How to Pray for What You Want and Get Your Prayers Answered (Part 1)

Prayer can reshape reality. Scripture after scripture shows us that prayer can heal the sick, reshape the physical world and even move mountains. This is no small claim. This means every single human being has access to a technology so powerful that it can literally bend reality. And yet people pray every single day of their lives, and nothing changes.

 So in this post, I’m going to show you why most prayer actually keeps you stuck. I’ll show you what proper prayer looks like according to the Bible, the Koran, and great metaphysical teachings, plus the exact practice I use every single morning that transformed my relationship with God and my reality, because when you learn how actually to pray- not wish and not beg, but pray properly- reality has no choice but to respond.

So let’s get into it. Alright guys, here’s what nobody tells you about prayer. It’s actually the way that most people pray that prevents their prayers from being answered. I’m going to say that one more time. The way most people pray is what keeps their prayers from being answered. Most people pray like this, and I did the same for most of my life.

 There is some super being somewhere, way out there in the cosmos, and if I plead, ask and beg loud enough, I can literally shout my prayers out to the universe. Over and over, maybe the Super being will hear me, right? Please, God, give me money. Please, God, heal my body. Please, universe, send me someone.

And what makes it tricky is that, in many ways, it actually feels right. I mean, take a look at it. It feels spiritual. It feels like devotion. But here’s the paradox. Every time you ask for something, you’re broadcasting the absence of it. Please think about this for a moment when you ask. It simply implies that you don’t have it; you’re telling the universe, hey, I don’t have this thing that I want. Bring it to me. Believe me, this is actually what it means. 

And the universe, which is vibrational in nature, mirrors that signal back, right? Reality is a mirror. It doesn’t respond to your words. It responds to the signal that you’re broadcasting through your habit of thought and through your habit of emotion. And the signal of desperate prayer is a signal of lack.

It signals need and, ultimately, fear. Because what you are actually saying here is that I don’t have this. And I’m afraid I won’t get it unless some supernatural being can intervene. So, I’ll turn to God, and I’ll ask loudly and repeatedly from a place of desperation. The irony is that the harder you beg, the stronger the signal and the farther away the thing you want actually gets.

It’s not because God isn’t listening, but because your signal is keeping it at Bay. And again, this is the great irony of improper prayer. The more desperately you ask, the more you reinforce the very condition you’re trying to get away from.

You’re literally praying yourself deeper and deeper into the very hole that you’re trying to climb out of. That’s why so many people lose faith. They go ahead and think, like, I prayed for years, and nothing changed, right? So therefore, God must not exist, or God doesn’t care, or the universe doesn’t function this way.

But the problem was never God or the universe to begin with. The problem was prayer itself. One of the great metaphysical teachers whose book, The Game of Life and How to Play It, I absolutely love is Florence Goblechin. She was around in the early 1900s, and she warned against what she called adverse prayer, praying from fear, worry or desperation. She calls this self-cursing because you broadcast the very condition you want to escape, and in James 4: 3, James tells us you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly.

 The question is: if desperate prayer, I mean the way we’ve been praying our whole lives, doesn’t work, then what does? And the answer has been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years. The Bible tells us, the Quran tells us, the great metaphysical teachings tell us: every tradition points to the same framework of proper prayer. They say proper prayer is thanksgiving. It is a giving of thanks, not thanking God after you receive, but thanking God before you receive, as if what you want is already done.

So let me explain why this works, because there are at least two explanations, and they’re both really important. The first explanation is psychological. It’s a psychological perspective. You give thanks for what you want before you actually have it. It closes the gap between wanting and having.

So, if you can convince yourself that what you want already exists or is already on the way, you stop paying attention to its absence and start looking for it, or anticipating having it. So, this is a psychological recalibration. Is it a recalibration of your thoughts? It is a reorientation of your attention; you start acknowledging that you already have something different.

You start to perceive reality differently, and that psychological calibration aligns you with creating what you want. For example, if you assume you already have the wealth you want, you start having wealthy or wealth-oriented thoughts. You start thinking like a wealthy person. You start noticing wealth-creating opportunities, and within a short time, wealth becomes the byproduct of that shift. So that’s how you create wealth, through the assumption of having wealth already.

That’s psychological proof. This is not some new age concept. This is how your mind actually works now, from, let’s say, a new age or metaphysical perspective, or a vibrational perspective. When you pray in Thanksgiving, you assume what you want already exists or is on the way. You’re putting off a frequency of already having the thing desired, and so the thing desired must reflect itself into your reality.

 Another way of describing this is: let’s say you are now in vibrational coherence with attracting or manifesting the thing that you want, right? This is the fundamental idea of the law of attraction, right? So you attract what you want by assuming you already have it, not by wanting it, by assuming that it already exists and giving thanks for it. And this is what the great Mystic Neville Goddard meant when he talked about living as if the wish were fulfilled.

And again, the Bible gives us direct instructions in Philippians: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer, supplication with thanksgiving; let your requests be known to God. You can continue with the part 2 here