Coaching practices for Contemplative Dryness

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Contemplative Dryness, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My prayer has gone completely dry
• When I try to pray it turns into thinking about God
• The same intrusive thoughts and moods keep ambushing me through the day and I get swept off by them before I even notice
• My contemplation keeps sprawling into long mental speeches and I lose the thread
• After I’ve read and reflected and prayed, I jump straight back into the noise of the day because just sitting in silence feels like doing nothing

Practices that may help

1. Bearing the darkness of not-knowing
   Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
   The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
2. The naked intent: directing love without images
   Reach toward God with a bare, loving intention stripped of all thought and image.
   The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
3. 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
4. Using a short word in prayer
   Choose a single syllable word — "God" or "love" — and use it like a dart of longing.
   The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
5. Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
   Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
   Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
6. Pressing thoughts into the cloud of forgetting
   Put every thought — including holy ones — beneath you, pressing them out of awareness.
   The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
7. Use a single, undirected object-gaze to invite daydreaming
   Gaze softly at a single object (window, wall, sky) without trying to think anything in particular.
   Boredom and Creativity: Why Your Best Ideas Need Idle Time
8. Accepting passive purification: not trying to fix it
   The essential move of the dark night is to stop trying to force a return to consolation.
   The Dark Night of the Soul: John of the Cross
9. Working with attachments in the night of the senses
   Use the night of the senses to examine what you have been clinging to for identity and security.
   The Dark Night of the Soul: John of the Cross
10. 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

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