🪴Welcome: Emotions aren't the enemy.

Prayers and practices for messy feelings & God's presence in them.

Many of us didn’t grow up knowing what to do with our emotions. Maybe they were dismissed, minimized, or met with discomfort. Maybe we were praised for being “easygoing” or “low-maintenance” but never taught how to process anger or grief. Maybe we learned that certain emotions—like sadness or frustration—were bad, and so we swallowed them down.

But emotions don’t disappear just because we suppress them. They linger beneath the surface, shaping how we respond to the world, how we love, how we trust, how we show up in relationships. They color our prayers and our perceptions, whether we realize it or not.

I wish I had known about the Welcoming Prayer earlier in my life. In my spiritual direction training program, we spent a lot of time in November and December reflecting on this prayer practice.

Rooted in the contemplative Christian tradition, the Welcoming Prayer is a practice of noticing, naming, and releasing our emotions into God’s care in the present moment of our daily lives.

It invites us to acknowledge our emotions—not to push them away or judge them, but to welcome God into them. This prayer gently teaches us to loosen our grip on control, security, and approval and trust that God is with us in every emotion that rises. Mary Mrozowski, inspired by Father Thomas Keating's teaching, developed this practice.

Here’s how my instructor Julie Saad, who studied under Keating, puts it:

The Welcoming Prayer practice enables us to consent to God’s presence and action in and through the experiences of everyday life. It is prayer because of our consent. The Welcoming Prayer practice heals the wounds of a lifetime by addressing them where they are stored—in the body. Be patient with yourself. The practice is simple and uncomplicated. Trust the process and the wisdom of this embodied practice.

I want to model this for my children—to teach them that emotions are not enemies but invitations. But even with this awareness, I still find myself slipping into old patterns. Recently, something in my marriage left me feeling hurt. At first, I did what I was conditioned to do: I ignored the feeling. I tried to rationalize it away rather than acknowledge it. I told myself it wasn’t that big of a deal. But emotions have a way of making themselves known, whether we want them to or not.

By the time my husband asked what was wrong, my unspoken hurt had morphed into anger. I could feel it in my body—tension in my shoulders, a heaviness in my chest. What I had avoided expressing had built up, and suddenly, I wasn’t just reacting to the moment—I was reacting to all the moments I hadn’t let myself feel.

Later, I sat with my emotions in prayer. I turned to the Welcoming Prayer, not to push my feelings away, but to let God meet me in them. I took a deep breath and named what was swirling inside me: I felt hurt. I felt unseen. I felt vulnerable. And underneath it all, I felt afraid that if I expressed these feelings, I wouldn’t be understood.

I was struck by these words from Joyce Rupp’s poem, Transformation:

"My heart begs your entrance / Even as it fights and holds you off."

That’s how it feels, doesn’t it? We want to welcome God into our emotions, but we resist. We fear being too much or not enough.

We’d rather avoid, suppress, or control than sit in the discomfort of vulnerability.

God is not afraid of what we feel.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

The Welcoming Prayer invites us to pause, to notice, and then—when we’re ready—to loosen our grip. Not to dismiss our emotions, but to release their hold on us. To let go of our tight-fisted need for control and allow God’s love to transform the shadows.

I am still learning. I still resist. But I want to keep praying, keep welcoming, keep trusting that God’s presence holds me steady—even when my emotions feel messy and overwhelming.

Again, Rupp’s words echo in my heart:

"Enter and rest in shadows / Until they finally give up their dark.
Come, fill my being with your love / Until your transforming radiance
Is the only lasting thing."

I don’t know exactly what it looks like to rest in the shadows until God’s light transforms them, but I want to try. I want to trust that God’s presence is steady, even when my emotions are not. I want to welcome divine love—not just in the easy moments but also in the ones that feel vulnerable, uncertain, and raw.

Emotions may flicker and burn out, but the Light of the World is eternal.

When we welcome whatever we are experiencing in any given moment…our “welcome”…is a sacred word that symbolizes our intention to consent to God’s presence and action within. Each feeling…is an opportunity to return to our consent to God. So whenever we welcome, implicit in that welcoming is our consent to the Divine Indwelling. That Divine Indwelling is always bringing compassion to us, is always loving us into being.

At the moment we turn around and welcome instead of doing whatever else we usually do — ignore, repress, resist, react, fight and struggle—in that moment of welcoming, we join God in God’s compassion.

I can’t give you quantifiable proof but I can give you lots of experiential evidence that in that moment of welcoming we are brought a little closer to healing, wholeness, and holiness.

Cherry Haisten

Movements of Welcoming Prayer

You are making a choice in praying the Welcoming Prayer Practice—a choice to become your true self. As Richard Rohr says, “When you know who you are, everything else follows. What you do follows.”

I can not take credit for this practice, but as I’ve promised, I’m bringing you along in my seminary journey—because Christian spiritual practices are for everyone, not just a religious few.

When you are practicing Welcoming Prayer:

• Feel and sink into what you are experiencing at this moment in your body—the feelings, emotions, thoughts, sensations, or commentaries.

• Welcome what you are experiencing at this moment in your body as an opportunity to consent to the Divine Indwelling. Welcome the Divine Indwelling into the feelings, emotions, thoughts, sensations, or commentaries in your body by saying “Welcome.”

• Let go by saying the following sentence: “I let go of my desire for security, affection, control and embrace this moment as it is.”

Further into this Year of Breath edition, we will explore Welcoming Prayer, its fruits, and how you can integrate this simple prayer practice into the comings and goings of your busy days.

A Prayer for Mothers

First: A caveat. This newsletter is not solely for mothers. In fact, you may have sensed that I’ve been drawing a wider circle here to move beyond even parents/caregivers. But, my thoughtful friend of

Coffee + Crumbs

invited me to write a prayer specifically for mothers to close their Volume II print magazine, and I’d love to share these words with you here.

Yes, I did cry when writing it. Some might say I welcomed God into my emotions. (See what I did there?)

O God, sometimes it seems

To be a mother

Is to be a time traveler,

Caught in the swirl

Of what was

And what might yet be.

How beautiful it is

To hold the fullness of time

Swaddled in our arms.

How sacred,

To gaze into the eyes

Of the one we once rocked to sleep,

And now see reflected back

An overflow of memories

Of who we’ve been together.

O God of yesterday and tomorrow,

No one prepared us

For this voyage into the unknown

A mother’s heart is an imperfect vessel

For time’s ceaseless passage.

Our children grow —

And keep growing.

And our hearts

Keep growing with them.

But how can the human heart

Contain a mother’s love

Through the ages?

We watch as time unfolds,

Pencil marks on the doorframe

Measuring a collection of seconds

That slip between our fingers,

And our chests ache.

They say time heals all wounds,

And while time is a gift,

Sometimes it feels

Like it wounds just the same.

How bittersweet the memory

Of little fingerprints

That once found their way onto everything,

Yet were wiped away

At some point

For the last time.

The drumbeat of footed pajamas

Padding down the hall

Fades into distant echoes.

Motherhood is an invitation

Into the everchanging companion of time.

We sense it but can’t see it

We know it but can’t fathom it

We feel it but can’t touch it—

This turning over of time.

We want to reach out and grab it,

Like dust motes floating in a sunbeam

That lights our way.

O Christ who exists in and out of time,

We ache for what was.

We struggle to stay in the present.

We worry about what’s to come.

We reflect on the babies they were,

The children they are,

And the people they are becoming.

Grant us Your grace

To catch snapshots

Of the fullness of Your time

In the fullness of our mothering days.

O Creator and Keeper of time,

In You, who can not be bound

By seconds or centuries,

We experience the fullness of time—

Of what was,

And what is,

And what someday will be.

Help us dwell in the now.

Peel back the layers,

So that our hearts

May stay tender to the present.

As the finite unfolds

Into the infinite,

The fleeting

Into the eternal.

Help us pause—

Not to pull away,

But to be fully present

In Your presence

Within our children

And in our very lives.

Amen.

Keep Reading For…

If you’re feeling the weight of your emotions or the world around you, this week’s Year of Breath is here to help you pause, reflect, and reconnect with God’s presence.

Inside this edition, you’ll find:

• Breath prayers to center your heart and mind

• Thoughtful, guided reflection prompts to explore your emotions

• A simple spiritual practice to ground you in God’s love

• A playlist to accompany your quiet moments

• A phone wallpaper to carry peace with you wherever you go

• A scripture passage to meditate on throughout the week

• A blessing to send you into this week with hope

Choose what resonates most with you and leave the rest.

Breath Prayer