Category Archives: Spirituality

Help Wanted – A GOD —

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Search for a higher power.
Photo courtesy of pixabay.

Do you wish you believed but can’t? Want to find a higher power?

There is no doubt that having a religious or spiritual belief can be a great comfort in times of trouble. I have no quarrel with those of you who have some sort of understanding of a higher power, but I know there are lots of you out there who want to believe and just can’t.

There may be a good reason why you find it so hard to believe. There may also be a solution.

You may be one who describes yourself as a recovering Baptist, a recovering Catholic or some other religious label. You grew up in a religion, but it doesn’t fit. You learned the creeds and rituals but the higher power was not someone you would want for a friend, let alone worship. Try as hard as you could you just can’t believe in that religion’s God.

You may have grown up in a home where religion was not practiced. Where the altar was a Television set and the higher power you worshiped was things. You would like more, some deep spiritual connection but you can’t find one.

You may look at the world’s religions and wonder why they all say they worship a higher power and they all hate each other so much. You try to adopt the religion of your family, your ancestors, or your country. My people always believed this way so I am supposed to. But it just does not work for you. You ask yourself if you had been born on in a different country on another continent would you worship a different God?

You know there has to be a solution, and there is, but you can’t find that higher power that is of any use in your life. You want to believe but you just can’t.

You may consider yourself an agnostic, an atheist, or a seeker who studies one faith after another. You may have adopted an unusual religion or rejected them all.

There is a solution and perhaps an example will help.

Say you grew up in a family that worshiped the Flamethrower God. This God hates everyone. He is always out to catch someone doing wrong and then fry them. He hates you and you fear him. He may even ask you to go into his service in some other country to rape, pillage, and burn.

This God, so his followers say, hates everyone and thinks we are all evil and deserve to be punished. This is an easy God to twist to fit your ends. Parents use him to scare little kids at night into behaving. Politicians can use him to justify wars and war atrocities.

If you grew up indoctrinated in this belief, this “you are no good, no one is any good” culture, it is hard to see how this higher power could be of any use to you. The less this God knows of your whereabouts the better. Since you will never be any good you might as well do your worst.

In psychological terms, we call this a non-affirming home. There are plenty of religious leaders who use this system to keep control over their followers by telling them if you do not do everything I, as God’s special representative, tells you, God will get you.

Sometimes we call these Cults and Fanatics but they can just as easily be a part of a large dominant religion.

So what do you do?

Here is a suggestion, not an original one, but one I have heard more than once.

If you could find that ideal Higher Power, that God you so desperately need, what characteristics will that God have? Try to avoid any particular mental image, any characteristics that you have been told that someone else’s God has. Inside you how do you feel this Higher Power would be?

Write out a want ad for this Higher Power.

Wanted – One God must love me unconditionally, must be available 24-7, and in times of need. Does not need to solve my problems for me but must be willing to go with me through whatever I am going through. Must be willing to help me become the best person I can be and not judge me harshly if I can’t do everything perfectly the first time.

Now begin acting as if this Higher Power exists and now knows you are looking for your Higher Power. It also helps, as various Higher Powers are suggested to you if you check back on your want ad and make sure that the powers that respond to this ad are really Higher Powers that will make you a better person, not some imposter that will take you off into doing things that you know are wrong just for someone else’s benefit.

Like any good loving relationship, this new Higher Power relationship will require some development.  Consider including some sort of two-way communication with this power. Personally, I like the expression “prayer and meditation.” You pick the expression that works for you.

The usual caveat here. Some of you have very strong beliefs in this area. You will want to quote a particular religious book, tell me I MUST call my higher power by a particular name, wear a certain piece of clothing, and contribute money to a cause. You are entitled to your opinion but I am resistant to being told that my higher power told me wrong. If you need to prove I or anyone else is wrong then I am convinced you are insecure in your faith and need the rest of us to be wrong to make you right. I am old enough to be willing to be wrong some of the time.

What I would like to hear from some of my readers, if you care to share, is what has your higher power done for you? Has that relationship made you a better person? How would I know that better person when I see them in front of me?

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia

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Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

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4 Ways Prayer is Answered

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Sunset.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Why visualization and the law of attraction may bring you garbage.

Whatever you may call it, the process of expressing things to our Higher Power and then waiting for an answer gets extremely misunderstood.

People tell me “God does not answer my prayers.” I also hear the law of attraction does not work or that visualization stuff is bunk. Let’s consider those possibilities.

Whatever terminology makes you comfortable with this discussion is OK by me. For ease of my writing this out, from here on in I am going to call it prayer. You can translate that into some other vocabulary if that works better for you. I will also use God and He or Him to refer to this Higher Power. If you understand your higher power as She or Them, please talk with your higher power, not me, about that.

We get a whole lot more answers to prayer than we realize. They just weren’t the answers we wanted and expected. Let me give you an example.

See a problem with this prayer?

A man new to recovery prays earnestly one night. “God, please give me a better paying job, lots of money, a new car, a nicer house, and a more attractive wife, and I will need this by Friday night when the class reunion occurs.

The AA Big Book refers to this as something like being a greedy child on Santa’s lap at Christmas. That is not the way we should pray.

We are told to pray for “Knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry it out.”

You can reframe that as finding your life’s purpose and then living your life that way if you chose. (I need to stop doing those reframes.)

1. The first possible answer to any prayer is NO!

There will be lots of “things” in your life you might ask for and you will not get them. You may pray for God to let someone live and they die. This does not mean that you are a bad person or God hates you. (My higher power loves me and everyone else unconditionally; he may not belong to that kill them all and let me sort it out club.) Getting a NO does not mean that your higher power is cruel.

There were reasons why you got a NO, I don’t know what they are, you may not know why, but then you might want to go on living your life the best you can and see if you can figure that one out.

2. The answer may be yes.

Sometimes my higher power heals sick people. I do not know why he heals some and not others. Praying in this case and the resulting healing could just be coincidences but some of the stories I have heard tell me there might be another, more spiritual reason for this healing.

My higher power does, however, help a whole lot of Alcoholics, addicts, and mentally ill people if they are willing to do a little work on themselves. Why this Higher Power has such a decided interest in the addicted and the mentally ill, I cannot say, but I am firmly convinced that a Higher Power of some kind is a part of the recovery process.

3. The answer to your prayer may well be “Not now, you need to wait.”

Very often we need to keep praying over a long time, all the while doing the required work in order to bring a result into tangible form. Those of you who believe in the “Power of Positive Thinking” can ascribe this to repeatedly placing the thought in your subconscious.

Personally, I do not hold much faith in the subconscious. I know about the conscious and about being unconscious. Like subliminal advertising, I think anything worth doing is worth doing in a conscious manner. The subconscious is part of another discussion; now back to our prayer in progress.

That third answer, you need to wait, some of us get that confused with the NO one.  It would be easy to give up on the conversation at this point and say God never answers my prayers. This is why it is important to not only talk with your higher power but to also listen carefully to what he is saying.

One way of listening to a higher power is to meditate. There are other words that can be used to this process of listening to your Higher Powers voice like “still small voice.” I will let you translate this one as needed.

These first three ways God might answer prayer seem pretty obvious but number four – well hold on to your hats.

4. You want what?

I do not know about any of your Higher Powers out there but mine clearly has a sense of humor. Sometimes God gives us what we ask for, all the while knowing we won’t like it when we get it.

We get this answer to our prayers when there is a spiritual lesson that we need to learn.

For example, say you prayed “God help me get this job” just before you go for the interview. Then you get the job. A few weeks into this new job you start discovering things about what you will be doing that are most distressing. You may have been moved across the country or overseas. You may be trapped and unable to afford the move back home.

This “You want what?” can also apply to love objects and friends. Sometimes we want an important person to like us and then find out that they are no one we want in our lives. Being popular with the in crowd, may not lead to spiritual enlightenment. It may lead us to a whole lot of places we wished we hadn’t gone.

This possible answer to prayer is why that “Praying only for knowledge of his will for us” part is included. We don’t always know what is best for us.

So have you used prayer or something like it? Has it helped in your life journey?

What is next on this road to a happy life? Stay tuned and we shall see.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

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What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Afraid to say pray? Spirituality, religion and a happy life

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Praying.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

The role of Prayer, spirituality, and religion in creating a happy life.

I have held off on discussing this topic as long as I can. It is with great trepidation that I even put the keywords, prayer, religion, and spirituality into my blog.

But there is a connection between what you believe and your ability to have a happy life. We find that people who have a spiritual belief are more able to create the changes needed to improve their life. Having friends is helpful and having somebody with a whole lot of pull in the universe would be even better.

Nothing has been so effective in human history at dividing us up into in and out groups and becoming an excuse for war or general mayhem, then what we call our particular spiritual belief. If you have a particular aversion to Religion in general, please read on, I believe that for you, recovery is possible also and you don’t need to sign on for my particular religious belief system in order to have a happy life.

I, like so many others, have from time to time referred to myself as a recovering —— (fill in name of several religions here.) I came from a region where at one time the “Regular” Baptists and the “Separate” Baptists used to get guns and shoot at each other. It was the 60’s, the 1860’s. But the idea is still in play.

Further north and a little east of there some of my ancestors tried to kill each other and then had to flee because somewhere Catholic and others were Protestants. Descendants of these faiths and a whole lot of others end up marrying each other and I am one of those results. I find it increasingly difficult, no impossible, to take sides in all these sectarian disputes.

So what does that have to do with recovery?

The hard part for many people in recovery, recovery from any and all of life’s problems, has been to separate those old religious rituals and dogmas from reconnecting with some sort of deeply felt beliefs.

Prayer is one of those useful beliefs.

Now it would appear that there are a whole lot of different understandings of who we pray to and what prayer is, but the results tell me that those that pray have better and happier lives.

Twelve-step groups in their early days had to come up with a solution to this God and belief problem. They use the term “God as you understand him” So that includes all the various denominations as well as the various other names by which people may call their “higher power.”

I will try to avoid those old sectarian disputes, though at this point I suspect I have already wandered into the minefield and shortly my comments and inbox will fill with comments from people saying “If you don’t pray the way we do at the First Church of —- then God hates you and you are going to —.”

Prayer is too important to our recovery from unhappiness and a whole lot of other issues to be left out of the equation.

Wholly sectarian philosophies often incorporate practices that look and sound suspiciously like prayer. Creative visualization, meditation, the law of attraction, all these things try to put us in touch with something greater than ourselves. So does “wish-craft” and psyching yourself up to create better performance.

As we take this journey towards our happy life, whatever you may define that as being, we will need to talk about the role of faith, belief, prayer, and meditation. I don’t expect to write anything that intentionally offends anyone and I do believe that what I say will not contradict anyone’s current religious practice.

I have not studied religion in any professional capacity and don’t presume to tell anyone what they “should” believe. What I do know based on my training in counseling and psychotherapy is that believing in something is helpful in creating a positive, mentally healthy life.

This raises a bunch of questions we need to consider.

Does God, your higher power, the forces of the universe, or whomever, hear and answer your prayers? Even if it is your own subconscious that hears and responds, what might be the advantages of giving some prayer a try?

Why do some people say they get answers to their prayers and others say they don’t? What improves the chances that you will get an answer? How many different ways could your prayer be answered?

What is all this meditation stuff and why do people talk about “prayer and meditation?” Don’t you do one or the other?

This material on prayer, meditation, and spirituality will get sprinkled throughout the year so as to avoid giving anyone spiritual indigestion.

From personal experience, I have concluded that my Higher Power (as I understand them) has not one or two ways to answer my prayers. I am quite convinced that I have received at least four different answers to my requests. Your answers to prayer may vary from that number depending on your actual situation. I have also learned that I was not very skilled at praying. I have needed to change the technique I use.

Let me tell you in a future post about those four different answers you may receive and why we may all be amateur prayers.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel