Photo by ehpien; creative commons license.
I’ve always had a hard time delegating, and that probably explains problems I’ve had with both Christian prayer, Wiccan magick, and the Law of Attraction.
Among those who practice the Law of Attraction and those who practice Magick, whether they are WIccan or some other variety of paganism, I’ve been ridiculed for not being able to “just leave things alone.” Among LOAers and Pagans, a big part of the mental-to-fruition process is intent and belief. You believe and then you simply leave it alone to manifest. You don’t have to do 500 different rituals for the same thing if you believe that Gods will deliver it. You don’t have to keep fretting about the lack or something or when it will manifest for it to come to you. And as a child, I often wondered if maybe God got tired of people pestering Him for the same thing every night if they believed God would supply their heartfelt wishes.
Just leaving things alone to happen, regardless of how much I believe they’ll come, has always been hard for me, and I think it’s probably because of my Southern Baptist upbringing
that said you needed to show God how much you wanted something by praying loud and long and hard, and preferably on your belly in the dirt and begging. That’s a hard mindset to get rid of!
Just leaving things alone to happen, regardless of how much I believe they’ll come, has always been hard for me, and I think it’s probably because of my Southern Baptist upbringing that said you needed to show God how much you wanted something by praying loud and long and hard, and preferably on your belly in the dirt and begging. That’s a hard mindset to get rid of!
I never really thought that much about delegation in relationship to prayer, magick, or even the Law of Attraction until recently. I think it hit home first after reading extensively on the Law of Attraction, which is very much like prayer and is not mutually exclusive of prayer if you understand its tenets. The idea of committing to certain actions that we can take to make our lives better but turning over those things we cannot control to the Universe (or God or a Higher Power) to let those things come to use in the right divine way and timing was very appealing to me.
I also had the not-so-fun experience of dealing with an angry Spiritualist (her term for a magickal system that did not include the same system of belief and ethics I was familiar with among my Wiccan friends). She’d called upon the spirit world to keep me from the object of her affections. Very unpleasant. What I dealt with was not her but a delegation of her wishes so that something dark took the action for her. I really don’t like to spend my time on banishings and exorcisms, you know?
Definitely more upbeat and the first time I’d heard the term delegating used was advice from a Wiccan High Priestess who added runes to her prayers. She told me that she chose a rune that represented what she was praying about, incorporated that rune into her prayer as a symbol, and then just let it go. She didn’t have to worry any more. She simply delegated the job to the rune and let it do the work for her. THAT was an epiphany for me.
In my Christian upbringing, we might have asked our guardian angels for help–and felt a little guilty for being so much trouble–but we would never have “delegated” a job to God. Maybe it’s semantics, but even if we believed that God would take care of it if we prayed for it, we would never have considered that to be “delegation.” Maybe that has something to do with our vision of who’s in control or who’s responsible for certain actions? If we’re responsible for how we conduct our lives and the actions we take, then how can we let go enough of those responsibilities to either instruct someone else to take care of it for us or to allow someone else to handle the task of making it happen?
For me, the idea of delegating the carrying out of my heartfelt desires is new, but it is working very well. I’m not as obsessive over whether my prayer was heard and I’m not bothering Deity with repeated requests for the same thing, in effect holding it at bay because I don’t really believe it can come to me. It’s just a small twist on looking at things in a different way, but a useful utensil in my box of spiritual tools.
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