The Welcoming Prayer
The welcoming prayer is a form of meditation that can be used at times when we are being overwhelmed by an emotion in the midst of our daily activities. While in centering prayer we come apart from life to sit in silence for twenty or thirty minutes, the welcoming prayer is a form of “consent on the go” that can be used for as little as thirty seconds in the midst of daily life.
When we find that it is difficult if not impossible to let go of an emotion or state of being, we can instead move deeper into that state. This is a way of accepting what is rather than trying to run away from it. We consent to the presence of the sacred and to this moment just as it is.
These are the steps of the prayer:
1) Feel and sink into whatever you are experiencing in your body. Notice the sensation in your body of the emotion or state of being. Where is it? What does it feel like? Is it moving around? Are you tensing parts of your body or breathing differently than usual? Is it a familiar sensation? Try to be fully present to this sensation rather than pushing it away. You don’t need to analyze, explain, or even name the sensation, just notice it.
2) Welcome - Welcome whatever you are experiencing. Accept that your feelings are there and that you can just be the way you are without trying to change.
3) Let Go - When you are ready, say, “I let go of my desire for security, affection, and control and embrace this moment as it is.”
To welcome and let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is — in ourselves and in the world.
~ Mary Mrozowski, creator of the welcoming prayer practice
Welcoming Prayer is the practice that actively lets go of thoughts and feelings that support the false-self system. It embraces painful emotions experienced in the body rather than avoiding them or trying to suppress them. It does not embrace the suffering as such but the presence of the Holy Spirit in the particular pain, whether physical, emotional, or mental. Thus, it is the full acceptance of the content of the present moment. In giving the experience over to the Holy Spirit, the false-self system is gradually undermined and the true self liberated.
~ Thomas Keating
When an emotion becomes overwhelming during centering prayer or in life, it can also be helpful to simply lean into the emotion, just being with it fully rather than resisting it, allowing the emotion itself to become the sacred symbol of centering prayer. Be with the emotion in a simple and open way until it dissipates and it seems to be time to go back to the practice.
Here is Richard Rohr’s description of the welcoming prayer, adapted from his CD The Art of Letting Go:
“The Welcoming Prayer” encourages you to identify in your life, now or in the past, a hurt or an offense: someone who has done you wrong, or let you down.
• Feel the pain of the offense the way you first felt it, or are feeling it in this moment, and feel the hurt in your body. Why is this important? Because if you move it to your mind, you will go back to dualistic thinking and judgments: good guy/bad guy, win/lose, either/or.
• Feel the pain so you don’t create the win/lose scenario. Identify yourself with the suffering side of life; how much it hurt to hurt. How abandoned you felt to be abandoned.
• Once you can move to that place and know how much it hurts to hurt, you would not possibly want that experience for anybody else.
• This might take a few minutes. Welcome the experience and it can move you to the Great Compassion. Don’t fight it! Don’t split and blame! Welcome the grief and anger in all of its heaviness. Now it will become a great teacher.
If you can do this you will see that it is welcoming the pain, and letting go of all of your oppositional energy against suffering, that actually frees you from it! Who would have thought? It is our resistance to things as they are that causes most of our unhappiness—at least I know it is for me.
Welcoming Prayer Resources
• The Welcoming Prayer: Consent on the Go, a 40-day Praxis - This booklet helps you learn and establish a Welcoming Prayer practice as well as understand the background for its transformative process.
• View a video introduction to the welcoming prayer by Therese Saulnier
• Watch a short video about the welcoming prayer and the Twelve Step tradition.
• Video recordings of half hour practice sessions of the welcoming prayer can be found on Contemplative Outreach’s YouTube page:
Practice Session I
Practice Session II
Practice Session III
Practice Session IV
Practice Session V
Practice Session VI