Prayer As Recovery
Prayer brought me back to my soul. Discover how prayer can help you with a 30 day challenge below.
I thought I could pray with the best of them…
I grew up Catholic on the far Southside of Chicago, and attended Catholic School from Grades 1–12. No one was more about the cross than Young Nicole: from weekly mass every Tuesday, to weekends spent at Church functions, to taking a Religion class as a requirement every year. Me, the big J (Jesus ya’ll), and the Saints were riding deep.
Yet nothing that I learned in those awkward, anxious formative years of my life prepared me for a moment I experienced as an adult, when I was alone on the back porch of my house. There, at one of the lowest points in my life, I started to try and pray — and I didn’t know where to begin. I realized that the God I was taught about all those years ago was not the God I understood in the present day. To me the God of my youth was always watching. Judging. Kept me stuck in a story of guilt, shame, and sin. That Catholic guilt I grew up with was not going to help me now — my spirit was rejecting that image of God and was calling out for something more.
I found that I couldn’t turn to this God in prayer about my problem on that porch. I needed a different understanding of who God/Spirit was and how I would communicate with them. Reflecting in that moment I realized graduate school had become my church. I spent most of my 20s and the first part of my 30s learning and implementing dense theories, moving through the rites of what I thought being an “academic” meant. God became the powers of higher education that I tried to let mold me and my life into what society and others wanted me to be.
Neither image of God was really true, and so I did what I normally do: I began to re-engage with who I knew God to be by going back to basics and understanding the purpose of prayer.
Academic recovery for me meant I could not fix my life by myself. I needed spiritual help, a spiritual intervention that started with prayer. These are the things I have learned in my studies and praxis.
Prayer = surrender
Prayer is the acknowledgement that there is a force greater than ourselves, and we want to tap into that energy to help us along our way.
Prayer is our agreed upon communication with God, the Universe, the Creator, your Higher Self — whatever you see as a supreme being outside yourself. It is the words we say out loud, in our hearts, that we whisper when we go onto a stage or give a presentation. To pray means you are tapping into that energy/life source and in doing so you are admitting what you can and cannot handle on your own.
More than a problem-solver
We pray because our solutions don’t work and we are serious about taking back our life. We pray to combat the enemies we will face in life. We pray for the material as much as we pray for the spiritual. We pray for control while admitting we have none. But more than being a problem-solver, prayer helps us tap into that divine energy that reminds us who we are and why we are here. It empowers us to rediscover the power and passion that is already present in us, so we can walk boldly on to our paths.
When I could no longer logic my way out of why I was so sad and dissatisfied in academia, I tried again to come back to the act that I learned in those too-hot or too-cold classrooms of my youth — prayer. As my last post details, I was at a literal crossroads in my life. And it was time to not only tell myself the truth (I was miserable in academia) but also admit that I needed help to discover who I was and what I wanted my life to be.
Prayers are always answered — just not in the ways you may think
According to Iyanla Vanzant’s 1998 book “One Day My Soul Just Opened Up” , when you do not let doubt creep in, when you expect a positive outcome, when you are very specific about what you want, and when you stop blaming God and everyone else for your problems prayers are answered quickly. Prayers then become an affirmation of what already exists. You just have to be willing to let go of the need to control how, where, and when your prayers will manifest.
Spirit and prayer brought me back to myself, my center, my core. It helped me give more grace to Young Nicole and empathy to Academic Nicole, seeing them not as competing parts of me but an evolution of my soul. It helped me dig into the darkness and face the devils of anxiety and codependency that left me in a perpetual state of stress and breakdown. My recovery from academia, from a life that others said I should want to live but was not giving me any reason to really live, started when I realized I needed a spiritual remedy for a spiritual issue. No amount of theories or publications would solve that problem.
As Priscilla Shirer says, we pray because we know we don’t use physical means that require spiritual remedies.
Prayer and faith go hand in hand
You need to hold two types of faith: faith in the prayers you are crafting, and faith that they are being heard and will be answered. It’s tricky but absolutely doable to master the challenge of prayer: to let go. Release the predetermined image you have in your head of how that prayer will be answered. Folks get caught up in dictating the sacred — telling God how to do its job.
All things are possible through God — because God is within us. You just have to remember who YOU really are and prayer is the vehicle to help with this.
We pray because we breathe
Our breath is the reminder of the gift that God gave each of us as Spirit in human form. This is what demonstrates that God is within and works through us. Connecting to our souls, our cores, our spirit through prayer, is how we connect with God within.
I continue to pray daily, speaking and writing out my prayers so that I remember where I have been and where I want to go. As a writer, I find I embed prayers in many of my morning pages as a way to connect with my soul and have it guide me through my day.
Challenge: You can integrate prayer into your life in 30 days
I offer you a 30-day challenge. Find a notebook or journal and craft a prayer that addresses one major issue in your life. In that prayer, be clear about who you are praying to. Is it God? The?Universe? Energy? Your Ancestors? Who or whatever it is be clear. Offer praise for what you have and acknowledge where you can improve, then get specific, and ask for what you want. Then know that it will happen.
Use your prayer for 30 days and track what happens — the shifts that occur, the synchronicities that happen, the revelations that come to light. Design a new prayer for another issue, and continue the conversation with God from there for another 30 days. Give it a try and see how your soul feels. You may be surprised.
Thank you to Celeste Ramos for talking with me about this post, and for her edits to make my points clearer.
