Breath Prayer: An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred

BREATH PRAYER

BREATH PRAYER

An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred

CHRISTINE VALTERS PAINTNER

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

BREATH PRAYER

An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred

Copyright © 2021 Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Cover design: Cindy Laun

Cover image: Shutterstock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7067-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7068-9

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

A new moon teaches gradualness

and deliberation, and how one gives birth

to oneself slowly. Patience with small details

makes perfect a large work, like the universe.

What nine months of attention does for an embryo

forty early mornings alone will do

for your gradually growing wholeness.

—Rumi¹

CONTENTS

Introduction

Entering the Practice

Quieting Myself to Hear My Heart

Praying with the Divine Name

Awakening

The Grace of Daily Tasks

Showering

Morning Coffee or Tea

Getting Dressed

Beholding Yourself in a Mirror

Eating and Savoring

Washing Dishes

Doing the Laundry

Washing Your Hands

Reading the News

Working at the Computer

Checking Your Phone

Sending an Email or Text

Cleaning the Bathroom

Holding a Dog or Cat in Your Lap

Balancing Your Finances

Running Late

Sanctifying Time

Bedtime

Waking in the Middle of the Night

Start of the Workday

Midway through the Workday (Or Midway through a Work Project)

Lighting a Candle

A Walk in Nature

Gardening

Sabbath Day

Gazing with Love on Another

Sacred Reading

Blessing the Seasons of Our Lives

Extinction Anxiety

Discernment

While Waiting

Crossing a Doorway or Threshold

For a Rainy Day

For a Sunny Day

Gazing at the Stars

Encountering Beauty

In the Midst of Loss

Learning Something New

Composing Your Own Breath Prayers

Notes

INTRODUCTION

The Divine has sent us a Comforter

in the form of our own breath.

Press out her healing nectar.

What flows so naturally can only be good.

Nothing is gained by listening to the voices of fear

that others have placed in your mind.

Listen instead to the music of So’ham

pouring through your flesh.

Inhalation is wine. Exhalation is surrender.

Beauty does not stream down from above.

It murmurs from the well of Silence in your heart.

Silence is the Mother. You are her song.

—Alfred K. LaMotte¹

Many religious traditions have some version of breath prayer. In my own tradition, the roots of breath prayer are built from St. Paul’s invitation to people who hold faith to pray without ceasing.² In early Christianity, many monks and nuns would endeavor to do exactly this in practice by bringing prayer to each breath. They would combine a phrase of prayer or blessing with the inhale and exhale so that every breath was a chance for them to be present to the sacred. In earliest tradition, the words they used were

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God (inhale)

have mercy on me a sinner (exhale)

—known as the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart. This prayer and prayer form originated in the sixth century, but the text is taken from words spoken to Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, in the first century.

This kind of mantra practice has also long been present in the Hindu tradition, where a sacred phrase is repeated as an anchor to keep one’s awareness focused on the divine at work in the world. In the Buddhist tradition, these take the form of gathas, short verses recited with the breath, as part of mindfulness practice and meditation, and recited during ordinary activities, like walking, working, or cleaning and so on.

In Sufism it is the dhikr prayer that is repeated to help in remembering the sacred presence. Jews pray the Shema, Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One, recited as part of morning and evening prayers and also before sleeping. Some consider it to be the most important prayer they offer. Some Christians pray with the rosary, which is a prescribed set of prayers to repeat again and again while using beads to mark your way. While some who pray the Shema or the rosary don’t always equate the prayer form with breath, for those who observe the way the prayer is embodied, repeated, they witness the breath and cadence so close in form that for many it is considered a form of breath prayer.

Give Me a Word

In ancient times, wise men and women fled out into the desert of what is now the Middle East and Northern Africa. There, they found a place so stripped barren and wild they could be fully present to the divine and to their own inner struggles. To them, the desert became a place to enter into silence, the refiner’s fire, and be stripped down to one’s holy essence. The desert was a threshold place where, they believed, you emerged different from when you entered.

As people heard about the wisdom of those entering the desert, many followed these ammas and abbas, seeking them out, asking them for wisdom and guidance for a meaningful life. One tradition of seekers was to ask the wise ones of the desert for a word—a word or phrase on which to ponder for many days, weeks, months, or sometimes a whole lifetime. This practice came to be connected to lectio divina, where we approach a sacred text with the same request: Give me a word. We ask to meet something in the text that will nourish us, challenge us, a word or phrase or line we can wrestle with and grow into. The word that is given has the potential to transform us.

Whatever your spiritual or religious background might be, this book is meant to provide an invitation for us to practice this seeking of a life-giving word to help direct our attention in various moments of the day toward what is most sacred.

To reflect both the desert tradition and also the different religious traditions, I have chosen to begin with the many ordinary practices such as showering, cooking, and driving, and written a short breath prayer—or what’s sometimes called a poem prayer—to accompany it. These are prayers you might learn by heart and recite gently to yourself as you perform the task, as a way of bringing a meditative awareness to all you do. If you are familiar with the practice of centering prayer, it is similar to repeating the word or phrase as an anchor for your attention, but in all the activities of daily life. In also seeking to bring that aspect of a word that might change us, I’ve also sought to focus on words or phrases that, combined with breath, might transform us as we engage and breathe them, over days and weeks and even a lifetime.

Breath by Breath

In the Philokalia, the great collection of Eastern Christian wisdom books, which also teaches about the early practice of the Jesus Prayer, St. Hesychios the Priest writes, Let the name of Jesus adhere to your breath, and then you will know the blessings of stillness.³ I love this image of letting the prayer adhere to your breath. Rather than a forcing together of word and breath, imagine the words naturally being drawn to the breath like a magnet to metal or like bees to flowers. In this bringing together, the blessings of stillness wash over you.

Our breath is such an intimate companion. One that sustains us moment by moment even as we are entirely unaware of that sustaining gift. Yet when we bring our intention to it, it also becomes an ally for slowing down, for touching stillness.

These prayers are meant to be gateways—both to bring you more present to the sacredness of whatever activity you are involved in, and also, perhaps, to your own practice of writing short phrases for prayer to learn by heart. I’ll offer guidance for your own creation of that paired praying practice at the end of the book.

The intention and focus throughout the book is not on saying each prayer correctly or perfectly each time, but on letting the words open your heart to a deeper intention in daily living. We work on the words, but the words work on us as well. Eventually, you might discover that you are not so much reciting the prayer as the prayer is reciting you, guiding you, opening your heart to a devotion to the world.

Learning by Heart

When we memorize something, like a prayer or line from a poem, we often describe it as learning by heart. Many of the early Christian monastics would have learned large quantities of Scripture—especially the psalms, which made up the cycle of their daily prayer—by heart, largely out of necessity because of the scarcity and expense of books. The practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading, was meant to be a deep listening of the heart to words and phrases of the psalms or sacred texts. That deep listening practice was likened to a cow chewing her cud, the slow process of breaking something down, digesting it, and allowing it to nourish us.

In the Hebrew Scriptures we find many passages that describe the new covenant as not written on stone, but in the hearts of the people. This was meant to indicate a shift from following an external list of rules to a true internal experience of conversion. The motivation to do good things—to live from the wisdom of the heart and to bring that active good