The Power of Prayer

A therapist friend of mine recently told me she sees many anxious clients in her practice. She said she teaches them new language skills, ones which allow them to comfort and reassure themselves. When they use the skills, they are happier and more confident. They have changed their emotions, they have changed their world, and science has the MRIs to prove it.

Unfortunately, what she sees is that these people just plain get tired of practicing new skills. It is work, and even though they like the results, they weary of the effort getting there.

This fits in with my theory, a metaphor if you choose to call it that, of how the world works. Our thoughts are electromagnetic impulses in our brains. We come into this world with certain tendencies, based on genetic and chemical make-up. Influenced by our environment, our genes instruct us to fire off synapses and flood our brain with certain chemicals, reinforcing our view, what we are teaching ourselves about the world. We begin a story line, embellish it, and tell it to ourselves over and over, until this fable we’ve concocted, pumped up by chemicals, entrenches certain habitual reactions, and we think we know reality. If the story becomes problematic enough, we try to change it. But it’s like trying to learn to ride a bicycle from start every morning of the world, and we give up from the fatigue, find ourselves plodding along on our crippled, mental feet, thinking the same old thoughts, getting the same old painful results. But at least it’s something we know. A little truth we can rest on.

Think about it. Think about something you would like to change. Let’s not even go to esoteric personality traits such as anxiety or irritation. Pick something physical. I smoked. I tell people I only smoked for three weeks, and quit every week after that for twenty-five years. I loved smoking. I hated smoking. Smoking made me calm. Smoking made me feel like a no-worth felon. Sometimes I quit for two hours. Sometimes I quit for three weeks. I would cry, I would rage. Where once I smothered my otherness in burning nicotine, I no longer had a defense between me and the prickful world, no pacifier. Even so, once I quit for three years. Why did I go back? I would tire of the effort it took to not smoke, even though during the three smokeless years I could not think about smoking a good deal of the time, and really preferred the not smoking life most of the time. But let something stressful happen, let me get around folks who were having a pleasant social time and drinking, let me surface from a deep concentration and want some instant relaxation, and I thought of my old friend, the cigarette. At those times, I understood when one of my friends told me, “I knew I could choose cocaine or life,” she said. “So I quit. And felt I had chosen second-best.” Finally, the third time the police came to the house in the life of our tempestuous child, I grabbed a friend, jumped in her car, told her to give me a cigarette and dare not to say a word.

How did I finish for good? I reached that juncture. I knew it was cigarettes or life. Still, I could not quit. One day in my back yard, I fell to my knees. Okay, so the yard’s private and nobody could see me. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I imagine it something like this, “I made this addiction, and cannot unmake it, but I am willing to let it go. Please help me.” A great cry from the heart. Then I immediately got up, went to the swing, sat down and lit up.

And it tasted bad. I looked at the smoldering cigarette. I did not want it. I put it out. I’ve never smoked again in my life. I’ve never wanted to.

It did take me about three weeks to get over the ritual aspects, and perhaps some physical side-effects. I was tired. I slept more. I prayed to let go of my thoughts of cigarettes. And they did pass. My husband still smokes. Unlike the previous times, this time his or other people’s smoke didn’t make me nauseous. It didn’t drive me crazy with desire. Once I dreamed I smoked, something which occurred in my past quitting episodes. In the past I would wake up devastated, with the feeling I had lost and cigarettes had won again. This time in the dream I realized I was smoking, and like that morning in the swing, I looked at the cigarette. “It’s just a choice,” I said to myself in the dream, “I can smoke if I want to, or not.” I didn’t want to, not even in the dream. After all those years, I had finally let cigarettes go. I was free.

Now if it worked for cigarettes, why am I still grappling with fat and salt, clutter, anxiety, the need for reassurance and approval? What is it I have not been able to let go of?

I don’t know. I am still struggling in these areas, still practicing, still having some success and some setbacks. But I believe this. I believe change can come, and when it does I won’t have layered new thoughts or new ways to practice over the old ones, though for now the practice may make me stronger. When change comes it will be because I have, with help from an Intelligence greater than I, let go of that which I have made and which no longer works for me. I will have asked, and I will have received. I will have changed my mind.