Unfortunately, many of the prayers people offer have no effect towards their desired intention. To pray properly, the relationship dynamics between our body, our soul, and the divine is an important consideration. A lot of misinformation has been promoted during the past few millennia. This article will explore why we suffer, who pulls the strings and what we can do about it. Once we incorporate the five tenets that lead to a successful prayer, then the five steps we need to pray effectively, which will be discussed in Part II of this series will make much more sense.
The five tenets follow:
- The divine is whole and fully complete without our love or adoration.
The nature of love is to give without conditions. The divine doesn’t need us to be anything more than we want to be. Our soul is the adventurer, who wanted to explore earth and master its illusion as a challenge to overcome. The desire to take our first breath in darkness and return to our divine origins with treasure is very appealing. Seeing how long it takes us to return home on our own given the fact that the divine will help us along the way is the attraction. Our soul knows there is no better feeling in the world than being one with the divine while in human form. Thus, learning how to be love, find love, and recognize love when we physically experience it is very compelling to our soul.
Our soul is an eternal being, who incarnates and uses our human form as a tool to explore its spiritual goals. It cares about our body and loves us without conditions; however, it loves the divine more and its family of souls. On top of that, our soul never feels the pain and agony our body endures, so there is a natural split between the physical reality we experience and our soul’s dream. So, when our bodies break down and suffering greets us every morning, many of us often wonder who has our back. Pain is a big deal to us; however, our soul never loses sight of its bigger picture.
2. The secret to long-term happiness is surrendering our heart, mind, and body to our soul.
Souls incarnate to explore ideals, qualities and/or embody strengths then bring them to the divine as gifts. Unfortunately, illusion provides many twists and turns for us all. Souls can get lost in the process and many of us lose our way temporarily. When we solve earth’s riddles and reunite with the divine, it is a truly a happy occasion and joyful celebration. Every soul shares all the love and light together on the other side of the veil. Reunification with the divine after experiencing our short time on earth is indescribably delicious.
When our heart, mind, and soul dance with the divine, peace, love and 
harmony organically occur as our physical and spiritual aspects become one. Surrender is key when merging with divinity, for grace, honor and the highest of highs and profound joy resides within the divine. Source created these qualities and embraces the world with love, gentleness, and peace every day. The divine enjoys our creations and doesn’t want us to suffer. However, the divine knows our soul’s purpose, which allows suffering into our life. Suffering is the fire that tempers the soul and allows our personality to learn lessons the hard way. Pain assures learning. The question becomes how long and how much suffering we will endure before we let go of our debilitating belief systems, habits and/or behavioral patterns that do not work, never worked, and create imbalance.
3. Suffering is a teacher, and our soul conducts and orchestrates everything.
Lessons need to be learned on earth and experienced physically within our body. Our soul uses pain like a carpenter uses tools to shape wood. As you guessed, our body is the unwitting wood in this analogy. Souls are interested in beautiful works of art, but the wood isn’t so sure it signed up for the same 
agenda our soul created. As everyone knows, the sandpaper of life is hard on each of us. However, our soul sees suffering as a necessary tool to teach the body to work with his/her soul’s spiritual goals.
Our soul knows when our body, heart and soul eventually work together, the joy will be so immense that no amount of pain it took to get us there would be too great. Gratitude fills our heart and soul once they merge and become one. Life immediately becomes easier, even more joyful. As an extra perk, synchronicity begins to support us naturally in ways we never imagined. Mentally surrendering to our soul and letting it lead is very hard for most people to do. The nature of life on earth is not knowing what is going initially, learning to trust, and eventually walking with the divine as friends and lovers like our souls have done since the beginning of time.
4. The divine always answers our prayers, but not always in the way we prefer or map out.
Divinity is not passive or ignores our cries for help. The divine is love, peace and offers these qualities and grace to us every day. Source is always there for us and never wants us to suffer one minute. Witnessing the misery humanity endures is challenging for all of us and yet it was always known on the other side of the veil this would be so on earth. It is important to remember that the divine will not interfere with our soul’s agenda or override it. Herein lies the problem when our soul incarnates to develop mastery and we forget why we came. And then our personality whines and wants the divine to bail us out of our suffering. Or worse yet, many think the divine is mad at us, bargain like lawyers, and/or grovel more to gain favor. This minimizes our power and disregards our soul’s agenda particularly if we incarnated to learn how to stand in our power.
5. Problems are potentials for growth.
Consider the divine also wants us to stand on our own two feet, claim our power and solve problems. It is important to learn how we created our problems and then follow through with solutions we deem necessary. 
Consider the possibility that the answer to our prayer is the potential within the new event (that we do not like) is the divine’s answer to our prayer. Then the courage it takes to resolve our problem fulfills both our souls and the divine’s agenda. The concept that the divine’s answer to our prayer many be a second problem that if we solve it…it would also solve our first problem can feel like a riddle upon a riddle. This is very hard concept for people to grasp much less accept. To pray properly, we must truly know our soul and the divine always work as one. The five steps for a successful prayer follow in part II of this series.