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Body Prayer
Opening Ourselves to the Work of God, A Prayer by Pastor Katy Stenta KatyandtheWord.com (Please stand if you are able, if not you can do this prayer seated)) God thank you for bringing us here (Hands to heart) Holy Spirit extend your presence across this space to our companions (stretch your hands in front of you as far as you can) Jesus, spread your love and care that we are practicing here,…
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Walker Arts Choreographers Evening 2021🙏🏿Body Prayers
Orange Skies
Lord, sometimes I wonder what you think when you see our skies in California, stretched orange with smoke.
When Karachi is flooded.
When Superstorm Laura winked out the power before a heat wave.
When Beirut explodes, and Typohoon Haishen blows through Japan and South Korea.
Did you have a big messy cry when violence erupted not once but twice in Kenosha, WI?
I did.
God I cannot…
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I’ve never been good at giving things up for Lent. I find my attention is diverted from my relationship with God to my relationship with that which I’m giving up. So my Lenten practice is usually to take something on. This year I’m seeking to connect more fully with God by connecting more fully to my own body through prayer. So often I’m stuck in my head in life and in my life of faith, oblivious of my body, but Christianity is an embodied faith and our whole selves matter. Too often my disconnect with my own body—a disconnect created by body image issues and shame and weight gain and experiences of abuse and assault—creates a disconnect between myself and the body of Christ in addition to God. So as one who regularly confesses in “the resurrection of the body” I hope to live into that promise and claim it here and now—in this time, place, and body. May it be so. Amen.
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I've come so far from my disorders. And I more than them. I am worth more and my body deserves better.
Prayers Guided by 1 Corinthians 12:12-30
(Body Prayer)
Raise hands high and outstretched above the head
God, see our praise as we lift our hands
open and eager, waiting for you to guide us
through dark and dangerous valleys
to pastures of soft green grass
among the tall buildings of the city
and into each others homes.
Bring hands over chest and clasp over heart
God, fill hour hearts with the knowledge that you are with us
to have and to hold,
in each day of our lives,
for richer or poorer,
in sickness and in health
in good times and in bad.
Put hands at side to mimic holding hands with a partner, some direction may be needed
As we are one in you, we are one with each other.
Let us not forget, as we go hand in hand in to the world,
to not let pride blind us from each other
but as members of the body let us celebrate our uniqueness
and communion with one another.
In Christ's name,
Amen
(response prayer 1)
Jesus, Precious Friend
Solomon has seen many things under the sun
Let us delight in the wisdom that two are better than one
That when one falls they have another to pick them up.
Lord receive our prayer
Ever Present Spirit
David was blinded by the fury of sin as he gazed upon Bathsheba
And sent the Hittite, her husband, to death.
Let us have true and obedient eyes that seek after your heart.
Lord receive our prayer
Almighty and wonderful God
We are so grateful to be in this space with You and each other
As the body of your church we prepare our hearts and minds
to be nourished by your Spirit.
Lord receive our prayer
In your Son's holy name, Jesus Christ
Amen
(Response prayer 2)
God,
Take from our hands this humble offer of praise.
Lord receive our prayer
Wipe clean the smear of transgression,
we have against you and against our sisters and brothers
from our faces.
Lord receive our prayer
Shed the blinding scales of pride from our eyes
that neglect the rest of the body of your church.
Lord receive our prayer
Arrest our feet as we march down wild and wayward paths
away from your love.
Lord receive our prayer
Lord, with much gratitude we share this time and place
with you and each other.
As the body of your church we prepare our hearts and minds
to be nourished by your Spirit.
Lord receive our prayer
In Christ's holy name
Amen
Seane Corn Demonstrates "Body Prayer"
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
For Seane Corn, yoga is much more than a practice in flexibility. It's a way of applying spiritual lessons to real-world problems and personal issues. One way she channels her energy and love is through a practice she calls "body prayer," as she shares in this video from Yoga from the Heart.
She shared this perspective about "body prayer" with Krista Tippett in our show, "Yoga, Meditation in Action":
"I trust that if I do my yoga practice, I'm going to get stronger and more flexible. If I stay in alignment, if I don't push, if I don't force, then my body will organically open in time. I know that if I breathe deeply, I'll oxygenate my body. It has an influence on my nervous system. These things are fixed and I know to be true.
But I also recognize that it's a mystical practice, and you can use your body as an expression of your devotion. So the way that you place your hands, the ways that you step a foot forward or back, everything is done as an offering. I offer the movements to someone I love or to the healing of the planet. And so if I'm moving from a state of love and my heart is open to that connection between myself and another person or myself and the universe, it becomes an active form of prayer, of meditation, of grace.
And when you're offering your practice as a gift, as I was in that particular DVD, as I do often, I was offering to my dad who's very ill. And so when I have an intention behind what I'm doing, then it becomes so fluid. Because if I fall out of a pose I'm not going to swear, I'm not going to get disappointed or frustrated. I'm going to realize that this is my offering, and I don't want to offer that energy to my father. I only want to offer him my love. And so I let my body reflect that. And when you link the body with the breath, when my focus is solely on getting the pose to embrace the breath that I'm actualizing, then the practice, it's almost in slow motion.
It has a sense of effortlessness. When people can connect to that, it takes the pressure off of trying to do it perfectly. It just becomes a real expression of their own heart. Sometimes it's graceful and elegant, other times it's kind of funky and abstract, but it's authentic to who the person is. It's their own poetry."
The Practical Mystery of Yoga
by Krista Tippett, host
After my interview with Matthew Sanford a few years ago, I started thinking about yoga. I had dabbled in it intermittently across the years, but until very recently the structure of my life did not yield happily to new "non-essential" commitments. I would sign up for a weekly class and then only attend once or twice.
Then I discovered a studio with a full and flexible schedule — drop in classes literally morning, noon, and night — and I was off. Initially — and this is how Seane Corn describes her experience too — I was mostly aware of how good the physical workout felt. (I'm doing "core power yoga" — a fusion that is indeed more of a sweaty workout than I'd experienced in yoga classes before.) But at some point a few months on, I realized that yoga was working in far more significant ways on my energy, my sense of spiritual and mental well-being, the way I moved through the rest of my life.
Several of my colleagues were nearly simultaneously going through a similar process with yoga in their off-hours. And we're not special or strange in this. The past few years have seen a surge of cultural and journalistic attention — some wary, some appreciative — to the way yoga has suddenly taken in cities, small towns, schools, and workplaces. Perhaps I'm justifying the fact that this show, as much as any we've done, indulged an enormous curiosity that has grown in me privately as well as professionally. But when I read Sebastian Faulks' James Bond redux novel and found that he has the Chief Spymaster M instructing his agents to practice yoga for strength and focus, I felt we had no choice but to at least devote an hour to it.
Seane Corn is a wonderful and surprising voice for this exploration. She is a master teacher and a star in the ever-expanding universe of yoga teachers and trainers. She appeared as the beautiful face and body of yoga in a Nike "goddess" ad campaign. But the cadence and intensity of her voice — as she's quick to point out with some pride — reflects a blue-collar New Jersey upbringing and the fact that she is one of life's fighters.
Nothing in her early life prefigured her current embodiment of yoga's alignment of strength, energy, and grace. She left home and school to move to New York City at 16, found work as a waitress, and partied hard. She discovered yoga at 19, as she was on the edge of sanity. She had been battling an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she believes was connected with an episode of childhood sexual abuse.
The drama of Seane Corn's story makes for a fascinating conversation. But she is also a very down to earth guide into the basic facts about the practicalities and power of yoga.
I've written a more personal essay about the changes this practice has affected in me — the very unexpected lessons it has brought to the rest of my life. On this point, too, the intensity of Seane Corn's story is compelling. But it also throws into relief parallel experiences I've had and heard about in others that have practiced yoga in varying forms and degrees. She had been practicing yoga for years until one day she was filled, walking home, with an utterly strange sensation, which she finally understood to be a sense of joy, of happiness.
Her practice of yoga is thoroughly interwoven, at this point, with her understanding of grace, God, and love. The way she comes at that — and expresses it — is anything but light and airy. The joy and love at the heart of yoga drive her to be ruthlessly honest about the darkness in herself and to face the darkness in the world. She takes yoga's sense of the teacher in every experience with utter seriousness — working with organizations helping get teenage prostitutes off the streets, for example, from Los Angeles to Cambodia.
Like meditation, this ancient spiritual technology lends itself to interpretation and incorporation with many spiritual sensibilities and religious traditions — just as its range of practices are adaptable to any type of body at any stage of vitality or disability. I also see this yoga phenomenon as part of a larger move that we've variously explored towards rooting — or rather, reintegrating — the body into spiritual and religious traditions, from Judaism to Pentecostal Christianity. There is some wonderful, fundamental insight here that many of us are reclaiming from wildly different directions. And as Matthew Sanford still so memorably put it to me, the more completely we inhabit our own bodies with both their strengths and their flaws, the more compassionate we become towards all of life. That's the kind of earthy, reality-based mystery I love.
Namaste.
