why your prayers aren’t answered

When I was a kid, saying my nighttime prayers felt like a total bummer.

I was raised by conservative Catholics, which is a long story for another email.

My three little sisters and I all shared a bedroom.

(6 people living in a 1 bedroom apartment in 90s NYC was… intense!)

My parents would tuck us into our side-by-side bunk beds, and they’d prompt us to speak various rehearsed prayers out loud.

As rock music reverberated from the apartments below and sirens blared outside, I would whisper things like “God bless my family” and “our Father who art in Heaven” and “forgive me my trespasses.”

I always felt like I was performing – saying nice things I didn’t really feel or mean in order to be good. Sure, I wanted everyone in my life to be blessed and protected from eternal damnation, but what was the point of saying it out loud?

And, frankly, praying felt pretty disappointing. If God was all-powerful, why was I in such an unrelentingly dire situation? Why didn’t I have what I needed? Did God ever actually answer people’s prayers?

I spent most of the first two decades of my life asking these questions. And I used to get totally triggered and upset any time someone mentioned the words “God” or “prayer.”

Until I encountered the work of awakened metaphysicians and learned about the Universal Laws that govern my reality.

GLORY HALLELUJAH. (Literally, thank God haha)

I learned that my previous prayers weren’t working because I didn’t understand how reality worked!

I had been taught to pray in a totally dissociated and pessimistic way.

I was in the energy of what I didn’t want (poverty, lack of love and support, etc.).

My prayers of supplication – please God, help me! – were only making matters worse, because they were amplifying my state of lack and limitation.

I had to learn how to, as my teacher Derek O’Neill says, “not come to God as a beggar.”

I had to reconnect with my inherent worthiness, before and beyond all the distorted programming.

I had to rehabilitate my intuition, so that I could hear the subtle signs and messages from God that would help bring my prayers into reality.

Neville Goddard wrote: “When you emerge from prayer you no longer seek, for you have—if you have prayed correctly—subconsciously assumed the reality of the state sought.”

This is how I pray now!

And this is the kind of prayer that gets results.

It requires a deep cultivation of faith, not in some imaginary mercurial god, but in the immutable laws of reality, and the power of divine love to transcend all seeming limitations.

What would you pray for if you knew your prayer would be answered?

What needs would you finally admit you have?

What dreams would you finally let yourself dream?