Healing Our Fear-Based Thoughts

Celebrating a book's ten years of peace.

Twelve years ago, I had a very bad day. Not that I haven’t had bad days since then, but this particular January day was significant. It was the day a prayer floated into my mind. That prayer turned into a book, which turned into a bestseller, which has alleviated inner fears for countless people around the world ever since, and I’m so very, very grateful.

The book, aptly called The Only Little Prayer You Need, took shape in forty days. It received a foreword from the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama. I cried when I found out about that, as you would expect. And then it received an endorsement from the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. More tears.

I’m telling you this because The Only Little Prayer You Need turned ten years old recently, and I think it’s important to celebrate milestones—especially this one, because we need the prayer as much as ever. Our fears may be about different situations or people, or they may seem more dire. But the internal threats to our happiness—the fears that we’re not enough and don’t matter—are still as universal as can be.

The book has been translated into four languages and has sold all over the world, including western Australia, where it fell off a library shelf into the hands of a woman who had read every self-help book, looking for a way out of her cynicism. When she read the The Only Little Prayer You Need, she told me, her hope was restored.

Out of all the countless stories I’ve heard from readers who have used the prayer, one of my favorites was from a military veteran. He’d lost his veteran’s benefits, couldn’t get approval for a credit card, and was estranged from his daughter and grandchild. He started using the prayer, he told me, and within days, he got a call from the Veterans Administration restoring his benefits, he received a credit card application and was approved, and his daughter called him out of the blue and sent him photos of her baby,

The clincher? “I don’t know how I got your book,” he said. “I didn’t order it. It just showed up on my Kindle.”

Mysterious ways.

When I think back to writing the book, I remember that it poured out of me from a higher voice, clear and insistent. I’m grateful to be the one who received it. “This is big, this is big, this is really, really big!” I wrote when I started to realize the prayer’s power and the forces behind it.

Like I said, I’ve had bad days since the day the prayer showed up, but using the prayer means I don’t get stuck in fear like I once did. I have a path back to peace.

I’ve learned that our fear feeds other people’s fear, but our peace feeds other people’s peace.

I’ve learned that we constantly forget to call on Spirit for help. But when we do remember, the help is always there.

As His Holiness the Dalai Lama said in his foreword, “We need to encourage an understanding that inner peace comes from relying on human values like love, compassion, tolerance, and honesty, and that peace in the world relies on individuals finding inner peace.”

This is big, this is big, this is really, really big.

From the beginning, I’ve known my job is to put the prayer into the world and get out of the way. Now, because a tidal wave of fear is cresting again, the book’s anniversary seems like a good reason to offer its comfort to a whole new audience. So if you need it, please check it out. And if you’d like some immediate peace, here’s a short excerpt from the book, in celebration of its tenth birthday.

I had an ah-ha moment years ago when I was making my bed one day, thinking about something good that had happened in my life. Immediately after that thought, I felt a wave of fear. When would the other shoe drop? At that moment (I’m not making this up), my inner voice said very clearly, “There is no other shoe.” And at the same time, I heard a clunk in my bedroom closet. When I looked, I saw a shoe on the floor. It apparently had defied physics and thrown itself out of the shoe organizer, just to make the point.

Okay, I get it, I said to myself and whoever was listening. From that point on, my fear of the other shoe dropping disappeared.

The truth is, the only “shoe” out there is the one you create with your own expectations. If you think something negative will befall you, you’ll look for it, anticipate it, magnetize it, amplify it, and put it squarely in your line of sight. It’s not a lightning bolt from a punishing God, and you’re not the victim of a random universe; it’s simply a belief, a piece of fruit from the Fear Tree landing with a thump on your head.

So consider that maybe you’re not being punished, that there’s no cosmic score sheet balancing your wins with losses. The freedom to fully enjoy all life is available to all of us. But, like everything, first we have to be free of the beliefs that stand in our way.

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