This week we’re praying with our feelings. Read on for some chat and a description or click above to hear me lead your through this prayer.
Loss, joy, frustration, boredom, peace, despair, loneliness. Some of us live in our feelings and others completely ignore them. Personally, I’m much better at tuning into everyone else’s feelings rather than my own.
“Feelings are God’s means of knocking on the door and asking for a conversation”
(unknown author)
In Ignatian Spirituality we are taught to pray with our feelings: naming them and bringing them before God in conversation. Sometimes we experience our feelings as shameful or unreliable, but they can be the starter for a beautiful conversation with God. One memorable occasion when this prayer tool was fruitful for me was processing my twin pregnancy. I wrote out a list of all the competing feelings I could recognise in the weeks after finding out we were having twins. At the end of my journaling time I felt like God was saying ‘there is space for all of these’. It was healing to acknowledge, name and accept all of the emotions.
Praying with our Feelings
– Name a strong feeling from the past week, try to be specific.
– Journal about the feeling: what lay beneath it? How did you respond? What were the consequences? How does it appear reflecting back?
– Reflect with God about the feeling: How does He feel about it? What is His invitation to you in this? Have a conversation with God about what emerges.
Thanks to the Ignatian Sprituality Centre in Glasgow for introducing me to this exercise.
I found an alternative exercise for praying with feelings when I recently listened to a wonderful conversation on the Evolving Faith podcast between two of my favourites - Sarah Bessey and Kate Bowler. Kate’s Book ‘The Lives we Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days’ lives on my bedside table. Sarah asked her how to bless the difficult parts of our lives.
Kate responds that the best place to start is:
“Oh, I'm having a feeling that doesn't feel spiritual.”… Step one is: Identify weird sensation inside of your own body. And then maybe, two, see if that connects to an emotion word.
Her third step is to take the feeling to God and allow yourself to free associate with curiosity. Then invite God into the feeling or situation and find an image to rest into. As Kate says “let yourself have the arc and then say all these feelings are spiritual, period”.
So perhaps try out Praying with your Feelings this week and see how you find it. I’ll be back on Saturday with a conversation with Paul about our experience with this prayer.
As Kayla Craig of Liturgies for Parents says:
“And may all your life,
Your muddy, messy, wonderful life
Be a prayer.”
This Post is part of my Pocket Prayers Summer Series:
Really helpful! I had an uncomfortable and very unwelcome “big feeling” moment a few weeks ago, and found it helpful to do something to acknowledge its reality in my body when my instinct was to push it away. Somehow by saying hello to the difficult feeling it became less potent, and it did feel like a sacred encounter through it all.