Breath Prayers for Motherhood

Connecting truth to our lived experiences

Mar 03, 2025

Liturgies for the Little Years: In this series, you’ll find words for the everyday experiences of raising young kids in prayer form. My hope is that these liturgies would bring a sense of sacredness, meaning and worship to the ordinary moments of daily life as a parent.

You know that feeling when you’ve just spent time in the Word and you’re all filled up, and then five minutes later you’re snapping at your child with frustration running rampant in your heart? Or that experience of being overcome with exhaustion mid-afternoon, and you find yourself trying to remember that Scripture passage you read in the early morning hours that suddenly feel like a lifetime ago? This disconnect can feel, simply put, quite disheartening. It seems there’s often a lapse in connection between the truth we fill our minds with and our actual lived experiences in motherhood. And we wish it wasn’t so.

To forge this connection between truth and experience, one practice I’ve been focusing on is connecting to my breath in the moment. This practice is nothing novel, but I’ve been amazed at the way the simple practice of deep breathing helps slow me down and connect to myself and what I know to be true rather than blindly acting out of my unregulated emotional state.

I’ve enjoyed using breath prayers - short phrases you say or meditate upon with each inhale and exhale - to both help me connect to my breathing and also to connect truth to the moment in front of me. In this post, I’m sharing six short breath prayers specific to motherhood in hopes that they might help you slow down and connect truth to the lived experiences of motherhood.

And so, breathe in - breathe out. Remember that God is present with you in all the little moments of motherhood, and his truth is relevant to even the most mundane, unseen moments of your day.