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| One of my favorite calming places - the hill beside our driveway at Starry Meadows |
One of my favorite contemplative practices is more challenging in this pandemic. It is meditating with the Welcoming Prayer by Father Thomas Keating.
One line of the prayer catches me now - "I let go of my desire for security and survival." I struggle to know what letting go of my desire for security and survival looks like and feels like. Sometimes my mind wants to run wild with catastrophic thoughts or take control by deciding yet more ways to protect my family and/or build our immune systems. Other days, I easily flow with the realization of how little control I have over things and I'm content to live fully and gratefully in the moment.
I know it's not the pandemic that I welcome, but my responses to it, including the fear of my family not being secure and surviving. First I acknowledge or welcome what arises, then I work my way through it before I can let go of it. This is a process, not something instant. I can practice at any time, but especially when my mind starts to spin, which often makes fear arise. Then, I can sink deeper, knowing my deepest, truest self is not my thoughts. I am so much more than my thoughts! There is beauty, calm, empathy, trust, stillness, compassion, truth, hope, goodness, safety, and wisdom down in my depths, where I commune with Spirit. So I just keep practicing the prayer and allowing my truest self to bubble up. That becomes the spacious place I live from rather than living from the surface, the thoughts and stories my mind circles around.
Cynthia Bourgeault wrote about the welcoming prayer and calls it the Welcoming Practise. Her version has three steps:
1. FOCUS OR 'SINK IN' to become aware and physically present to the particular experience or upset. Bring your attention to what is happening as a sensation in your body. Without analyzing or judging yourself or your state, inwardly tune into what is happening as the physical embodiment of the experience. Don’t try to change anything at this stage – just stay present. This will help to avoid drawing mental-cognitive conclusions, and will also ground you in the body’s experience rather than repressing what’s arising. By engaging with this awareness to sensation over time it can help us become more attentive to moments of constriction and unconscious reactivity.
2. WELCOME Welcome and lightly name the response that is being triggered by a difficult situation (such as “fear” or “anger” or “pain”). Acknowledge the response as sensation, and recognize that in this moment, if the experience is not being rejected or repressed, it can be endured. Ever so gently, begin to say ‘welcome’ (such as “welcome fear”, etc…) Though this step is counter-intuitive and the impulse is most likely to try to push away the unpleasant emotion, Cynthia explains “…by welcoming it instead, you create an atmosphere of inner hospitality. By embracing the thing you once defended yourself against or ran from, you are actually disarming it, removing its power to hurt you or chase you back into your smaller self.”
The flow of energy shifts almost immediately, becoming more spacious, and defenses can relax sufficiently to allow new perspectives or more positive responses to emerge.
3. LET GO Transition to a ‘letting go’, whereby the intensity of the situation can recede. This enables the natural fluidity of sensation to come and then go. In the classic welcoming practice methodology there are then four statements that you can employ and recite to yourself at this stage:
I let go of my desire for security and survival.
I let go of my desire for esteem and affection.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire to change the situation.
As Cynthia puts it, “This is not a final, forever renunciation of your anger or fear; it’s simply a way of gently waving farewell as the emotion starts to recede.”
Resources for Bourgeault's welcoming practice -
https://wisdomwayofknowing.org/resource-directory/the-welcoming-practice/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bClyhR2ZPc&feature=youtu.be
What is your favorite practice during difficult times?
