How to Welcome Your Challenges: 3 Simple Steps

A guest post by Mike Reeves-McMillan.

To live a remarkable life of courage, resilience and calm – this is something that we admire in other people, but often think we can’t achieve ourselves.

One of the secrets of this kind of success is to be able to manage the emotions that inevitably rise up in challenging circumstances. If I’m afraid, angry or depressed, it derails me. My connection with other people and the world around me is broken. There’s no flow.

So one of the most valuable life skills I’ve learned is a method of managing those emotions. It’s called the Welcoming Practice.

The Welcoming Practice is my slightly modified version of the Welcoming Prayer, which comes from the Benedictine tradition of Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is a form of meditation that’s all about gently letting go – of thoughts, of feelings, of sensations, of striving and desire. And when I’m angry, fearful or sad, I’m holding on to my desire for power and control, security and survival, or esteem and affection.

While Centering Prayer is a meditative practice that’s performed during time you set aside for it, the Welcoming Practice takes the same approach of letting go and moves it into everyday life. And it specifically addresses the frustration, anxiety and upset that come with that everyday life.

Here are the three steps of the Welcoming Practice.

1. Connect

I’m learning improv at the moment, partly to free myself up more in expressing emotion. In a recent class, we played the Hat Game.

In the Hat Game, two people, both wearing hats, play a scene together. The aim is to be present. If one of the players notices that the other has mentally “gone elsewhere”, he or she reaches out and takes the other player’s hat – which the other player isn’t present enough to prevent.

Powerful emotions take us somewhere else, inside our own world, inside our own heads. So the first step of the Welcoming Practice is to reconnect to your body.

Where in your body do you feel the emotion? Does anger burn in your chest? Does fear freeze in your gut? Does sadness pull at your eyes?

Connect to that feeling and allow yourself to feel it. It’s trying to get your attention. Give it some.

2. Welcome

Once you have connected to the feeling, welcome it by name. “Welcome, anger.” You aren’t welcoming the situation that triggered the anger – that situation may be completely unacceptable. But you’re welcoming the feeling, because it’s a part of yourself trying to alert you to something it thinks is important.

There’s actually neuroscience to support the naming part. Lieberman and his colleagues discovered that when you scan the brain of someone who is naming an emotion they are feeling, the activation of the brain shifts from feeling the emotion to a more rational, verbal mode. But Mary Mrozowski, creator of the Welcoming Prayer, discovered it independently.

3. Gently release

Once you are ready – and it’s important not to rush any of the three steps – you can gently let the emotion go, without allowing it to drive your behaviour. (That’s assuming that it isn’t serving a useful purpose, of course. If you’re being physically threatened, and fear is giving you extra strength and speed to get out of the situation, by all means use it. But in most cases in modern life, reflexively acting on the emotion isn’t going to help resolve the challenge in a positive way.)

Personally, I just use a mental gesture of letting go and allow the feeling to drain away. But you can use a form of words if you like. The original words for the Welcoming Prayer are these:

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.

Those are powerful, and advanced, words. Not everyone can go straight to saying them. But really, when you’re practicing letting go of an angry, hurt or anxious response, that’s what you’re doing at a deeper level.

The Welcoming Practice works. I’ve used it after a near-miss on the road, when I’ve been feeling down about my work, and when irritated with the people around me. It’s a simple, useful real-life practice that quickly becomes a skill of emotional control.

Mike Reeves-McMillan is a personal development coach and hypnotherapist in Auckland, New Zealand. The Welcoming Practice forms part of his free online course, Simple Stress Management Techniques.