Welcoming Prayer

Welcoming Prayer is a tool to help quickly center and hopefully reduce painful emotional responses.

Listen to a 2.5 minute introduction to the welcoming prayer :

It’s purpose is to help one “let go and let God,” naturally heal old emotional wounds, and  show you better paths to take in life.  People who know how to effectively use Welcoming Prayer can often quickly recover from an upsetting situation within just a few seconds.   For example, it can be used to help you sleep by clearing the mind of bad feelings that wake you up in the middle of the night.  Practitioners also eventually start seeing life more clearly because they naturally repeat less blind, unconscious, survival reactions.

A variety of emotional & physical knee jerk reactions were stored during childhood deep within your body to help you “survive.”  An example might be the fight or flight reactions to unusual noises. Many of these automatic reactions are quite useful for dealing with simple physical threats; however, in a more complex world, blind reactions often make the situation worse.

Welcoming Prayer is designed to lead to better cooperation between your big-me, your higher self, and your little-me, the survival conditioning that has accumulated over time within your body. By welcoming blind emotional reactions for what they are — automatic survival mechanisms — one begins to see them from an observer’s viewpoint rather than from a victim’s viewpoint.

Welcoming Prayer starts by deeply experiencing feelings within your body and then welcoming your increased awareness of these feelings.  This awareness naturally leads to healing and to better solutions.  Letting go of your little-me‘s death grip on these feelings allows them to naturally pass by and disappear, like leaves floating by on a stream.

related links

Thank you to Thought-Management tools, tips, ideas, discussion

Note: The commentary above relies heavily on and includes quotations from these resources. Look them over yourself.

• gravitycenter.com
• barefootjourneys.net
• learningtopray.blogspot.com – Good background quotes from authoritative sources such as Thomas Keating.
• davidsonumc.org – “The reason for paying attention to your body and your interior state is that the mind deceives. … There is never a thought, feeling or emotion that does not have a corresponding body sensation. Each experience is imprinted in every cell of our body.”
• meaningandauthenticity.blogspot.com – Excerpts from Cynthia Borgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.
• bustedhalo.com – Commentary on Welcoming Prayer.
• contemplativeoutreach.org – The practice of the welcoming prayer by the Contemplative Outreach organization.
• Further discussion of Welcoming Prayer