The Welcome Prayer & Depression

As promised in yesterday's post – some thoughts on the Welcome Prayer when dealing with persistent low energy situations like depression. I must come clean and say that I have nothing useful to add to what you can find in a marvellous book called, ‘The Mindful Way Through Depression’, by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn. If depression is what gets to you and if you don’t want to spend money on a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction therapist then this book is a must. The authors are not fly-by-night self helpers. Mark Williams is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Oxford; John Teasdale is a research scientist at Oxford and Cambridge; Zindel Segal holds the Chair in Psychotherapy at Toronto University and Jon Kabat-Zinn is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Massachusetts University Medical School. We’re talking serious scientists here.

And by the way, if depression is not an issue for you, don’t be put off by the title. I found the book very helpful in my developing practice of meditation, not least because it includes a companion CD of guided meditations. However, back to the Welcome Prayer; or rather on from the Welcome Prayer to page 183 of my edition of ‘The Mindful Way .....’ where you find something called ‘the three minute breathing space’. Guess what? It’s the Welcome Prayer in Buddhist mindfulness clothes!

Which brings me to a vista which some devotees of every religion find disturbing; at this level of conscious there is a remarkable sense of the unity of all created things. If you depend on the idea that your religious commitment is exclusive, that what you believe is the TRUTH which believers in other religions don’t possess then this is a vista you will want to get away from as soon as possible. Of course the standpoint from which we each catch a glimpse of this wonderful vista is culturally conditioned. Most of us here in what was western Christendom share a cultural heritage which is deeply imbued with Christianity. The good news is that going deeply into contemplative prayer brings us to the point at which we can see how much we share with our fellow human beings, no matter what their cultural background. In our global society that is Good News indeed.