239. Meeting God in Your Body With Jennifer Tucker239. Meeting God in Your Body With Jennifer Tucker
Strong Tower Mental Health with Heidi Mortenson
Host Heidi Mortenson talks with author Jennifer Tucker about anxiety, depression and trauma, and how breath prayer, gentle movement and faith can meet those struggles in the body. Their conversation shares a Christian perspective that treats the body as a place of connection with God rather than something to fight against.
42:04•11 May 2026
Meeting God in Anxiety: Jennifer Tucker on Prayer, the Body and Mental Health
Episode Overview
- Anxiety and depression are not signs of weak faith; they can be signals to slow down, notice what’s happening and invite God into the experience.
- Breath prayers and simple grounding exercises can calm the body’s stress response and keep a sense of connection to God during intense fear or crisis.
- The nervous system can get stuck in chronic stress, especially when emotions and trauma are pushed down rather than processed in safe relationships or therapy.
- Seeing the body as a gift from God, rather than a problem to fix, opens up new ways to pray through movement, stillness and everyday activities.
- Healing is often multi-layered, involving therapy, medication, prayer, scripture and supportive community rather than a single spiritual or medical solution.
“Prayer should be the heartbeat of our life. It's the breath of our life.”
How do people manage co-occurring mental and physical health issues while recovering? This conversation between host Heidi Mortenson and author Jennifer Tucker offers a gentle, honest look at mental health through a Christian lens, with a big focus on anxiety, depression and the body. Jennifer shares her story of growing up as a high-achieving Christian, treating faith like a checklist and feeling deep shame whenever anxiety showed up.
Things changed when her teenage daughter developed severe panic attacks, pulling her into the mental health system, therapy and psychiatry for the first time. As she learned to support her daughter, she had to admit, "Okay, I have that too," recognising her own lifelong anxiety hiding behind perfectionism, people-pleasing and overworking. You’ll hear how breath prayer, meditation and gentle movement became lifelines during some very dark seasons, including her daughter’s hospitalisation and her own depression.
Instead of seeing anxiety as a spiritual failure, Jennifer now treats it as a signal: slow down, notice what the body is saying, and invite God into it. She explains how the nervous system gets stuck in chronic stress, why many people don’t realise they aren’t actually feeling safe, and how small, kind movements can help the body shift towards calm.
The episode is especially helpful if you’ve ever thought, “If I trusted God more, I wouldn’t feel this way,” or if you tend to stuff things down and carry on. Heidi and Jennifer talk candidly about therapy, medication and trauma, insisting that prayer is part of healing, not a shortcut around it. Blending faith, neuroscience and somatic practices, the conversation gently asks: what if your body isn’t the problem to fix, but a place to meet God?
If anxiety, shame or chronic stress have been running the show, this one might help you breathe a bit easier and feel a bit less alone.
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