Categories
| Wedding Wheels | Anniversary | Healing the Earth | Home / Personal |
| Health / Therapeutic | Place of Worship | Urns / Celebrations of Life | Pet Urns |
Prayer Wheel Uses : Health / Therapeutic
Click for Slideshow
Child Recovering in Hospital
A six-year old friend of our family came down with a rare disease requiring months of treatment and recovery at Children's Hospital. We gave her a small prayer wheel as she left the ICU. The littlest thing can feel like the greatest accomplishment when you have been ill. Her mother was stunned when she slowly reached out and turned the prayer wheel with her hand. Her eyes followed the animals as they passed. This was the first significant movement she had done with her eyes or hands for days. Her prayer wheel filled with prayers and good thoughts from school friends, family and playmates. Every day, her parents would also help her write a new wish. It was often: "I want to go home." After she left the hospital she insisted on "sleeping with the wheel" in her bed. Our little gal has since recovered completely. She is a wild girl again – playing soccer, climbing trees.
Click for Slideshow
Hospice / Homecare
Chaplain Donna Vande Kieft of Providence Hospice & Homecare of Snohomish County, WA, writes:
"We have incorporated one of Chris Moench's beautiful prayer wheels into a ritual of remembrance and blessing at Providence Hospice & Homecare of Snohomish County. The prayer wheel sits atop a special cabinet in our lobby, along with a vase of colored stones that represent the losses staff and volunteers encounter in their work with patients, families and in their own personal lives. Staff and volunteers are invited to jot down their concerns, joys, hopes, dreams, disappointments, blessings, etc. and drop their note into the prayer wheel.
The wheel is often spinning when we walk through our lobby or get off the elevator, reminding us that there is a sense of the divine and the holy in the midst of our lives and our work. We are blessed to have the prayer wheel in our work environment. It offers a sense of healing and hope to us all. This weekend the wheel is going to Camp Erin where it will be used in ritual to help heal the grief experienced by children and teens who have lost someone significant. We know they will be both intrigued and blessed by the presence of the wheel and what it represents."
Click for Slideshow
Martin Luther King, Jr. Prayer Wheel
This MLK prayer wheel took center stage, literally, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration: Inter-racial Community Healing, Whatcom County Courthouse, Bellingham, Washington. Every year our city holds the celebration in the crowded atrium of the County Courthouse. As people entered the courthouse door, they were handed a Program with a "tear off section" for writing their ideas on how to make our community more like Dr. King's "I Have A Dream." Some of those thoughts were later shared in the local newspaper.
Click for Slideshow
Physical Therapy Waiting Room
Bellingham Physical Therapy owners write:
"It adds a sense of completeness to the office. The prayer wheel opens people to new possibilities. It creates questions. Kids are great with it. They have lots of questions. They ask: 'How does it work? How do the prayers get out? What happens when the wheel is full? Can I look inside?' It's a great stimulator of new ideas and possibilities. We put pen and paper out by the wheel.... It is already about one-third full."
Click for Slideshow
Surgeon's Waiting Room
Russ, a Virginia Doctor writes:
"I love these things!! I am a surgeon... And as such there will be many people passing through my waiting room to see one of these two prayer wheels. I may rotate them..."
Click for Slideshow
High School Counselor's Office
A high school counselor in Tacoma, Washington, Mr. Fox commissioned this prayer wheel. The wheel is used in his office.
His name inspired the illustration of a wild red fox padding across the wheel's bottom. Five bald eagles are depicted soaring on invisible updrafts, gliding, reaching, and standing. Two large eagle feathers float in the space between.
Click for Slideshow
Yoga Studio Prayer Wheel, Bellingham
A yoga instructor and business owner of "Bikram Yoga: A Yoga College of India" in Bellingham, Washington, says:
"My students just love the prayer wheel in our Yoga Studio. I set it up in the center of a large low table with benches surrounding it for people to relax before or after class. The Prayer Wheel brings a whole different meaning to the space and the reason we are here. I just love having it."
Click for Slideshow
Yoga Studio Prayer Wheel, Texas
This prayer wheel was commissioned by a couple founding "Bikram Yoga of the Woodlands" in Texas. They wanted it to reflect their love of the Texas pine woods landscape, their passion for Bikram Yoga, and their Christian faith. The bottom half of the wheel depicts a forest of Texas long-leaf native pine and grasses. The top half features the billowing cumulous clouds bringing thunderstorms and nurturing rain to land. The clouds are interspersed with eight phases of the moon waxing and waning and returning to fullness, only to empty again.... Around the center of the wheel undulates a band featuring the 28 poses of the Bikram Yoga cycle. The Prayer of Saint Francis is carved into the vessel's interior.
Click for Slideshow
Cascade Valley Hospital Chapel
This 16" tall porcelain prayer wheel was commissioned for the patients, healthcare workers and visitors to the hospital in Arlington Washington. The vessel has been installed in the chapel where it receives written prayers and hopes. When it is full of those messages the chaplain removes them and burns them in a respectful ceremony.
