Prayer, in its truest sense, is not a petition, not a supplication, not a wail of despair. It is rather an alignment, a unifying process that takes place in the mind as it reaches to its divine self and to that power greater than human understanding.

— Ernest Holmes

God as Principle

Little could be considered more foundational to New Thought teachings than the practice of affirmative prayer. And perhaps little is less understood than the underlying premise of affirmative prayer and the practice of using it to create our realities.

In their new book, “Discover Your Divinity: A Modern Guide to Affirmative Prayer,” Linda Martella-Whitsett and DeeAnn Weir Morency explore, clarify and reconceptualize affirmative prayer, focusing on Unity’s process, which also is applicable to Science of Mind and other New Thought traditions.

“In a movement where prayer is the central practice,” Martella- Whitsett says, “there’s been no book about how to pray published by Unity since the 1960s.” She explains that if all we do is “affirm and let go,” then we engage in magical thinking because we don’t have to do anything. “In our approach,” she says, “God is not a person who does things. We are the actors. We claim and embody that power.”

Morency's early training at Agape led her to rely on affirmative prayer as a process for growth, transformation and empowerment. “There is nothing more powerful than knowing the truth of who you are,” she says, “and knowing the truth of who we all are.”

She describes New Thought as “steeped in prayer, often with a focus on comfort rather than a realization that leads to action. The transformative power of affirmative prayer is New Thought’s gift to the world because it asks something of us. It asks us to step into the ‘I AM.’”

—Excerpted from the February 2024 Science of Mind magazine, article by Julie Mierau.

What Affirmative Prayer Is

In outlining a refreshed approach to affirmative prayer, Martella-Whittset and Morency, as noted above, offer this as the underpinning of affirmative prayer.

Anchored in our divine humanity, affirmative prayer awakens us to all we are capable of being and doing by:

1. Consciously clearing away false beliefs to reveal the truth.
2. Realizing and declaring the spiritual truth about ourselves.
3. Being still and knowing that God is. Feeling that reality so clearly that we declare the spiritual truth of any situation.
4. Releasing and surrendering our human-centric perspective and yielding to our divine identity.
5. Accepting that every new discovery is a revelation of truth.
6. Understanding that mind in essence and mind in form are one and the same. Our thoughts and beliefs become reality.
7. Realizing that since a human being is divine, there is a perfect spiritual idea that is the truth of every individual.

—Excerpted from the February 2024 Science of Mind magazine