Third Sunday of Lent, March 8, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Focus and sink in
Steps to pray the “Welcoming Prayer.” (See yesterday, today and tomorrow, and tomorrow)
- Focus and sink in
- Welcome
- Let go
If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
So if I feel pain, feel it 100%.
If I feel joy, feel it 100%.
Like Job beside the fire with his friends, cast all the ashes on my head.
Woe is me, I am undone. Don’t despair. Stay with it.
When I decide to do this and practice doing it, it gets easier.
In her Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Cynthia Bourgeault asks me to feel this physical or emotional pain as a sensation in my body. Focus on it. Pay attention.
Become very present to it, with all of your attention. If you are angry, see if you can be present to how anger is manifesting in you. Is your jaw clenched? Is your stomach in knots? If fear is present, what is the sensation of fear? See if you can pay attention to what it feels like inside you. Is your breath short? Is there a sense of vertigo, or a stampede of “fight or flight” adrenaline? Don’t try to change anything. Just stay present. (p. 143)
Why? Not in order to understand. Not yet. Leave the thinking to God. What is the Holy Spirit doing while I’m thinking about what the Holy Spirit is doing? Of course. He’s waiting for me to stop!
Paul gets this right in his sounds-like-desperate poetry of Romans 7 and 8:
O wretched man I am. Who will rescue me from this body of death – thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord … I don’t know how to pray, but the Spirit himself pleads with God for me in GROANS THAT WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS.
Stay with it. Stick with it. My body is mostly a strange land unmapped, unknown except by what I “think” about it. Babies know. We don’t have to give up the primal physical sensations when we begin to “think,” but mostly we do. No wonder Jesus loved the little children. They didn’t think themselves out of their bodies.
Cynthia calls this “dissociation or repression, and it is one of the primary occupational hazards of people on a spiritual path.”
Give me living water, that I may never thirst again.
Like dancing, like learning to play the guitar, “focusing and sinking in” is much easier to learn by doing than talking about it. The words keep me at a distance. Try doing the classic “six steps of focusing” with guidance from a teacher (from chapter 4 of Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, 1978):
1 Clearing a space
What I will ask you to do will be silent, just to yourself. Take a moment just to relax . . . All right—now, inside you, I would like you to pay attention inwardly, in your body, perhaps in your stomach or chest. Now see what comes there when you ask, “How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?” Sense within your body. Let the answers come slowly from this sensing. When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say “Yes, that’s there. I can feel that, there.” Let there be a little space between you and that. Then ask what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. Usually there are several things.
2 Felt Sense
From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on. DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back from it. Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking about—too many to think of each one alone. But you can feel all of these things together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things, and in there you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that.
3 Handle
What is the quality of this unclear felt sense? Let a word, a phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense itself. It might be a quality-word, like tight, sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, jumpy or a phrase, or an image. Stay with the quality of the felt sense till something fits it just right.
4 Resonating
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word (phrase, or image). Check how they resonate with each other. See if there is a little bodily signal that lets you know there is a fit. To do it, you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as the word. Let the felt sense change, if it does, and also the word or picture, until they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.
5 Asking
Now ask: what is it, about this whole problem, that makes this quality (which you have just named or pictured)? Make sure the quality is sensed again, freshly, vividly (not just remembered from before). When it is here again, tap it, touch it, be with it, asking, “What makes the whole problem so       ?” Or you ask, “What is in this sense?”
If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt sense, just let that kind of pat answer go by. Return your attention to your body and freshly find the felt sense again. Then ask it again.
Be with the felt sense till something comes along with a shift, a slight “give” or release.
6 Receiving
Receive whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way. Stay with it a while, even if it is only a slight release. Whatever comes, this is only one shift; there will be others. You will probably continue after a little while, but stay here for a few moments.
Wow! That’s hard work, getting back to being a baby. These instructions seem to me like a fleshed-out Romans 8:26, and when the Holy Spirit sings and groans for me, I am getting beyond my “ordinary awareness” and touching the spiritual awareness of the Reality that’s always been there, that God gave and will never take away, so now I can begin to say,
Yes! I’ll take that.
Oh! I already have it!
Thank you!
Again, to the woman at the well, Jesus said,
“The hour is coming, and is now here,
When true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth;
and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.
God is Spirit, and those who worship him
must worship in Spirit and truth.”
 (Exodus 17, Psalm 95, Romans 5, John 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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