“Welcome to your practice” is a phrase I first heard my meditation teacher use to begin a session and is the same one I often use as well.  One reason I like to begin this way is to signal that we are crossing what I see as a sacred threshold between living our lives as we normally might, with our minds wandering much of the time, to a special practice where we are actively training the mind to rest its attention and focus instead on the felt experience of our own natural process of breathing.

In addition to a transitional signal, this phrase also makes clear whose meditation practice this is:  yours!  This may seem quite obvious, and at the same time I talk with prospective students who decide to try meditation on the recommendation of someone like a partner, friend, family member and/or mental health professional.  Now I’m certainly not trying to say that coming to meditation on the advice of a trusted third party is a bad idea, on the contrary.  I do believe, however, that if an attempt to develop a practice doesn’t eventually become something one does primarily because they themselves believe in its worth, then chances of developing a consistent and stable practice are significantly reduced.

Finally, a welcome to your meditation practice can also be thought of as a welcoming home, where “home” is the true nature of the mind, free from distraction by discursive and habitual thought patterns.1  A sense of “home” ideally holds a sense of rest, safety and peace, and so practicing meditation can be a doorway to increasing the feeling of these things in your life, regardless of what your actual home is currently like. In the practice of “bringing the mind home”, we can discover our mind’s true nature, and come to rely on it as a consistently safe and wholesome place to experience the truth of our being.

1  The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche, Chapter 5: “Bringing the Mind Home”

Photo from May 21, 2019: 
West door to the Bishops Gardens next to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC