Coaching practices for Dart of Longing Prayer
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Dart of Longing Prayer, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My contemplation keeps sprawling into long mental speeches and I lose the thread
- When I pray I fall back on memorized, safe phrases that don’t touch what’s really in me
- When I try to pray it turns into thinking about God
- My prayer life has quietly become a place I retreat to and stay
- I pass real suffering all day
Practices that may help
- 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 - Oratio: praying in response to what arose
Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - 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 - Contemplation opening to universal compassion
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Use flash tonglen in the moment of encountering suffering
A single in-breath of someone’s pain and an out-breath of goodwill is a complete act of tonglen.
Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending - 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 - 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 - Practice the Examen daily and briefly
Do a short Examen most days rather than a long one occasionally.
The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review - Sitting for twenty minutes, twice daily
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - 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
Related concerns
- Spontaneous Prayer Practice
Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
Oratio: praying in response to what arose
- Apophatic Prayer Practice
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
Bearing the darkness of not-knowing
- Contemplative Dryness
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
- Dry Prayer Practice
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
- Negative Theology Prayer
Let go of all mental images and concepts of God to rest in what transcends concepts.
Apophatic prayer: releasing images of God
- Prayer And Meaning
The Serenity Prayer — asking for serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what can be, and wisdom to know the difference — encodes a three-part cognitive and behavioural process: accurate classification of control, appropriate action or acceptance, and the discernment to distinguish between them. It predates and converges with the Stoic dichotomy of control, ACT’s acceptance-action balance, and modern stress-appraisal research. The prayer’s value is as a practical diagnostic, not just an aspiration.
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