Spirituality & Religion

What Works: The Welcoming Prayer

An unassuming little tool in my spiritual first aid kit that can have a big impact

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.

The method

The history of the Welcoming Prayer is a little surprising. It’s not an ancient practice, though it’s … Continue reading What Works: The Welcoming Prayer

Spirituality & Religion

What Works: HALT—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired

Avoiding triggers and staying connected to God

Ever want to bite someone’s head off just because they had the misfortune to cross your path when you hadn’t eaten lunch? Or hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before? Or when you were already angry about something else? Ever sit alone — or worse, in a crowd — and feel lonely and irritated at anyone and everything?

When I was on Father Dave’s radio show in June, we talked a little about HALT. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to write more about it. Self-help is full of acronyms and aphorisms and a lot of them are more cute than useful, but this one is a keeper. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired: When you feel irritated or anxious, one — or more — of those four conditions is likely at play.

And if not noticed and tended to, they can lead you to very bad places: explosions at others, self-destructive acts, relapses into addictions.

The genius of HALT is that it reminds us of several things at the same time:

To halt before we act out, and reconnect with the divine.

To tend to our physical and emotional well-being — not just go running around on fumes without eating and sleeping.

That these feelings are ephemeral, and once we see them for what they are and let go of our attachment to them, they lose their power over us.

[Read the rest of What Works: How Sweet to Do Nothing at bustedhalo.com.]