Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval, and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person, or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God, and God’s healing action within.
Amen.

Each morning, our online staff meeting begins with the Welcoming Prayer. In front of a screen filled with coworkers/friends, we each take a few deep breaths and center our bodies in our chairs. “Welcome, welcome, welcome,” one of us reads, as an invitation to our spirits.

Welcoming Prayer is a powerfully transformative, contemplative practice of becoming deeply present and attentive to ALL that comes to us in our lives, so that we may live in healing and freedom.

In welcoming prayer, we begin by making space for keen attention to what’s happening right now in our experience – both in our circumstances, and our mental, emotional, and physical responses to those circumstances. And in this season of national crisis and personal challenges, SO much is happening, and clamors for attention – but are we paying attention with fruitfulness?

Lacking fruitful attention, we are held captive to unchallenged patterns of attachments, addictions, and reactivity.

Having created a welcome, open space for such awareness, we move to surrender and release. Welcoming prayer gently but firmly guides us through the resistances we encounter, so that we can become open to the renewing presence and work of God in our lives. A common fruit of this prayer is a sense of becoming “unstuck.”

By pausing to pray this prayer we stand in a grounded place and allow ourselves to embrace these moments and then let them go. We choose freedom over attachment and control. As Cynthia Bourgeault teaches, this practice of surrender is not passive, but rather it is “the active exercise of a receptive power.”

Grounded in such power, we can engage in fruitful action with liberation and love. What is mine to do today? How am I being freed to do it in a less reactive, more powerfully grounded way?

The Welcoming Prayer was developed and taught in this form by Mary Mrozowski (1925-1993), a founding member of Contemplative Outreach, with each phrase carefully representing key challenges and opportunities of the soul.

Further reflections on the Welcoming Prayer can be found on p. 234 of our beautifully illustrated book, Beyond Our Efforts: A Celebration of Denver Peacemaking, available on Amazon.