Devotions based on David Benner’s book, Soulful Spirituality

Welcoming Prayer is a way to respond to emotional upsets with a spirit of surrender. It involves the process of: focus, welcome, and letting go. We can’t welcome an emotion until we first acknowledge it and bring it to the center of our consciousness. Like the emotion of anger. We can focus on the sensation in our body that we feel when another driver cuts us off. The next step is to welcome that emotion as a guest in the home of ourselves.. As we do this something gets released inside of us. Then we can go on to let go of the negative feelings and also the assumptions that lie behind them. As humans we may feel we need control, approval, and security to be happy but this is a lie. What we really need is to release our desire for these things and for the need to change the circumstances. There are 2 spiritual paths and one is ascent and the other descent. The way of ascent is control, willfulness, grasping and clutching. The way of descent is the way of surrender, willingness and letting go. When we surrender “we give up that which we think we already have, only to discover that for which we most deeply long.”  May we recognize we don’t control life and we can only say yes to it for in surrender it leads us to fullness of life.