Recently while talking with a colleague about using multi-
sensory prayer stations to enable people to pray, she recommend me to view a
video featuring an interview with Dr Herbert Benson on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQAIaVmHyAE which
outlines what Dr Benson calls the Relaxation Response.
The Relaxation Response is perhaps best described as the
reverse of the fight or flight response; which is when faced with a stressful
situation, our bodies respond by a rush of hormones such as adrenaline to
increase our hart and breathing rates and our blood flow resulting in higher
blood pressure to prepare our bodies for a fight or to escape.
Howard Benson suggests that our bodies are also imbued with
a mechanism to induce a physiological state of quietness, which, relaxes the
body, slows our heart and breathing rates and lowers our blood pressure.
In order to achieve this Benson suggests that two factor help
these are:
A mental device such as a sound, word phrase, or prayer repeated
silently or aloud, or a fixed gaze at an object.
A passive attitude-not worrying about how well one is performing the
technique and simply putting aside distracting thoughts to return to one’s
focus.
With eighty per cent of his patients
choosing prayer as a method to elicit this response he found himself in the
unusual position as a physician in the United States of teaching people to pray.
Following watching the video and
reading more about “The Relaxation Response” I
started putting the strategies in to practice in prayer in church and at home
and found they certainly helped relax my body and enabled me to leave my
concerns with God in payer.
One morning I awoke early and as
I lay in bed I practiced the techniques, as I did so I found I was listening to
the sound of a pigeon call outside my bedroom window and the gentle repetitive calling
was the perfect sound on which to focus my mind and to create an attitude of
prayer.
On another occasion while camping
I was listening to the dawn chorus and a sky lark singing over the
fields of North Yorkshire and again found it the perfect melody to draw me in
to an attitude of prayer.
This made me wonder, if perhaps
St Francis’s attitude towards creation had been elicited by him listening to bird
song, while in prayer.
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