Prayer Therapy: Introduction
Ever since the dawn of human life on this planet, the events in the personal, social and environmental life of human beings have always been explained in some divine way depending upon the faith and awareness of people regarding the changes taking place in a person’s life and in the universe. Different religions explain the universal phenomena according to their religious or divine understanding. These religious beliefs gave rise to various religious or spiritual practices people used in order to protect themselves from natural disasters or calamities and psychological or physical disorders and other social and environmental problems. The adventures of Moses in Bible are a typical example of how he rescued his people from various disasters and calamities using the power of faith in a supernatural being called God. With progress and development in civilization the religious and divine worship practices also changed and now we have several systems of knowledge that have borrowed the religious and spiritual practices from various religions and developed and adapted them into a therapeutic system called Prayer Therapy.
Prayer Therapy aims to understand and resolve the problems of man who he/she faces during his life-time. It helps and guides the person in understanding his/her problems in divine perspective and suggests techniques and strategies based upon divine scriptures to help the person in overcoming his/her problems.
To understand the concept of Prayer Therapy in a better and easier way is to compare it with Psychotherapy. There is, in fact, hardly any difference between Prayer Therapy and Psychotherapy. Both of these systems of knowledge deal with the solutions of problems faced by man during his life.
Psychotherapy deals with treatment and cure of psychological disorders/problems of man. There are a set of techniques and strategies used by psychotherapists for helping and guiding a person in order to strengthen him/her to face the challenges of life. The main theme of psychotherapy is the psychological repair and treatment of human psyche (mind/behavior).
Prayer Therapy also deals with the psyche (mind/soul/spirit) but here the conceptual approach is a little different. In prayer therapy the concept of psyche takes in itself the soul, the mind, the spirit as well as behavior. In this respect the range of Prayer Therapy is much broader. Psychotherapy deals only with psychological problems but Prayer Therapy takes in its area all the problems of man: Psychological as well as Physical problems, Social as well as environmental problems, individual as well as group problems. Psychotherapy concentrates only on emotional and psycho-social issues whereas Prayer Therapy goes much beyond that and includes in its arena every problem of man and when we say every problem it really means every problem that you can think of happening in his/her life-time.
As the name suggests, the main tool in prayer therapy is “PRAYER”. Nevertheless, there are techniques and strategies of assessment of problem and its resolution. While Prayer Therapy focuses mainly on divine scriptures and faith of the person seeking help, it also utilizes the knowledge of psychology, sociology and psychotherapy to extract its methods of assessment of the problem and implementation of various prayer techniques.
Like all other disciplines, Prayer Therapy is a secular system of knowledge and studies the problems of man and its solution from a very secular and liberal perspective. It suggests prayer techniques adapting them to the religious faith and perspective of the person.
Before we proceed further in our discourse on Prayer Therapy, let’s talk briefly about the ‘Psyche”.
Psyche is a Greek term meaning mind, soul or spirit. Since Psychology believes in science and scientific explanation of every behavioral phenomenon therefore the meaning of Psyche as mind, soul or spirit was discarded and was replaced by behavior which was more objective from the scientific point of view. But the fact is that whatever meaning we give to psyche it will always remain a mystery. We know for sure that we are conscious or aware of things and activities happenings around us. This is what we call the conscious mind. We know what we are doing, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting and feeling. We are aware, we are conscious, we are alive.
In addition to the consciousness or awareness, we have loads and loads of memories, images, thoughts and ideas which are not there in our conscious mind right now but we can switch them on and recall several images of our past life as our precious or unwanted memories. This is what psychologists call the subconscious or unconscious mind.
Mind is something like an iceberg which displays 1/10th of its portion out of the water whereas 9/10th of it is submerged in the deep-sea. The subconscious is like a very, very vast and immensely huge storehouse that registers and keeps in itself the record of all our life events however important or trivial they might be. We may be able to recall some of the past events easily and some with a little effort or difficulty. But there are thousands and thousands or, to say appropriately, innumerable stories and events of our life which lie buried in the sea of subconscious without ever getting any opportunity to manifest themselves in our conscious life.
Conscious mind is the functional side of us. It lets us operate our daily life activities. But it is the subconscious mind that is the creative and imaginative force behind the conscious mind that does all the important life activities which we shall discuss later in our subsequent chapters. All the great discoveries, inventions and miracles, the divine or mind scientists believe, are due to the creative manifestations of the subconscious mind.
The divine scientists also believe, on the basis of their studies of religious and meditational practices, that unless one is able to communicate effectively with his/her subconscious mind, the prayers will go in vain. But the question is: how to communicate with the subconscious mind in order to manifest discoveries, inventions and miracles or to get our prayers answered?
This is where Prayer Therapy gives techniques and strategies of effective prayer that brings answer to our problems. What the followers of religion call God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Rab, Bhagwan or Kami-Sama, the divine scientists or prayer therapists would call Subconscious, Universal Conscious, Infinite Intelligence or Universal Mind. Whatever name one uses for these universal forces, the prayer techniques and prayer answers or results have been found to be the same.
Mumtaz Shah