Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

Before I leave this series, I want to do proper justice to the Welcoming Prayer, which I’m using as the basis for this particular way of letting go of emotions. (There are others, which I’ll cover in my forthcoming course, the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit).

As I’ve been presenting it so far, the Welcoming Practice is simply this: When you become aware of a powerful negative emotion, you pay attention to it, allow it into your awareness, and welcome it by name. You say something like “Welcome, anger”, and then allow anger to be, and then allow anger to go. And then you go on with your life without having reinforced your usual emotional cycle.

photo credit: Incase Designs

The Emotional Circuit

I’ve talked about the cycle (or circuit) in depth in earlier posts in the series, but to review, it starts with the three emotional programs for happiness: power and control, esteem and affection, and security and survival. These programs condition our attachments and aversions, the things we move towards and the things we move away from, and from those we generate hidden agendas with which we go through life.

Inevitably, our hidden agendas clash with those of others (or with things that just happen in life) in triggering events, which lead to an experience of frustration. At this point, we can go one of two ways. We can break the cycle using a “circuit breaker” such as the Welcoming Practice, or we can go on around the cycle of identifying with the afflictive emotion, which leads to well-practiced internal dialogue about how this always happens to us and it’s someone’s fault and it’s not fair, followed by emotional turmoil which takes us right back round into the emotional programs for happiness again. Round and round and round.

photo credit: alanwoo

The Welcoming Prayer

So, the Welcoming Practice (as I call it) is a circuit breaker, one of a number. But the Welcoming Prayer is a little bit more. It’s the creation of the late Mary Mrozowski, and came together in the context of the Centering Prayer movement, which is where I encountered it. (All of this material – the emotional programs for happiness, the cycle, and the Welcoming Prayer – is covered in Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, chapter 13.)

There are three steps to the Welcoming Prayer. The first, which arises from Mary Mrozowski’s background with biofeedback, is to “focus and sink in”: that is, to become aware of your physical sensations connected with the experience of frustration. Bear in mind that you are using these sensations to become “associated, but not identified” – by paying attention to the physical sensations, you pull yourself out of your head and are no longer swept along helplessly inside the current of emotion, but you are also not dissociating or repressing. You are aware of the emotion.

The second step is the “welcome” itself. This is the hardest part to understand. Why are we welcoming this thing again? Don’t we want to be rid of it? And this is the secret of the welcoming prayer: It’s not about being rid of the emotion (though that is going to be the outcome). It’s about remaining conscious and present rather than fleeing to the comfort of the internal dialogue and the emotional programs for happiness.

It also (this bears repeating and repeating, because it’s the thing that we keep getting wrong) isn’t about welcoming the context or the situation which has led to frustration. Often this context is genuinely bad and not something we should welcome – it may be abuse, cruelty or injustice. We are welcoming, not the context, but the content. We are welcoming our own reaction and owning it as a part of ourselves – and in so doing we are remaining connected to that part of ourselves and increasing our integration as people.

photo credit: alborzshawn

The first two steps are not to be rushed. The more you practice, the quicker they get, on average, but the third step comes along in its own time, sometimes after you’ve gone back and forth a few times between being aware of the physical sensations of emotion and welcoming the emotion as part of yourself. When the emotion begins to dissolve and evaporate, as it will, you make a mental gesture of letting go of it. Clinging to it carries you right on round the circuit. Letting go of it allows you to move on without reinforcing your emotional pattern.

How do you make this mental gesture? You may open your hand, in your mind or literally, as if you were letting a small bird fly free. Or you may use words.

One form of words you can use is simply “I let go of my anger” (or whatever emotion it might be). But there’s also the litany that Mary Mrozowski used, if you dare:

I let go my desire for security and survival.
I let go my desire for esteem and affection.
I let go my desire for power and control.
I let go my desire to change the situation.

Boom! That’s huge. That’s really breaking the cycle in a dramatic fashion, because what you’re doing is giving a vote of no confidence to the emotional programs for happiness and acknowledging that they aren’t going to take you anywhere that is ultimately satisfying. You’re remaining present to the real situation as it is, and recognising that the really important thing is how you respond to it.

That may be at a higher level of development than where you currently find yourself (it’s higher than I currently find myself, I don’t mind admitting). But people who use it consistently become very, very remarkable people.

UPDATE: I’ve now revised the material in this series and turned it into a self-reflection process as part of my ebook, Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It. It’s included when you sign up for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course.

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