Healing in the Hands

Your hands can become resting places for mercy, cradling what you carry and offering it into God’s healing love.

When we pray with our hands, we bring more than posture; we bring our whole selves. Mudras, or handy postures of prayer, remind us that our bodies are participants in the conversation with God. They become gestures of healing.

Consider for a moment what you bring into prayer: your body, your emotions, your mind, and your spirit. Each has its own needs, each its own wounds.

• Physically: Our hands are wired to the brain. Gentle touch and gesture can calm brain waves, stir memory, awaken creativity, and invite balance.

• Emotionally: The hands carry our feelings and moods, shaping how we relate to ourselves and to others. In them lies both the power to cling and the freedom to forgive.

• Mentally: Postures of prayer encourage focus, quiet the mind, and open space for imagination, a childlike quality we are called to recover.

• Spiritually: Our hands become signs of surrender, channels of mercy, extensions of trust in God’s presence.

  
  

A Small Practice for the Week

Find a quiet moment. Sit comfortably. Place your hands gently in your lap or open them outward.

Whisper the words:

I rest in God’s mercy… I rest in God’s mercy.

As you repeat the phrase, imagine placing whatever you are carrying into your hands: an emotion, a worry, a longing.

Hold it for a moment.

Then, with each exhale, release it into God’s embrace.

This practice can be as short as a few breaths, or it can grow into a rhythm of 3, 10, or even 40 days. With each repetition, your hands learn to remember they are made to hold, to release, to receive.

Building the Practice

If you feel called to continue, this practice can unfold more deeply:

• Through a simple 7-day rhythm like the SOS (Softening–Opening–Settling) program, where daily gestures and affirmations guide you into embodied prayer.

• Or through the 15-week Embodied Garden program, where movement, prayer, and reflection become an ongoing conversation with God through your body.

  
  

However long or short, however profound or straightforward, the truth remains: healing begins the moment your hands rest in God’s mercy.

Invitation: This week, pause each day, even if only once, and pray with your hands: I rest in God’s mercy. 

Trust that He receives what you carry and restores you with His love.

Blessing: May your hands remind you of the One who heals, and may every gesture, every release, become a resting place for His mercy.