Coaching practices for Deliberate Emptiness
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Deliberate Emptiness, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Every gap in my day, every pause in a conversation, I rush to fill — and I’ve got a nagging sense that all this packed busyness is exactly why nothing new ever has room to surface in me.
- Every gap in my day gets instantly plugged
- There’s never a single quiet moment
- My prayer has gone completely dry
- Even in meditation I’m secretly grading myself, chasing some better state, treating sitting as a means to an end
Practices that may help
- Find the use of empty space
Create deliberate emptiness — in your schedule, your mind, your output — and let it do its work.
Wu Wei — the Practice of Effortless Action - The value of emptiness — making space
Deliberately preserve unscheduled, unstructured time as the space from which clarity and creativity arise.
The Tao Te Ching, Made Practical - Practising intentional silence
Build short periods of deliberate quiet into the day — no input, no output — as a return to ground.
Pu: Taoist Simplicity and the Uncarved Block - 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 - Shikantaza — "just sitting" in the Soto Zen tradition
Sit with complete presence and nothing to achieve — no goal, no technique, no observer separate from sitting.
Open Monitoring Meditation, Made Practical - Resting in the gap between thoughts
Notice the small silences between thoughts and let attention settle there.
The Power of Now, In Practice - Rest as the witness rather than in objects
Allow the inquiry to culminate in resting as the awareness that perceives, rather than in any object perceived.
Self-Inquiry: Ramana Maharshi’s Path of Direct Investigation - 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 - Practice inquiry into the ground of your experience
Investigate the aware presence that underlies all mental content as a way of touching the real.
The Perennial Philosophy, Made Practical - Recognize and name existential vacuum when it appears
When you feel a pervasive boredom or emptiness that pleasure-seeking doesn’t fill, recognize it as a meaning problem, not a mood problem.
Logotherapy
Related concerns
- When Contemplative Prayer Entering Silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Entering and sitting in silence
- Emptiness As Freedom
Create deliberate emptiness — in your schedule, your mind, your output — and let it do its work.
Find the use of empty space
- Existential Emptiness Treatment
When you feel a pervasive boredom or emptiness that pleasure-seeking doesn’t fill, recognize it as a meaning problem, not a mood problem.
Recognize and name existential vacuum when it appears
- Taoist Inner Silence
Notice the layer of continuous inner commentary on experience and practise resting in the experience itself.
Quieting the commentary track
- The Cloud Of Unknowing Contemplation Beyond Concepts Before Bed
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.
- Contemplative Bare Intention
Reach toward God with a bare, loving intention stripped of all thought and image.
The naked intent: directing love without images
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