Hello, Dear Friend

When I think of practicing invitation, inevitably, I am drawn to practices that I have learned from Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh. The practice itself invites our imagination to engage, and with that engagement, the ability to find our way through difficult and painful feelings. 

He calls this the seventh practice of mindfulness. It works like this. We find ourselves becoming aware of a painful feeling. We pause and, perhaps, find a place where we can sit, (although, you can do this standing in the line at the grocery store with a little practice). We take an intentional inbreath, and as we breathe in, we say: hello, dear (painful feeling). I am here to take care of you.  When we breathe out, we smile at our painful feeling. 

Breathing in, we greet our painful feeling as an old friend.

Breathing out, we smile at our painful feeling. 

As he often taught around practices of mindfulness, we continue in this breathing in and breathing out practice until we feel something shift. 

If you are like me, you don’t like painful feelings, and your inclination, like mine, may be to run in the opposite direction, or engage in thoughts or activities as a distraction. Invariably, the painful feelings hang around at the door of our hearts, waiting for us to finish our running and our distractions. 

By greeting our painful feeling as an old friend, we lessen the anxious inclination to flee and to distract. We move into a place that is more calm than when we first became aware of the painful feeling. The very fact that it is a painful feeling likely means that it is an old one–one we have encountered before, and greeting it, welcoming it to sit down with us and have a cup of tea (real or imagined–I mean, why not make tea and sit with that feeling for a while, breathing and smiling) takes some of the edges off of it. Our only “job” in this practice is to be present, in the moment. This is a practice of invitation. It is one that begins to transform us and very likely how we view and what we learn from our old friends, painful feelings. 

~Bob Patrick