What's in it for you?

How will this book help/benefit you, the pray-er?

• Doing the poses in this book has the potential to affect the health of the physical being. The movements stretch and strengthen muscles and joints, promote balance and flexibility in both body and mind, and help improve the respiratory, digestive, circulatory, and nervous systems. Body awareness leads to a more mindful self-health care.
• Practiced in the morning, it helps start the day in a positive way. It brings an intentional, a more contemplative stance (which is an awareness of God’s loving presence wherever we are) to the whole day. It makes the morning feel like Easter morning: new day, new world, and new life. Practiced in the middle of the day, it reminds us that we are not alone, that God is with us, even in the toughest situations. Practiced in the evening, it brings a gentle, forgiving, and relaxing closure to the day and promotes a more peaceful and restful sleep.
• Practiced regularly, the prayer format offered in this book could lead to a more focused and less scattered mind. It helps to open the body, heart and mind to the God’s loving actions. It also helps in developing a more present, loving, and God-aware way of moving, of living, of being. From menshealth.com : “Pray. New research shows that men who pray frequently have 3.5 percent lower diastolic BP than once-in-a-while worshippers.”
• The Living your Prayer sections help us to choose and spread light, peace, compassionate, and joy in a proactive way in our daily life. It promotes the integration of both our external and interior lives which could lead in improved relationships with God and all the people in our lives. It helps us create a more positive, creative, and life-giving environment for ourselves and for others.
• This prayer book could help revitalize a monotonous, lifeless, and spiritless prayer life. “This book that you hold in your hands may be the beginning of a whole new unfolding in your dialogue with the Divine.” (from the foreword)

Learn to Pray with the Body

The book, Praying with the Body: Bringing the Psalms to Life, is already listed at amazon.com. It is available for pre-order and is scheduled to come out in March 2009. Sold separately, there will be a DVD version with the same title.

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The following is the proposed back cover copy:

Pray with more than mind and spirit—learn to pray with your body as well

In this innovative prayer book, you are invited to move in prayer by expressing the Psalms with motion. This way of praying helps broaden and deepen your relationship with God and all of creation. Through it, you will experience the presence of the Divine more completely, and it will help you to better embody God’s love in your daily life.

In Praying with the Body you will find both prayer tools and companionship. Black and white drawings showing the postures and expressions of the body, accompany the Scripture texts and explanations by Roy DeLeon. Working together, these elements invite you to explore and discover a new and different way of being with God.

This book is for anyone who wants a more integrated and holistic approach to prayer. It proposes a way of prayer that will influence both your interior and daily life. Its meditations and reflections will address your deepest needs to be with the Beloved, and reassure you of the divine presence in your midst.

“The four basic ways of praying–oral, mental, affective, and contemplative—are all contained here.” — from the book's foreword by Father Tom Ryan, author of Prayer of Heart and Body

An offering for our embodied being

Father Tom Ryan, author of Prayer of Heart and Body, begins his foreword to my book:

"Within the first thirty pages one becomes aware that this is a book that, like a fine wine, has come to maturation slowly. The various prayer components are arranged in a repeated pattern, like good ritual: opening invocation, psalm prayer, silent reflection, praying with the body, heart,, and soul, sitting with the Divine Presence, living your prayer, contemporary psalm, closing prayer.

"At the heart of this ritual pattern is the author’s desire to offer ways—gentle, doable ways—of making our worship more truly holistic, of going to God not just with our hearts and minds, but with our bodies as well. This is a much-needed encouragement. Christians and Jews in the Western world may be surrounded by playing fields and fitness centers, but when we step into the church or synagogue to enter into conscious discourse with the Divine, we by and large check our bodies at the door.

"By contrast, the Muslim at prayer is constantly bowing and kneeling, touching the head to the floor, and moving the arms and the head to incline the heart. The Buddhist enters into a series of prostrations. The Hindu learns yoga in order to meditate with greater stillness in the body and focused awareness in the mind.

While Christians may have one of—if not the—highest theology of the body among the religions of the world; they also have one of the lowest levels of embodied spiritual practice. The great Christian festivals of Christmas, Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost all make profound and radical statements of faith about God’s esteem for our embodied being. And in Judaism, the body-mind-spirit is a seamless entity named not by three different words but by a single word: nefes."

I think that's an excellent beginning for this blog focused on my first book and DVD about praying with the body, heart, and soul.