In 1952, a young doctoral student asked Albert Einstein, “What original dissertation research is left.” Einstein is said to have replied, “Find out about prayer.”
Find out about prayer. —Albert Einstein
That’s our assignment today.
We’re going to begin our own experiments and find out about prayer & meditation for ourselves.
And just to briefly define terms, for the purposes of this blog post we use the terms meditation and prayer interchangeably, with the understanding that the meditation we’re referring to does not stop with calming our monkey-mind and emptying ourselves, but continues beyond to attempt to connect with the Divine. With God.
THE BENEFITS
Here’s a quick refresher on the documented physical and psychological benefits of prayer and meditation[1]:
1) Significantly reduce blood pressure
2) Drastically reduce chronic pain
3) Dramatically boost our immune response
4) Regulate heart rate, breathing, and brain waves by activating the parasympathetic nervous system
And importantly for us here at Daniel Henry Fitness, the physiological benefits of reducing our stress response carries with it [2]:
5) Reduction in the hunger hormone ghrelin/increased production of leptin (the satiety hormone)
6) Reduction in the stress hormone cortisol and increased melatonin production (potent antioxidant to speed recovery)
7) Improvement in mood, concentration, and productivity
There are even documented correlations between meditation and skin and joint health. For more on that jump over to
Helen Sanders‘ great post on
HealthAmbition.com.
And if you’ve been through the
New Strength course here, we even had a chance to practice a 5-minute, mindfulness meditation that focused on the breath.
You can also download the
Headspace app by the amazing
Andy Puddicombe and give it a shot. If you haven’t tried Headspace yet, you really should check it out. Andy is the real deal with chops in Sports Science and is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist monk. The first few sessions on the Headspace app are free, so really, there’s nothing to lose!
And those are fantastic places to start.
The positive spiral that begins to occur when we engage in the practice of meditation and prayer, even for these brief, 5 minute periods, is significant enough to make part of our daily practice and to add to our health and fitness arsenal.
Now, as you feel more and more comfortable with this practice and curious about next steps, we’re going to look at two easy ways to turn up the juice on your prayer and meditation practice and start exploring this skill in a deeper way.
GOING DEEPER
I don’t like to get all hung up on insider jargon.
Prayer is the desire to pray. —Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk
That’s perfect.
Like many of the tools we work with here at Daniel Henry Fitness, there are reams of theory and research about the topic of prayer and meditation.
But we aren’t going to get bogged down with ‘the life of the mind.’
We need skills and tools that we can start using today.
That’s why I love Merton’s definition so much—it prioritizes intention over ritual or dogma.
And that is the primary takeaway: prayer is the desire to pray.
You can pray in quiet solitude and meditation.
And you can pray in the midst of church ritual.
And you can pray to give thanks at a meal, or on a special occasion.
But you can also pray on your drive to work, on your lunchtime run, as you wash the dishes or sweep the floor or walk down the street to grab your coffee at Starbucks.
You can pray anywhere at anytime.
But for most of us, it’s easier to start by setting aside a time and a place for quiet reflection, so let’s start there.
Let’s start with what we’ll call a:
SITTING PRACTICE
Buddhist tradition calls it zazen, Islam calls it salah, while the Judeo-Christian western tradition commonly refers to it as a daily devotional.
Whatever you choose to call it, you can begin simply by:
1) Find a quiet spot and get intentional about your time: get clear and calm using a meditation technique like the one we’ve been discussing in New Strength or Headspace.
2) You can sit, or kneel or bow or lie face down on the ground. Your position will be led by your attitude, and vice versa, so pay attention to it and experiment.
Then you can proceed in any number of different ways. Here are a couple options:
DEVOTIONAL
1) First, you can contemplate a passage from a devotional. This has the benefit of focusing the mind more deeply than we typically have the opportunity to do in our daily life. Check out “Draw the Circle” and his latest release “Play the Man“[3] or download the Bible App, if this option is appealing to you. [4]
2) In devotional prayer, you typically read a brief idea from scripture, then read an author’s interpretation of that idea, and you end with a time of meditation on that idea and how it might impact your life.
Mark Batterson, in Draw the Circle says:
Prayer is the way we write the future. It’s the difference between letting things happen and making things happen. —Mark Batterson, Draw the Circle
ACTS
A second option is to use the acronym ACTS to focus your thoughts in the following sequence:
1) A-adoration: get into God’s presence. Dwell in his good and perfect love as found in nature or someone or something you love.
2) C-confession: step into the no b.s. zone and get honest about the damage you’ve done to others, to yourself and to the world we live in. Own up to it. Ask God for forgiveness. And commit to changing your behavior. God is faithful always.
3) T-thanksgiving: dwell in gratitude for the good things in your life. The gifts of God.
4) S-supplication: a churchy word that means to ‘ask for stuff, with humility’. Make your desires known to God.
One last tip for your sitting practice.
JOURNAL
Just like your workout journal, a prayer journal is a great way to track your progress. To see what works, what doesn’t and to validate your progress as you go along.
If you need a structure for your journal, you could start with 4 simple categories you jot down every day. 1) Gratitude, 2) Concerns, 3) Dreams, 4) Thoughts. Use these in any way that seems logical to you.
If a Sitting Practice doesn’t work for you, or if you are just looking for something less traditional, you can try a:
MOVING PRACTICE
A moving practice is similar to a sitting practice, with the obvious exception of the posture of your body.
In a Moving Practice, you MOVE.
Historically, sitting practice made perfect sense as prior to the information age, most of us spent our days on our feet working and moving and so the time spent in stillness was radical enough to shock us into an awareness of the Divine. [5]
Today, when more and more of us spend our days sitting at desks, in cars, and in front of screens, moving is the radical act, not stillness.
I’ll use running as an example, but the principles apply to many other solitary forms of movement including walking, swimming, bike riding, gardening, hiking, climbing and many more.
JUST ONE EXAMPLE: THE RUN
1) As in a Sitting practice, begin by being intentional: get clear and calm.
2) Then you can use either the devotional technique above or the ACTS acronym to frame your run. Spend just a few minutes as you stretch or just after you’re dressed to run through that mental exercise.
3) And then, you run.
4) As you’re running, use the journey and the rhythm of movement to take you deeper into the present moment, into the now.
5) After you run, in your exercise journal, add the categories as you would in a sitting practice: Gratitude, Concerns, Dreams, Thoughts.
So there you have it.
Sitting practice and moving practice.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There are literally as many forms of prayer and meditation as there are people praying.
So, give one of these a try and then in the comments below, let us know how it goes.
Let’s do this!
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NOTES:
