After posting the wise words of Zen teacher Cheri Huber last night, I've been thinking more about what she wrote. In case you missed her thoughts on prayer and peace, here's the link again: Click here.

Here's the paragraph which resonated the most strongly for me, because it's sure been true to my experience:

"The quality of our life is determined by the focus of our attention. When our attention is focused on anger, resistance, hatred, and judgment, that's our experience of life. We have been conditioned to believe that focusing on what we don't want will get us what we do want. As with so much of what we've been taught to believe, that simply isn't true. When we focus on what we want, we have what we want. If I want to feel love, I must love. If I want a compassionate world, I must make my world compassionate. If I want to feel peace, I must be peaceful. It is possible to turn our attention away from what we do not choose and toward what we do choose. And, it is helpful to have friends along the way."

It can be easy to breeze over this paragraph and miss out on what she is trying to teach us. What she's done is to give us the secret magic bullet to create anything we want in our lives, not just peace, but success, health, money, you name it. She has laid out in simple terms the mechanics of how to engage in what I call "power prayer."

The metaphysics behind prayer are pretty simple. It's just our conditioning, our upbringing, and our negative beliefs that tend to get in the way. Really, power prayer is something that we can tap into every day, in every way.

Pray Something, Don't Pray FOR It

Prayers don't work when you are praying FOR something, because this only affirms the LACK of that thing. "Dear God, please bring rain." This adds powerful energy to the fact that you don't have rain and are desperately seeking rain. So, after praying in this way, what do you think you get more of? The same condition that you affirmed - NO RAIN.

On the other hand, prayers always work when you PRAY SOMETHING. That is, you enter into the belief that you ALREADY POSSESS THIS THING OR CONDITION IN THE PRESENT. You enter into the state of being WITH this thing instead of being APART from this thing. You experience this thing as being in your life NOW. To pray something instead of praying for something, you have to generate a sincere feeling within yourself that this condition has ALREADY manifested in your life. Being able to conjure up that clear, unshaking faith within yourself, that 100% belief, is the key to all successful prayer.

Connecting with the Mind of God

If you really need and want something, here's how to manifest it through prayer. Let's again use the example of praying to bring about rain. For prayers to connect instantly with what is called "The Mind of God," the divine intelligence and quantum force that intersects with all of reality, you'll have better results PRAYING RAIN. Enter into the vision of rain, the belief of rain, the affirmation of rain, the feeling that RIGHT NOW, in this moment, you are possessed of abundant rain.

You want to amplify those feelings of abundance, of having already received the object of your prayer. Use everything you've got to achieve this 100% belief. You'll want to focus on emotions of joy. You may want to incorporate bodily sensations like imagining what the raindrops feel like as they pour down your head and face. Prayers become more successful when you can invest all of your senses in the prayer, "tricking" them into experiencing the reality of your prayer. So if you want rain, smell it, feel it, taste it - get all your senses involved.

You may even want to incorporate elements of physical ritual to help make this prayer more real to your body. That's where all religious ritual and magical ritual comes from. It's all designed to give the physical body cues that something important is happening. So rituals like lighting a candle, making certain physical gestures and movements, or vocalizing through chants, song, or affirmation can also add strength to your prayer, but only if you are truly comfortable with the ritualistic form. Some people aren't, and for them, it just gets in the way.

After you have awakened all of your senses to embody the belief that your prayer has already been made manifest, hold onto this sensation for as long as you can. Allow that belief, that joy about your prayer coming true, to flood through your entire being.

Sometimes, these moments of really convincing yourself that your prayer has already manifested can be very elusive. But even if you can only hold the belief for a few minutes, that can be enough time to set your powerful intention, this creationary seed, into motion.

And after you have summoned up this belief, this energy, this reality of your prayer already having been successful, it's important to walk away from it. Don't dwell on it. Focus your mind on other things. Disconnect from your prayer work after you've energized your intentions. This gives your intentions time to gather strength on the inner plane and work their way down into manifestation here in the world of "3-D" or third dimensional consciousness.

Praying Peace

You can apply this same power prayer technique to anything you wish to bring about in your life. So, in praying for peace, we actually need to PRAY PEACE. We need to BE peace in our hearts and minds to such an intense, awe-inspiring degree, that this power permeates throughout creation with our intention.

Don't pray FOR peace, because this affirms that you don't have it now and sets you off further from your power center, your sovereign spiritual power. Instead, PRAY PEACE, enter into that energy, step into the faith that creating peace in the NOW is not only possible, it's probable. That in fact, it has already happened and is occurring all around you.

You may not be able to maintain that feeling for long, but even holding it for a minute can create huge changes on the physical plane. Sometimes you have to engage in power prayer several times to condition yourself to creating events in this way, especially in areas of your life where you have the most blocks. But it always works.

My honey and I prayed rain last summer during a mild drought and within 24 hours a flood came to our area. OOPS! So do be careful. It's best not to mess with weather stuff since the devic kingdom is really in charge of that, and we humans don't always know what's going on there.

I'm focused on praying peace now. While I have tons of peace in my immediate neighborhood, my immediate life, I need to pray more broadly.....to extend the radius of my belief...to believe in this abundant peace permeating everything, from Capitol Hill to the White House to Iraq to Afghanistan and everywhere in between.

I invite you to join me. Creation power is always multiplied when we unite our intentions.

And don't forget to inject a feeling of lightness, of play, of FUN into your prayer time. Our angels and spiritual helpers love it when we're having fun. Our true essence isn't that much different from theirs. At our core, we are each a joyful, magic spark, with fabulous lightness of being. So the more we can recapture that, the more we can experience heaven on earth, and the more the angels will come and play with us.

Start experimenting with your own power prayer program now, and watch how quickly miracles manifest!