The Goal

The goal in your prayer to establish meaningful relationships is to first establish a meaningful relationship with yourself. In other words, your prayer work establishes in your consciousness those qualities that you feel you lack. Thus established, the principle of "like attracts like" draws to you a level of experience with others that is healthy and meaningful because you bring a consciousness of health and meaning into the relationship.

The Relationship Prayer

In forming a denial statement for your relationship prayer, it is helpful to ask yourself what you feel you lack as an individual. What problems will getting the right person solve? Are you battling loneliness? Insecurity? Lack of direction? The need to share experiences with another? These are legitimate needs and certainly can be addressed in the right relationship. But they must be addressed in yourself first. Would you like a lonely, insecure person who doesn't know what he or she want in life clinging to you? Of course you wouldn't, and neither does someone else who is interested in developing a healthy relationship. When you identify what you feel you lack, put it in your statement of denial. "I now release this sense of loneliness (insecurity, and so on)."

As you speak these words, feel yourself let go of the negativity in the best way you can. Create your affirmative statement according to what you want out of a relationship: The divine qualities of security, love, and wholeness, are now established in my mind and circumstances. I am free to love and accept myself and to be all that I can be. Thank You, God. Feel the Truth of this statement and, as with all these types of prayer, seek to live out your denials and affirmations in daily life. Make a conscious effort to practice what you pray because prayer without practice is incomplete. God can 'do no more through you than He is doing at this moment, if you do not, in all ways, open yourself up to change. Look for that "perfect person" first in your own mirror. As an extension of your internal prayer work, make a practice of putting yourself in places that best represent the person you are becoming. As you build yourself from the inside out, it is only a matter of time before the people who are "right" for the person you wish to be will begin to appear.

A Few Final Words

In our practice of meditation and prayer it is important to bear in mind that there is an ebb and flow in our spiritual growth, times when no progress seems to be made and other times when we feel we are making great strides forward. Otherwise, when we hit occasional dry spells in our journey, we may feel like we are failing to make progress and become discouraged in our efforts to grow. What is even more frustrating is our tendency to know the higher Truths but, through a kind of spiritual indifference, choose instead to cling to lesser ideals. Paul put it very bluntly when he wrote: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (ROM. 7:15).

Who on the spiritual path does not understand well Paul's sentiments? Why, when we have seen grander possibilities for self-expression, do we continue to choose to be overrun by negative emotions, old limited thought patterns, and negative reactions to circumstantial appearances? What is it in us that keeps us hanging on to the old, spiritually degrading way of handling things when we know that the joy and freedom of choosing a higher perspective is just a thought or two away?

This question has probably plagued members of the human race ever since it began to dawn on us that, while the surface of our being is very much involved in the finite world of expression, our essence is grounded in the Infinite. In one sense we stand with one foot in heaven and another foot on earth, and because we are in the beginning stages of spiritual development, we favor with attention our earthly standing over our heavenly one.

The Bible, as you might expect, addresses this tendency beautifully, and I think exploring it briefly might be a helpful way to bring this book to a close. Masked in the allegorical account of Cain and Abel, we find some helpful guidance in understanding this side of us that does what we "hate." We can also see how this seemingly negative allegiance to old values actually serves as stimulus to push us into greater levels of expression.

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