outside is an important expression of my faith.
While contemplating life on a short stroll, it occurred to me that certain fears of mine were fundamentally true. There are some realities of my life that I had spent a lifetime fighting or denying or trying to change, and it has been completely exhausting.
Some part of me had resisted accepting that certain things about myself or other people, but when they became realities I could trust, rather than fears to second-guess or be uncertain about or doubt, some kind of very profound peace came upon me and persisted throughout the day. I felt a great weight lifted. It’s very difficult to describe but that lightness continues to feel very important.
One thing that seems key to developing faith is that we get in touch with belief. Not just in Good or God, but also belief in ourselves as well. It’s not just Good (or God) that gets returned to us, so too does our sense of an authentic self, our true being, our real priorities, our true purpose. So many important things come to us after developing faith. And as our belief strengthens, our dependence on the opinion of others diminishes, because we have more truth within to stand on.
I remember living without faith. I couldn’t trust myself or my own instincts. I spent far too much time in situations or with people who were causing me harm. I barely had the wherewithal to discern what I wanted, let alone ask for it. I struggled with sorting out my own priorities, and then prioritizing them. I regularly remember wishing I believed in God, because then at least something would be available to tell me what to do, because I didn’t know what to do or how to do it all by myself.
What I realize now is that Good (or God) is a shared venture. This is why prayer is important. In recovery programs, they say that prayer is talking to God (or Good) and meditation is listening. We become active participants in our own path when we start dabbling in faith. We start asking for what we want and then start feeling worthy of a positive future when those prayers are answered, because inevitably, some of them are answered.
There is real power in belief, and I am not the only one out there saying such things, which is part of what helped me in the early stages of faith. Authors like Gabby Bernstein, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton, and many others have plenty more to say on the topic.
Manifestation isn’t about blinking our eyes and magically making a mansion appear. It is about focusing on Good (or God) so hard that we slowly change our brains to see the best in everything, which inevitably brings in more good, more hope, more opportunity, more lessons to learn, and most importantly, more and more faith.
It also makes us strong enough to accept certain things about ourselves, the people around us, and our histories, which, in my experience, is an incredibly important and peaceful part of the process.