The Set Aside Prayer
I will consistently encourage you to develop your overall Contemplation, Prayer, and Meditation (CPM) practice to ensure it is meaningful to you. Additionally, my experience is that the “Set Aside” prayer is extremely effective when making conscious contact with, and building a relationship, with your chosen Higher Power.
This prayer has no religious history or association. I strongly suggest you include it in your daily practice. To be clear, if your CPM were to include only one prayer, this is the one I would suggest.
Instructions for building your own Set Aside prayer: Select and/or replace bold words with your words.
Universe/Father/Mother/Spirit/God/Higher Power, please help me set aside everything I think I know about you, me, and my spiritual life, for an open mind and a continued new experience of you, me, and my spiritual life. Additionally, please help me set aside everything I think I know about [Insert tangible life subject such as relationship issue, work situation, decision, emotional reaction, fear, anger, etc.] for an open mind and a continued new experience of [Insert/repeat subject you are contemplating such as relationship issue, work situation, decision being made, emotional reaction, fear, anger, etc.].
Here is more about the prayer and why it’s powerful:
“Please help me...” This statement acknowledges you are not powerful enough to solve all your problems/make your desired change alone and you are asking a power greater than you for help. This is the difference between a self-help program and a spiritual program. A spiritual program concedes that self-will alone is not how we intend to continue living. As part of a spiritual life, we ask for support in the forms of direction and power.
“…set aside everything I think I know…” This element acknowledges the human psychological phenomenon of conditioning. Whether you are aware of it or not, your thoughts and belief systems are influenced by everything you encounter daily. This is the primary reason that advertisers will pay top-dollar to get even a few seconds of your attention. Once inside your perspective, thoughts lead to behavior. Behavior—spread out over time—is your life. That means that your “normal” thinking is influenced from the da you are born and begin perceiving. Broadly, this includes gender conditioning, ethnic and nationalistic conditioning, as well as everything you are taught to believe about yourself through your family and social groups.
In this prayer you are asking your HP to set aside everything you think you know because your belief systems and thoughts are constantly conditioned by your life experiences. It is like asking for a clean slate each day.
3. “…for an open mind and a new experience…” Once we’re being supported by asking for help setting aside what we think we know, then we ask for an “open mind and a new experience.” This is effectively building on the previous part of the prayer—setting aside what we think we know leaves us with an open mind and we request a new experience. The old experience usually being whatever the challenge was that our conditioned mind and self-will alone got us into. The new experience is alignment with our Higher Power’s will for us. We are effectively saying, “I am willing to follow your guidance. Please clear my mind of what I think I know and provide me new thoughts and a new experience.”
Real life: When we integrate our spiritual lives with our “real lives,” we are effectively asking this loving, divine force to direct our thinking instead of operating from our conditioned minds. As a result, we can bring real life challenges with people, jobs, or unhealthy behavior patterns to this process. For example, if we are having a challenge in our marriage we can say “please help me set aside everything I think I know about marriage and my role as a spouse for an open mind and a new experience of marriage and my role as a spouse.” This combines everything we learned above. Effectively we are saying:
I’m aware that as a human I’ve been conditioned to think my current thoughts. Also as a human, I’m aware these thoughts and the related behavior are not resulting in happiness.
I desire to have a new, inspired experience.
Even if I don’t know exactly how to do that, I am willing and I’m asking for help.
Your Contemplation, Prayer, and Meditation can include any variety of prayers, literature, gratitude lists, or other tools. Begin your process with this Set Aside prayer.
If you have a question or would like help, contact me.