Breath prayer: how to pray in a single breath

A practice for the moments when words won’t come.

There are days when prayer is a conversation. There are other days when you sit down to pray and find you have nothing to say — not from unbelief, but from tiredness, or grief, or the particular numbness of having too much to carry. Breath prayer is for those days. It asks for one sentence, short enough to fit inside one breath, and it lets you pray that sentence until it starts praying you.

What a breath prayer is

A breath prayer is a phrase of roughly six to eight syllables, split in two. You pray the first half as you breathe in and the second half as you breathe out:

Lord Jesus Christ,
have mercy on me.

That one is the oldest. It comes from the Jesus Prayer, a practice of the Eastern church going back at least to the fifth century, which itself grew out of a prayer Jesus praised in Luke 18 — the tax collector who could manage only God be merciful to me a sinner, and who went home justified.

The brevity is the point. A short prayer can be carried. You can pray it in a hospital corridor, in traffic, in the four minutes before a meeting you are dreading. It survives conditions that a longer prayer does not.

How to pray one

Sit, and let your breathing slow. Do not force it deep. Just stop hurrying it. Three or four unhurried breaths is enough to arrive.
Take a phrase. Use one below, or make your own from the two questions further down.
Join it to your breath. First half in, second half out. Let the words be quiet — thought, or barely whispered.
Stay for two minutes. Set a timer so you are not managing the clock in your head.
When you wander, return. Without commentary. Notice, and come back to the phrase. That return is the prayer.

Prayers to borrow

Take whichever one meets you today. There is no merit in variety.

Lord Jesus Christ / have mercy on me.
Be still / and know. (Psalm 46)
The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want. (Psalm 23)
Abide in me / and I in you. (John 15)
Speak, Lord / your servant hears. (1 Samuel 3)
Not my will / but yours.
Into your hands / I commit my spirit.
You are here / and I am yours.

Making your own

The traditional way to build a breath prayer uses two questions.

First: what do you call God? Not what you think you ought to call him — what actually rises. Father. Lord Jesus. Shepherd. Holy One. That name becomes the inhale.

Second: what do you most need? Again, the honest answer, not the respectable one. Mercy. Rest. Courage. Help. To be still. To not be afraid. That becomes the exhale.

Put them together and pray the result for a week before you decide whether it is right. A breath prayer reveals itself slowly. Very often the need you named on Monday turns out not to be the real one, and by Friday the phrase has quietly changed itself.

Where it fits

Breath prayer works well at the threshold of other things: before you open the Scriptures, before a hard conversation, at the end of a working day when you need to put it down. It pairs naturally with lectio divina — a few minutes of breath prayer first will slow you enough to read slowly — and it is one of the simplest practices to place inside a rule of life.

It is also, quietly, a way of doing what John 15 asks: remaining. A branch does not strain to stay attached to the vine. It simply stays. Two minutes of breath prayer is not an achievement. It is a way of staying.

Questions

What is a breath prayer?

A breath prayer is a very short prayer — usually six to eight syllables — prayed in time with your breathing. Half of it is prayed as you breathe in, half as you breathe out. It is old: a descendant of the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern church, itself drawn from the tax collector’s prayer in Luke 18.

How long should I pray it?

Begin with two minutes. That is long enough to feel the rhythm settle and short enough that you will actually do it tomorrow. Some people grow into ten or twenty minutes; many stay at two for years. Neither is further along than the other.

Is breath prayer the same as meditation?

It shares a shape with meditative practice — a repeated phrase, attention on the breath — but the content is different. A breath prayer is addressed to God. You are not emptying your mind; you are turning it toward someone.

What if my mind wanders?

It will. That is not the practice failing — noticing that you have wandered and returning is the practice. Some days you will return forty times in five minutes. Forty returns is forty small acts of attention.