Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul

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This is part of the Prayer series where I describe various ways of praying in the hopes that you can find something (or multiple somethings) to help diversify and/or enhance your prayer life.

The one that she likes the best is the 4, 7, 8 where you inhale for 4, hold for 7 and then exhale for 8, where the exhale is longer than inhale. One of my friends was talking to me about this today, who’s also a counselor, and she said, “You know, so many people deal with high-functioning anxiety. As I paid attention to my breathing and learned new ways to breathe, I discovered how my breath could support my movements, allowing more flexibility, strength, and endurance. I love how you shared how that one verse is one that you’ve clung to so much and is one you’ve memorized.But I think they are missing the point of the book, I believe it is a teaching tool to model how breathing for calming anxiety, focusing, and bringing calm and peace to your inner self, fits naturally as a form of prayer.

Although Christian breath prayers have been around for centuries, they aren’t super common in a lot of faith communities. Breath prayers can be great for children, as well, because they combine a practice of stillness and mindfulness with simple prayers that can be easy to learn.To access your Streaming Video after purchasing, you can view instantly on your browser on StudyGateway. Sometimes, the sympathetic nervous system will get riled up over something that isn’t a threat to us, and we’ll get anxious and worried. Breath Prayer provides a person of faith a conscious way to partner with God in healing physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds.

We’re trying to fill it with his truth and words that he gave us from his word, truths that we can cling to and count on. We’re halfway through our 40 Days to Pray contemplative prayer series and nearly halfway through the season of Lent. On those days when even getting out of bed seems hard and you feel like your energy is totally tapped out, take a breath and say, “Spirit, renew and refresh me to follow your will. Over the last eighteen months I’ve asked myself if I really believe what I wrote in The Making of Us: whether closed doors can really allow new adventures to begin, whether losing an identity can really help us discover who we really are, and whether adversity can really release our best gifts into the world. But I offer one of the many ways to pray that I’ve found very useful and effective in my own life: “breath prayers.They can be good for ground yourself if you’re anxious or overwhelmed, or they can be good for practices of stillness. And then all of a sudden, it brings up like, okay, well, these are some things that are on my mind that I’m thinking about that I want to talk to God about more in-depth or more fully. As we’re slowing our breathing and calming our physical body in the symptoms, at the same time, we’re going to turn our minds toward the truth of God’s word.

Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, so as we invite Him into our struggles through prayers like these breath prayers, we are literally inviting in Peace Himself. I didn’t know what would happen, but I’m focusing on the Lord is my shepherd, and I’m a sheep, and he loves me, and he’s here.

I may have written a whole book about them, but it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never even heard of breath prayers, and just happened to stumble across them in my hunt for strategies to help with anxiety. It’s shifted from being an obstacle that I had to overcome to an opportunity to go deeper in my faith and turn to Christ. Breathe out, and with your breath, let out a “simple, God-given desire” (Sharon Lee Song, “Take Time for Breath Prayer”). You will not only go into the problem better equipped, but 'the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus'. I have walked through several setbacks of struggling with my mental health and multiple hospitalizations and taking it one day at a time is even too much.