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

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It’s beautiful what you would share with your younger self and we can’t go back in time and do that but I’m going to hope that many girls and women will take your advice and receive it.

We’re halfway through our 40 Days to Pray contemplative prayer series and nearly halfway through the season of Lent. I love how you shared how that one verse is one that you’ve clung to so much and is one you’ve memorized. One of the first things that her therapist told us was the importance of the breath and how slowing her breathing could help calm her anxiety.I know if you breathe these prayers, in and out, throughout your day, God is going to seem more real to you than ever and you will grow even closer to the one who put the very breath in your lungs. Breath as Prayer With a beautiful foil-accented cover, Breath as Prayer is an ideal gift God created our bodies, minds, and spirits to be intimately connected with one another. 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.

Jennifer: There are a few breath prayers in my book in four lines where you inhale and exhale twice to get through it. When we slow our breathing, it sends signals through those vagus nerves to our brain saying, “You’re safe and it’s okay. 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 just sense there’s an emergency far beyond the proportions of a blaring horn, a painful comment, and ruined work. In addition, breath prayer so often makes me feel loved by God, and sometimes I think love is the main thing God is trying to communicate to us.Still, it’s been a simple way for me to come to the Lord in a very raw posture, to cry out to Him, and to notice the sweetness of His presence with me. The simple practice of Breath Prayer can bring calm and spiritual awareness of God’s healing power into the emotionally fraught world of prior distress and trauma. We talk with Jennifer Tucker, author of “Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, And Renew Your Soul”. Carrie: And I love that you and other people we’ve talked to are trying to de-stigmatize going to therapy and taking medication as a Christian like it’s okay. In essence, naming the science-spirituality intersection offers both permission and inspiration for practicing Breath Prayer in distressing situations.

It’s believed that breath prayers have been around since the early centuries of the church, being used by Egyptian desert monks. 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. Rangan Chatterjee, The Four Pillar Plan: How to Relax, Eat, Move, Sleep Your Way to a Longer, Healthier Life (United Kingdom: Penguin Random House, 2018): 25. Jennifer Tucker is an illustrator, lettering artist, and graphic designer whose work has been featured in multiple publications and books, including The Message Canvas Bible, New Mercies I See, and the ECPA bestselling coloring book Whatever Is Lovely.

That could be a physical danger, like a literal bear in your path or something as simple as being in a crowded room of people.