How does prayer work?

It is natural to imagine prayer as asking—petitioning a distant God to reach down and change something He has withheld. But consider how Jesus prayed. At the tomb of Lazarus he did not beg; he gave thanks, saying, "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me" (John 11:41, KJV), speaking from an understanding already settled. Prayer, then, is not persuasion. God is Love, wholly Good, and does not need to be moved from indifference to mercy—for He is already, always, entirely good. Prayer is rather the work of aligning your own consciousness with what God already knows to be true: that you are His image, whole and untouched. It is a receiving more than an asking. This is why Jesus taught, "when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret" (Matthew 6:6, KJV)—the closet being that inner stillness beneath the noise of anxious thought. There, in wordless attention, the false claims of fear and sickness lose their footing, because truth clearly seen displaces error as light displaces shadow. "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21, KJV)—not to be summoned from afar, but uncovered. And Jesus made a striking promise: "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24, KJV)—receive, present tense, before the seeing. This is not magical thinking but spiritual understanding: the good you seek is already the fact of your being in God. So prayer does not change God, and it does not really change reality—it changes you, awakening you to the harmony that was always present. The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying the Kingdom "is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it" (Gospel of Thomas 51.19-20). Prayer is how we come to see. Do not measure it by the words spoken but by the stillness entered and the trust deepened. If you wish, we can sit together with how this differs from prayer as you were taught it.