Prayer that affirms

Before any of the people in the first month wrote a word, there was a quiet American movement teaching that the mind is a creative cause and that what you hold in it tends to come about.

It began with Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker in Maine in the mid-1800s who healed people by changing what they believed about their illness, and it passed through a remarkable teacher named Emma Curtis Hopkins, who trained most of the movement's founders in the 1880s. In 1927 Ernest Holmes gathered it into a book called The Science of Mind, and the churches and centers that grew from it are still open in most American cities. It's called New Thought, and nearly every self-help book you've ever read is downstream of it, whether the author knows it or not.

Its practice is affirmative prayer, or what Holmes called spiritual mind treatment. Not asking for something. Affirming that it is already so, and then releasing it. The form is simple: recognize that there is one life and you are part of it; declare the thing you need as already present; give thanks; let it go.

I hold this key the way I hold Peale and Nightingale, who both drew from it. The claim that thought alone shapes the world is bigger than the evidence. The practice of affirming, giving thanks and releasing is something else. It quiets a frightened mind, points attention somewhere useful, and ends with your hands open instead of clenched. Those are good things to do with a morning, whatever you believe about the mechanism.

It's in the month of Breathing because the release at the end is an exhale. Holmes understood that you cannot hold a prayer in a clenched body. You say it, you mean it, and you let it out.