Tuesday, March 10, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Let go
We follow you with our whole heart,
we fear you and we pray to you.
Do not let us be put to shame,
but deal with us in your kindness and great mercy.
Deliver us by your wonders,
and bring glory to your name, O Lord.
The chapter on the “welcoming prayer” comes near the end of Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. Before she gets here,she covers the method, history and psychology of centering prayer. Now she describes the three steps of this “welcoming” which clears the way for centering: Focusing, Welcoming, and Letting Go.
Don’t get to the third step too quickly. The real work in the Welcoming Prayer is actually accomplished in the first two steps. Stay with them—rather like kneading a charley horse in your leg—going back and forth between “focusing” and “welcoming” until the knot begins to dissolve of its own accord.
The “letting go” is carefully pro-active. You can use many words or few., but you decide you’re ready to believe what you’re about to say. You may speak a litany or just a sentence. A longer version includes four proclamations:
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.
Cynthia refers to Mary Mrozowski, who created this practice:
Those first three, of course, are the ego’s three false self programs, and in naming them thusly, Mary said, “I feel like I’m sending a strong message to the unconscious.” The last one: “I let go my desire to change the situation”hits right between the eyeballs and is a stroke of pure genius. In no uncertain terms, it removes this practice from the ballpark of “fix-it” (”I do my practice in order to correct an unpalatable situation”) and back into unconditional presence.
Whether the pain goes on forever is not the point; the point is that throughout this entire “forever,” an awakened and surrendered consciousness can remain fully present to God.
One surprising aftermath of this practice with its focusing, welcoming and letting go … is energy! The yoke Jesus offers me, his yoke, is easy and light, and now I can receive it.
A false self system is a system working at a low level of being, which is why it remains so mechanical and viciously self-reinforcing. With its vital energy largely locked up in its defenses and neurotic programming, there is little left over to reach escape velocity into real awakened consciousness, which both requires and produces a higher level of spiritual vibrancy than we are used to.
In the Welcoming Prayer the energy normally bound up in identification is suddenly vitally freed—sometimes so dramatically you can almost hear a “whoosh”—and the influx of this new energy is immediately experienced as a deepening and vitalization of your innermost being.
As the woman watching from another booth said about Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart;
for I am gracious and merciful.
(Daniel 3, Psalm 25, Joel 2, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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