Breath Prayer

Breath Prayer

This month’s update describes a spiritual discipline called a “Breath Prayer” that can be very transformative if practiced seriously.

I discovered my first breath prayer in the late 90s.  I prayed my specific breath prayer regularly for over a year, probably close to two years.  God did some incredible work in me through that simple prayer.  Read on to discover what my breath prayer was and what it did in me.

The following is summarized from Richard Foster’s book, “Prayer – Finding the Heart’s True Home” (page 122-124).  It is the best book on prayer that I have ever read.  Check it out.  This spiritual exercise is just a taste of its goodness.

Here are some things you may want to know to help you develop your own Breath Prayer…

Characteristics of a Breath Prayer:

a) Brevity – a Breath Prayer is seldom more than seven or eight syllables long (so it may be said in one breath).
b) God is addressed in a close, personal way (using a name that is meaningful to you).
c) It expresses dependence, docility, and trust.
d) It asks for something to be done in us or to us, reflecting God’s will and God’s ways.
(A Breath Prayer is a self-focused but not a self-centered prayer).
e) A Breath Prayer is discovered more than created.  We are asking God to show us his will, his ways, his truth for our present need.

Examples of Breath Prayers:

The most famous breath prayer is the Jesus Prayer:
“Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Other examples:
Teach me gentleness, Abba.
Jesus, let me receive your grace.
Courageous Savior, remove my fear.
Reveal my sin, Holy Spirit.
Immanuel, help me feel loved.
Help me understand your truth, Father.
Help me live your truth, Lord.

Discover Your Own Individual Breath Prayer:

1) Find some uninterrupted time and a quiet place and sit in silence, being held in God’s loving presence.
2) After a few moments, allow God to call you by name.
3) Next, allow this question to surface, “What do you want?”
4) Answer this question simply and directly.  Maybe a single word will come to mind:  “peace”, “faith”, “strength”.  Perhaps it will be a phrase: “to understand your truth”, “to feel your love”.
5) Next, connect this phrase with the most comfortable, meaningful way you have to speak to God: “Blessed Savior”, “Abba”, “Immanuel”, etc.
6) Finally, you will want to write out your breath prayer, staying within what is comfortable to say in one breath.

What To Do Next:

a) Over the next few days allow God to adjust your breath prayer ever so slightly.  You may have written down, “Help me understand your truth, Lord”.  But after a day or two of prayer, you realize that what you really need is not so much to understand God’s truth as to live God’s truth.  Hence you begin praying, “Help me live your truth, Lord”.
b) Begin praying your breath prayer as often as possible.
c) Allow God to plant it deep into the depths of your spirit.  Do not rush or change prayers too quickly.

My Original Breath Prayer:

After doing the above exercise in the late 90s, my initial breath prayer started out to be, “Please let your love flow through me to others, Lord.”  As I said it, it felt cumbersome.  It was too wordy to flow effortlessly.

Sometime after that, I shared my breath prayer with my mentor at that time, Sheryl Fleisher.  She was delighted and told me that hers was very similar.  Her prayer at that time was, “Love through me,    (a name for God)   .”  (I don’t recall the name she used for God in her prayer – Abba, perhaps.)

Her wording seemed to flow more easily than my preliminary attempt, and it held the same meaning for me.  I trusted that God was adjusting my prayer through Sheryl.  I began to pray, “Love through me, Lord” regularly…especially in moments when I was faced with a person or problem where I needed to love well…which happened a lot, especially in Christian leadership roles.

Over the next year or two of praying that prayer many times a day, God took me on a journey.

It started with Him placing a sense on my heart that if I was to truly allow His love to flow through me to others, then I first needed to more fully receive His love.  I was blocking the inflow.

Together, we spent at least six months looking at ways in which I wasn’t receiving His love.

At times I felt His loving nudges to let down certain defenses.  Sometimes it was painful as He removed fragments of my blocks and barriers, at least enough to let love flow in a little better.

Fully removing the blocks and barriers that keep me from receiving love will be a life-long journey for me.

After getting through some of that process, the next thing God placed on my heart as I prayed that simple prayer was that if I was to truly allow His love to flow through me to others, then I needed to love myself better.  I was stopping the flow of love by not loving myself very well.

I was in many ways following the command to love my neighbor as myself.  The problem was that I wasn’t loving myself very well, so I wasn’t loving my neighbor well either.  When I withheld love from myself, I withheld love from others.  When I was critical of myself, I was more critical of others.

I discovered that when I didn’t let God’s love in and didn’t love myself well, I was left with a gaping hole in my soul and everything became about me getting my love needs met by others.  This led me to “love” others in order to receive love back.  Then I would get frustrated when love didn’t come back to me the way I wanted it to.  What I thought of as giving was really about getting.

I also learned that love doesn’t flow when I focus on myself.  Contrary to my thinking at the time, the only way for me to not focus on myself was to love myself well.  That seemed counter intuitive, but I realized that when I wasn’t loving myself well, I spent a lot of time thinking about myself – beating myself up, evaluating myself in every interaction, feeling badly about myself, trying to figure out how I could feel better about myself and how I could receive the love I desired from others.

On the flip-side, when I felt secure in God’s love and in the love I extended toward myself, I was able to forget about myself.  I didn’t need to be constantly worrying about how I was going to get love, I was filled up, and my focus could authentically turn to loving others.  For a long stretch of time, we worked on (and are still working on) me loving myself better, not just receiving God’s love but letting God’s love soak in and reside within me.

After we continued to work on that for quite some time, I sensed God placing on my heart that if I was to truly allow His love to flow through me to others, I needed to remove the blocks and barriers that kept me from loving others, from letting the love flow out of me.  I saw the fears that held me back and together we began to work on them.

My dream is that someday I will be able to love others with carefree abandon, but I still have so many fears and barriers that prevent me from loving that freely.

I obviously still haven’t arrived.  This Breath Prayer was just a beginning.  I still have layers and layers of blocks and barriers that keep love from flowing freely through me to others, but I know internally that something shifted back then and is still shifting.  I love more naturally, more freely.  I take more risks.  I judge less.  I don’t take things as personally.  I trust and believe more fully that all love comes from God (1 John 4:7).  He is the only source of love, for God is love.  I don’t have to look to people, or to a specific person, as the source of love for me.  People don’t create or generate love; they are not the source of love.  It is simply God’s love flowing through them to me, whether they are a believer or a non-believer (though I believe some people can allow a more powerful flow due their connection with the source)(for God flows His love to everyone, graciously without discrimination, even if they don’t flow it back to Him), or it may be God’s love flowing to me through a movie, a piece of art, a song, an animal, a visualization in my head, a quiet time reflecting on his word, or a beautiful scene in nature.

God will flow his love to me in whatever ways He knows will be best at that moment, even when it doesn’t look like what I was expecting or what I was internally demanding.

To this day, I will pray my prayer when I sense the need, and I use a Blocks & Barriers Illustration with the people I meet with to help identify some of the ways they are not receiving God’s love, not loving themselves, and not loving others.  We name the blocks and begin the process of surrendering them to the Lord.  It is a transformational process.

Thank You:

Thank you for your continued prayers and financial support.

I hope you enjoy discovering your own Breath Prayer.  I hope it changes your life.

In His Love,
Randy

Note:  The artwork in this month’s update, other than the “Prayer” book cover, are creations of my friend Andy Padjen.  He’s doing some interesting art these days.  And I’m pretty sure his work could be hanging on your wall…if the price is right!