On Monday we began moving through the prayer bead practice I describe in my book, Simply Pray: a modern spiritual practice to deepen your life. We looked at how to make the beads, and went through the large Centering bead, the four Entering beads, and had landed on the first medium-size bead, the Naming bead.Following the Naming bead there are five small beads. These are for the "rote" style of praying I'd said was one of the two fundamental styles of prayer. ("Improvisational," or, "spontaneous" is the other.) With each of these five small beads you are invited to practice what is often called a "breath prayer."
Although often cited as a Christian practice, the concept of praying along with one's breath can be found in numerous other traditions. The Vietnamese poet, peace activist, and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written extensively about the importance in the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition of reciting gathas -- short verses repeated on the rising and falling of the breath. His most often cited gatha is, "Breathing in, I relax my body and my mind. / Breathing out, I smile." He teaches, though, that he was trained with a gatha for virtually every action of the day:
- On waking -- "Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four new hours are before me. / I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at beings with eyes of compassion:
- Washing your hands -- "Water flows over these hands. / May I use them skillfully to preserve our precious planet."
- Using the toilet -- "Defiled or immaculate, increasing or decreasing -- these concepts exist only in our mind. / The reality of interbeing is unsurpassed."
- Driving the car -- "Before starting the car I know where I am going. / The car and I are one. If the car goes fast, I go fast."
- Throwing out the garbage -- "In the garbage I see a rose. In the rose I see compost. / Everything is in transformation. Impermanence is life."
With this gatha practice, as with any of the "rote" practices, it doesn't matter how you're feeling on any particularly day, you still recite the gatha when you wake up, when you wash your hands, and when you through out the garbage.
The breath prayer you use with the five small beads in this prayer bead practice is a little different. You will still recite the same prayer on you in and out breaths as you finger each bead, yet you will have written the prayer yourself. You can, of course, use a traditional two-line phrase, one that is from the religious tradition you were raised in or associate with now. You don't have to, though. What matters most is that whatever you repeat on your in-breath and your out-breath is meaningful to you.
Or, rather, that it was meaningful to you when you first established it. The practice with these small beads is intended to be a rote practice, so while you are encouraged to "improvise" in creating your own breath prayer, you are dis-couraged from changing it too readily. Use that same in-breath/out-breath prayer every day you do this bead practice, no matter how you're feeling about it on any particular day. This provides an opportunity for you to experience what those who really engage with the Catholic rosary, for instance, experience -- through repeating the same words over and over, those same words can come to express different meanings.
I would suggest staying with one breath prayer for these small beads for at least several months -- I'd suggest no less than six months -- before coming up with another. Of course, if you keep finding yourself consistently saying other words instead -- especially if it's a small tweak -- I'd encourage you to listen to that leading. Make that change, and then stick with those new words.
On Friday we'll pick this up at the second medium-size bead.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
