- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 2
-
Sparkle (0)
I don't consider myself a religious person. A spiritual person, yeah, sure, but not a religious person. I'm a lapsed Catholic who hasn't been to confession in years. Hell, I haven't been inside a church in years. I struggle with the very idea of organized religion.
But I still pray. And I'm convinced that prayer has helped me maintain my sanity during some difficult times. Ativan, too, but I'm pretty sure that the prayer helped.
I thought of this the other day when I saw this post - at another site that I write for - on prayers for a healthy pregnancy. My immediate reaction was, who, other than the most pious church-going soul, would think to pray their way to a better pregnancy? And then I thought, oh. I did.
The thing was, I didn't set out to pray my way through my pregnancies. I just did it. I just did it, because prayer - my own, weird take on prayer, anyway (a hodge-podge of rhyming childhood prayers and Hail Marys and Our Fathers) - is a kind of meditation for me. I do it when I'm really anxious or can't sleep or am having panic attacks. I do it when I want to calm myself. As I said, I also take Ativan, but prayer is pretty handy when the panic attack hits on the bus or in the middle of the night and there are no drugs around. Also, during pregnancy, when one is worried about taking drugs.
So, yeah. It all of sudden made perfect sense, the idea of praying one's way to a healthier pregnancy, or indeed to better health in general. Prayer is - or can be - a kind of meditation. And meditation of any sort can be an invaluable aid in keeping oneself mentally and physically grounded. (I should stress, though, that neither prayer nor any other kind of meditation are a substitute for medical treatment. And I would be leary of anyone who suggested that prayer might be sufficient for treating post-partum or any kind of depression. And although prayer and faith and the like can be powerful allies in good health generally, we owe it to women everywhere to keep the critical lens well-focused: women die when they substitute faith for medicine.)
Prayer and meditation can be viewed in the same manner as exercise, when it comes to their relationship to health: they can be a powerful, and perhaps even necessary, complement to a healthy lifestyle.
And if Hail Marys aren't your bag? Just make something up. It's between you and your higher power, or between you and no power at all. Whatever brings you peace and calm - and good health.
(My favorite of the nine prayers cited in the post? A Prayer For The Womb, excerpted from a poem by Tikva Frymer-Kensky:
My eye cannot see you.
My will cannot control you.
But I feel your presence,
and I note your being
and I wish you all blessings,
and I love you.
I think that I sighed out loud when I read that.)
Catherine Connors blogs as Her Bad Mother and as Their Bad Mother. She's been praying to not worry so much about the economy. She's been having to supplement those prayers with an Ativan prescription.
