Learning to Pray with Beads with Kimberly Winston

Please welcome my very special guest, Kimberly Winston, author of Bead One, Pray Too: A Guide to Making and Using Prayer Beads. If you have never considering adding a prayer bead practice to enhance your spiritual life—no matter what your religious or spiritual persuasion—I invite you to. Expand your horizons!

Kimberly has much wisdom to share with us, as well as practical advice for how to create your own unique prayer bead practice. Make a comment here today and you will be entered into a drawing for her wonderful book. Without further ado, Kimberly Winston ...


TO PRAY with any set of prayer beads is to embark on a journey. We will be traveling by ourselves, but on it we will never be alone. We will be going somewhere, but we will sit almost entirely still. We will travel far, but go only in circles. When we return, we will have gone away without ever having left where we are.

Learning the steps of this journey is the easy part – those are the beads themselves. But staying on those steps is harder – we need the tools of focus, attention and purpose to help us say the prayers that go with the beads. And by no means are these tools exclusive to any one form of prayer beads. They are the foundation of any meaningful religious practice. Because of that, the principles of contemplation and prayer sketched here can be applied to all prayer beads - an Anglican or a Catholic rosary, a Buddhist or a Hindu mala, an Islamic subha or some form you may invent for yourself. The number and configuration of the beads is not what is important. It is the intention behind them - the desire to draw nearer to the divine - that is crucial.

Praying with beads is a form of contemplative prayer. The word “contemplation” has its roots in Latin and Greek meaning “to look at things” and “in the temple.” In The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous medieval monk advises that we seek God not through knowledge, but through love. Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, two Christian mystics, defined contemplative prayer as a kind of supernatural state in which the intellect and will are suspended and the mind enters a state of knowing instead of a state of doing.

Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, gave a modern spark to contemplative prayer, which he calls centering prayer, in his 1986 book, Open Mind, Open Heart. “Contemplative prayer is the opening of mind and heart -- our whole being – to God, the Ultimate Mystery, beyond thoughts, words and emotions,” Keating writes. “We open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than choosing – closer than consciousness itself.”

Don’t think about what you’re praying for – it’s better not to think at all when you pray – but focus on what you are praying for. If your prayer is for peace, keep the idea of peace before you. Keep the feeling of peace within you as you pray. Contemplate it, using your heart, not your head. Do not think about what it is you are seeking. Thinking will take you out of the mysterious realm of prayer and back into the all-too concrete world of daily obligations and demands.

That’s easy to say and hard to do. This is where intention and attention come into play. In the New Testament, Jesus tells us to beware of vain repetitions of prayer. He’s not warning against the repetition of prayer – if he were, we would need to say the Lord’s Prayer only once, like a pledge. The key word is vain. Jesus is warning against becoming disconnected from our prayers to the point that we are just repeating a series of words without meaning, like a mantra intended to induce a meditative state. Rather, our prayers should be deeply felt statements of faith, of praise, of joy that we keep emotionally attached to at all times during the praying. This is to pray with intention.

What about attention? This is where the tactile nature of the beads comes in. The physical act of grasping a bead, of rotating it gently between the fingers, of feeling it, will anchor you to the words of the prayer attached to the beads. As you pray, really feel each bead. How hard is it? Is it round or oval? Faceted or smooth? Cool or warm to the touch? Let the feel of the beads ground you in the prayer. If you feel your mind wandering, squeeze or hold the bead tighter. Your attention will come back to the presence of God.

Directing your breathing, too, will help; this is a well-known and widely practiced method for contemplative prayer. As you begin each prayer, breathe in on the first half and out on the second half. For example, if you are praying the Jesus prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”), inhale on “Lord Jesus Christ” and exhale on “have mercy on me.”

Though there are no hard and fast rules for praying with most prayer beads, a few guidelines are helpful. First, prayer beads are a tool for prayer and not an object of devotion. The prayers said with the aid of any prayer beads are always more important than the beads with which they are numbered. You don’t need beads to pray. They are an aid to contemplation, not the object of contemplation. So if you find yourself more concerned with the color of your prayer beads than the content of your prayers, you may want to think about why you are using prayer beads.

And remember that contemplative prayer takes practice. Be patient with yourself. It is hard to turn off the buzz of everyday life, with all its demands, and with the increasing connectedness modern technology forces on us. Your time with your prayer beads is a time to put aside these distractions – cellphones, email, schedules, and so on. – and be with the simplest essence faith can be reduced to: a reaching outward and upward towards the divine.

Kimberly and I welcome your thoughts ...


Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter living in and working from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been covering religion for the secular media since 1993 and her work has appeared in many publications. She is the 2005 recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Best In-Depth Reporting in media with a circulation larger than 100,000 for five stories she wrote for Beliefnet.com. She is the author of three books, Faith Beyond Faith Healing, Fabric of Faith: A Guide to the Prayer Quilt Ministry, and the new Bead One, Pray Too: A Guide to Making and Using Prayer Beads. You can learn more about her journalistic writing on her website, www.kimberlywinston.com. Visit her blog at http://kimberlywinston.wordpress.com.