This Advent, I would encourage you to take up the practice of saying the rosary out-loud and if you can, in Latin. Create a prayerful atmosphere, focus on your breathing, then start and go deep into the mysteries. By Christmas, not only will your spirit be nourished but your mind and body too.
The spiritual benefits of praying the rosary are well known, but did you know there is evidence to suggest praying the rosary out loud in Latin can lead to favourable psychological and physiological outcomes too?
This is in itself not exactly news – researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy came to this conclusion in their 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal. When the rosary is said vocally in the official language of the Church, it slows breathing down to around six breaths per minute – almost the exact same timing as “endogenous circulatory rhythms”. This is known to have a calming effect on the mind and body.
Researchers put sensors on 23 healthy participants to measure blood flow, heart rate and nervous system feedback while they recited the rosary in Latin, with one subject reciting the first half of the Ave Maria and another the response. It was found that respiration slowed to six breaths per minute, almost half the number of the modern day breathing pattern.
As participants’ breathing slowed, blood flow to the brain started to increase and heart rate variability was enhanced. This helped the heart and nervous system to operate at their peak efficiency. As soon as the subjects started talking and breathing normally again, this trend started to reverse.
The study concluded that “the rosary might be viewed as a health practice as well as a religious practice”.
These findings were supported just over a decade later by two doctors from New York, Patricia Gerbarg and Richard Brown, who experimented with different breathing patterns and their impact on anxiety and depression. Their 2013 studyfound that the most efficient breathing was when participants breathed in for 5.5 seconds and breathed out for 5.5 seconds, working out around five to six breaths a minute – sound familiar?
Gerbarg and Brown found that even when their patients practiced this breathing exercise for only five to 10 minutes a day, transformations occurred. These techniques were then used to help restore the lungs of 9/11 survivors who suffered from a chronic and painful cough as a result of the debris. A significant improvement could be seen in their symptoms by doing this breathing exercise.
These two studies were recently popularised in the New York Times Best Seller, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by journalist James Nestor. Nestor makes the case that humans have lost the ability to breathe properly. He suggests that making slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can have a big impact on everything from snoring to autoimmune diseases, and calls breathing “the missing pillar of health”.
After speaking to various pulmonary researchers, the consensus Nestor came to was that in the modern world we tend to over breathe. It is now considered common to take 12-20 breaths a minute – nearly double what we used to. Nestor argues this is contributing to rising blood pressure and overworking the heart and nervous system.
Instead, hecites5.5 breaths a minute as being the most efficient form of breathing and describes the 5.5 second inhale and 5.5 second exhale as the “perfect breath”, being “at the root of so much health, happiness and longevity”.
In his research he found this “perfect breath” in spiritual practices from around the world, and particularly the rosary.
Breathing exercises have grown in popularity recently. It is now commonplace in antenatal classes for expectant mothers to be taught breathing exercises to help manage pain during childbirth. However, sometimes breathing exercises are caught up with “mindfulness” and yoga practices which can be a moral minefield for Catholics.
While other breathing practices require you to have to time your breaths (Nestor even recommends various apps to practice the 5.5 pattern), in contrast, the Latin rosary has a fixed structure baked in, allowing you to get into a meditative breathing state without even having to think about it. Catholics therefore, need not go running after the latest breathing fad, often accompanied by some form of crypto eastern spirituality, when they already have the “perfect breath” within their grasp – in the most holy rosary.
As the 19th Century theologian, Rev. Francis Spirago,said about the rosary, “there is no prayer which affords more consolation in affliction, more tranquillity to the troubled breast. It soothes in sorrow, it imparts the peace spoken of in the Gospel”.
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