Your friend,
Jim Kitzmiller

We express gratitude to God for all the various blessings in our life. We can ask for help in serving God better.

We limit the power of the prayers if we ask for other people to be different. However, we can ask for help in forgiving others. We can ask for help in letting go of trying to control and then accepting other people the way they are.

We limit the power of the prayers by asking for physical objects. Instead we can ask for help in appreciating what we have. Or we can express gratitude for what we have.

We can ask for help in being a better person. For example, we can ask for help in being more loving.

We can ask for help in seeing the hidden beauty in everyone and everything. Or we can express gratitude for the beauty in everyone and everything.

We can ask for help in replacing addictions with positive attributes. For example, if we’re addicted to judging others, we can ask for help in replacing our judgments with unconditional love for everyone in all circumstances.

Try it. You’ll love it. You’ll look at life differently. You’ll experience life from a loving perspective.

There is something sacred about putting our hands together in a prayer position. Doing that can trigger energies at the level of unconditional love.

But there are other ways to pray. We can express gratitude for all the blessings in of our lives. This includes past blessings, present blessings, and future blessings. If you look at things in a certain way you see everything as a blessing. There really is a blessing in every situation. Some blessings are more visible than others.

One approach to prayer is through a pad of paper or a computer word processor. We can express gratitude starting with the most visible blessings in our lives. As we do this more and more we become aware of less obvious blessings as blessings.

Gratitude is the recognition of blessings as blessings.

We can start by deliberately pondering each blessing and pondering why that is a blessing. But we can really kick it into high gear when we let go of thinking and simply let it flow. Keep on typing or writing.

Stream of consciousness gratitude is an amazingly effective form of prayer, self-help, and spiritual processing. Keep on typing or writing without thinking much about it. Eventually you can let go of the thinking altogether and feel the warmth and the love as you experience the gratitude.

Just keep flowing. You can start a sentence without knowing how the sentence will continue. Some of that will be nonsense. Just keep going with the expression of the gratitude. You are recognizing blessings as blessings.

Much of what you write will make sense. It will make sense in new ways that you didn’t realize before.

Your overall level of happiness will improve. It doesn’t have to take a lot to make you happy.

What counts is our level of happiness – not how much stuff we have. Stuff doesn’t make us happy.

Prayer / gratitude at the keyboard can get you to high levels of happiness very quickly. There is no limit to how good you can feel if you keep on writing and writing. Just let if flow.

Gratitude is one form of prayer. There are others, but that’s another topic.