![]() Acceptance does not mean tolerance of wrong it means a clear-headed recognition of the situation as it is so as to avoid self-delusion and denial. We are welcoming our Response to the outside stimulus. ![]() Remember that we are talking about feelings here, not illness or abuse or injustice. Has it ever been helpful? Has the anger helped your safety? Has the fear prevented missteps? Where has it steered us wrong? Bolstered our false-self? Stampeded us into foolishness? Fear, I welcome you.” For a moment trace the trajectory of this feeling in your experience. Recognize that you are you, and affirm the rightness of where you are by welcoming the feeling. Explore it and acknowledge its reality in you.Ģ) Welcome: Acknowledge God’s presence in the moment. Don’t try to suppress the feeling or to push it away. What is going on inside me? How do I feel physically? Am I tense? Hot? Cold? Rigid? Vibrating? Let the feeling flood over you. This is not about miring ourselves in bad feelings, but about feeling them. Our pride, our expectations, need for safety, every value we have is right here with us.įeel the feelings. It took everything in our lives to get us to this moment. We will breathe a few deep, cleansing breaths to settle into the moment.įirst we acknowledge the rightness of who we are and where we are. An anger we can barely contain.ġ) Focus and engage: It helps if we can have a quiet place to begin our “sit”, but if the best we can do is pull the car to the side, put on the flashers and grip the wheel seething about the so-and-so who cut us off, then so be it. It begins when we acknowledge that we have a feeling that has become a burden. Welcoming prayer was the brainchild of Mary Mrozowski, a spiritual director with Contemplative Outreach in Brooklyn, NY. As with any practice – imagine starting cold on a new piece of music on the piano – it might start out a little clunky, but it improves with repeated practicing. And remember that this isn’t a matter of having faith or believing any particular thing. That just means you have to sit still and pay attention for a short time. Simply put, it is a contemplative prayer practice. If you’ve heard the saying “Let Go and Let God!”, and dismissed it as glib and not too helpful, you might be a good candidate for Welcoming Prayer. It is to free us from the power of feelings that alternately may goad us to inappropriate action or freeze us in fearful inaction. To be clear, this is not a program to suppress feelings in order to deny, ignore or sustain an abusive or unjust situation. The point of Welcoming Prayer is to give us a tool for our spiritual toolkit that allows us to engage our feelings and to move forward without those feelings urging us into wrong and destructive paths. How often do we simply shut them out? Or ignore them? Or send them underground to bubble up who knows when and to what effect? Rogers, in the recent film “Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” said that his TV ministry was oriented to help children learn how to both have their feelings and to manage them. or we become ensnared in thoughts of what might have been, if only ….Īnd the feelings come. We get news from a friend, or a doctor, or a child, or … or we discover, to our horror that someone we care very much for has wronged us badly …. Sometimes the feelings just blindside us.
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