The Welcoming Prayer

As the stressful time of midterms continues for some of you, one might be looking for an opportunity to de-stress from all the pressures that ensues with exams. Over at BustedHalo.com®, (the internet magazine I founded before heading North and West to be with you here at UB South) Phil Fox Rose has a great article today on what he terms the welcoming prayer. Want to get rid of stress? Phil says one needs to get in touch with it first.

I want to share with you a little method with a big impact: the Welcoming Prayer. This unassuming little method has helped me many times. What’s your first impulse when you have a “bad” feeling? If you’re like me, it’s usually to suppress it. But we all know that doesn’t work. What you focus on sticks around. This is one of the big lessons you learn through meditation. If you try to suppress a thought, it becomes your entire focus. Worse than before.

But while a regular meditation practice can inculcate a balanced relationship with your feelings and emotions, with the serenity that comes from that, sometimes you need help now, in the field. You can’t exactly sit down on the sidewalk and start meditating. (Though there may very well be a church nearby.)

And sometimes, you’re too caught up in the thoughts that are swirling around a negative emotion, and meditation just seems impossible. I encourage you to meditate anyway in those situations, but if you want some extra help, the Welcoming Prayer might help.

Palmer: How do you do it — block out fear?
Gibbs: You don’t. It’s what you do with it.

— NCIS

You’ve heard all the axioms about going through rather than around problems. Well, the Welcoming Prayer is a method for doing this with bad feelings. The basic idea is that when you are experiencing a negative feeling, you don’t pray for it to go away, you welcome it. Let’s say you are feeling fearful. You literally say to yourself, “Welcome, fear.”

You don’t detach from it. You get to know it.

Read more here and then take 10 minutes today to notice what feelings you have when you are stressed and welcome them, recognize those feelings next time and know that it's not that big a deal once it becomes familiar and that you will get past it.

And if you want to take some intentional time for de-stressing and prayer: join us on Tuesday@ Noon for the rosary (we'll teach you if you don't know how to do the rosary) or Wednesday night for our Candlelight Meditation.

And if that's not enough--come veg out with us on Sunday at 5:30P when we watch the movie Once.