Coaching practices for Christian Mysticism Meditation
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Christian Mysticism Meditation, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- The same intrusive thoughts and moods keep ambushing me through the day and I get swept off by them before I even notice
- My prayer life has quietly become a place I retreat to and stay
- When I read scripture I stay stuck in my head
- Since I started sitting in silence, old buried feelings and memories keep welling up during and after, and it unnerves me
- All my pictures of God
Practices that may help
- Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials. - Learning from the Desert Fathers and Mothers
Study and apply the radical simplicity, discernment, and watchfulness of the desert tradition.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Contemplation opening to universal compassion
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous 14th-century English mystical text that teaches a form of contemplative prayer in which the practitioner abandons all concepts, images, and thoughts of God — even holy ones — and reaches toward God by love rather than by understanding. The author distinguishes a "cloud of unknowing" between the practitioner and God, penetrable only by love, and a "cloud of forgetting" into which all other thoughts are pressed. It is a foundational text for Western apophatic mysticism; its practices are devotional and experiential, not clinically validated. - Moving from reading into wordless presence
Let sacred reading gradually release into silence rather than remaining an intellectual activity.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Allowing the "divine therapy" — psychological healing through practice
Expect that regular centering prayer surfaces buried emotional material, and allow it.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - Apophatic prayer: releasing images of God
Let go of all mental images and concepts of God to rest in what transcends concepts.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - The mixed life: contemplation alongside action
Practice the Cloud’s method within an active life — Keating and Merton both affirm it is possible.
The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts - Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating
Centering Prayer is a contemporary Christian contemplative practice developed by Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington in the 1970s, drawing on The Cloud of Unknowing and the Desert Father tradition. The method is simple: sit in silence for 20 minutes, use a sacred word as a gentle intention to consent to God’s presence, and release all thoughts as they arise. It is a devotional practice; some components parallel studied meditation mechanisms, but centering prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials. - Entering and sitting in silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey
Related concerns
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey During Conflict
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
Contemplation opening to universal compassion
- Contemplative Practice
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Contemplative Prayer
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey After A Loss
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey After A Setback
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey At Work
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
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