This year I started a Monk in the World online retreat through Abbey of the Arts. It is free when you sign up and I have no idea why I have not done the retreat before, but maybe now it just the right time.
Today’s meditation for week 2 day 4 was on hospitality. Christine Valters-Paintner introduced us to the idea of Welcoming Prayer.
As I listened, a memory and a visual image came to me. The memory was of my husband and I coming out of the Dublin airport in out little rental car to a roundabout. This was not just any roundabout, but one with many lanes. Knowing what lane you needed to be in to exit and getting in that lane was a bit hairy, but he did it. Yay, Tim!
I know I have mentioned before that I struggle with panic attacks. There is a definite sense of spinning when I get them. It might be something like being on a roundabout and going round and round looking for a way out. The paradox of panic attacks is that the more you try to get rid of them or look for and exit, the worse they get. The resistance to and wanting a way out of them only fuels the panic. At times it feels like being in a roundabout at high speed with someone else driving faster and faster as you fear that you will eventually be flung out into the abyss.
So, roundabouts and panic attacks. Where does Welcoming Prayer fit into this?
In Welcoming Prayer the idea is to focus on your thoughts and feelings, then welcome it lovingly in without analyzing or judging them. This echos what my therapist and I worked on years ago to “just let it be there.” (That was a better way of looking at it for the than accepting it, which was something I thought I could never do.)
The next step in Welcoming Prayer is to let it go. That is the really hard part as, of course I want to let it go. I want to run as far away from it as I can. But, it feels like the meditation today through the retreat helped me understand letting go a little differently.
Christine Valters-Paintner writes that letting go means:
- Let go of the desire for security and survival
- Let go of the desire for affection and esteem
- Let go of the desire for control and power
- Let go of the desire to change the situation
That is quite different than running away and can actually bring me to a different place where I see options I did not see before. In my art journal, I decided these were like tunnels or bridges (the green paths) that could not be seen from the road. There is another way. Maybe the heart of Welcoming Prayer is that it helps us find another way. A way not so influenced by the desires listed above.
Because I am very visual, I drew my thoughts out in my art journal and this is what I came up with.
Amen – it is so
Blessings!
Christine
