I’ll be honest, the fact that I went on to play Division 3 tennis and become a minister had more to do with my serve than his advice. Step Three | Practice the breath prayer by breathing in for the first part of the prayer, and then breathing out for the second part while slowing down your breathing, repeating the prayer for 2-5 minutes. Imagine when you were young, sitting close to a good friend and whispering something special to them.

One of the earliest known breath prayers, known as the Jesus Prayer, was “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” which is based on Luke 18:13. I don’t think at the time, especially as a teenager or young adult, I really didn’t know that’s what I was doing with my anxiety. The spiritual practice of Breath Prayer provides a person of faith with a conscious avenue to partner with God in healing physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds. He is with you no matter what, even how hard that circumstance is because I know we face hard things. EP 109: What Christmas Teaches us about Managing Anxiety and OCD with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP (12/13)109.During that time I remembered a breath prayer I’d written previously based on some words from the apostle Paul.

Breath prayer is rooted first in scripture, but it’s been a prayer practice of Christians for centuries—dating all the way back to our friends, the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century.Give it a try: print these pages, grab some crayons or colored pencils, hit play on the “b-r-e-a-t-h-e” playlist below, and breathe deep as you color in the pages. 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. Dad had to quit work because of his heart and mom couldn't pay the bills on her own and I wasn't able to work.

Even though I know God is there for me and that He has saved me and protected me from so many things, I'm still afraid. I’m not entirely sure when this episode airs, but I know people will listen at different times, too.If you feel yourself beginning to be anxious through your day, take time to stop, breathe, and pray. And so one way we can calm the amygdala down and calm the sympathetic nervous system down is through deep breathing because our breath connects to the vagus nerve, which connects to all of our organs, our major organs in our body. It’s believed that breath prayers have been around since the early centuries of the church, being used by Egyptian desert monks. The Holy Spirit’s in us, working in us; the Bible says he’s transforming us through the renewing of our minds.