Body Prayer: Practice Together

Body prayer is physical activity that promotes spiritual communion with God, sometimes accompanied by verbal communication, but often simply experienced as spending time doing something together with him.

If you practice this exercise as a small group or with a friend, take turns suggesting a topic to intersect with your activity. You may also take turns selecting the music or Scripture to which you all listen. When the designated time has elapsed, give yourselves a short period to consider the individual patterns your prayer has followed before sharing these with the group. Some spiritual direction groups choose different media for this exercise; depending on the availability, you might rather sculpt clay, paint, glue pieces of colored paper or found objects into a collage, or walk a labyrinth.

Alternatively, your group may wish to contribute to one canvass, one sculpture, one drawing, or one collage during the designated time frame. You may choose to walk the labyrinth in twos instead of one-by-one. When your activity is complete, you will be able to share, not only individual themes that arose as part of your prayer, but how those themes shifted with the physical interaction of other group members. Furthermore, you may be able to discern what the group’s melded prayer seemed to be and to listen for how God would speak to you as a unified community.

Gregory of Nyssa’s Physical Faith

Practice

Sample the Prayer

Consider

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One response to “Body Prayer: Practice Together

  1. Dawn
    Marvelous interesting way you have laid out and described
    the many ways to pray. Thank you for sharing your insights and
    providing further study.

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