Coaching practices for Direct Experience Contemplative
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Direct Experience Contemplative, 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
- When I try to pray it turns into thinking about God
- When I read scripture I stay stuck in my head
- My prayer life has quietly become a place I retreat to and stay
- I’m drawn to this kind of deep contemplative prayer but I have a job, kids, a full life
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 - 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 - Moving from reading into wordless presence
Let sacred reading gradually release into silence rather than remaining an intellectual activity.
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 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 - Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - Attending to the true self beneath the false self
Recognize the constructed social persona (false self) and rest in the deeper self beneath it.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Bring contemplative attention to ordinary moments
Practice full presence in mundane activities as a form of sacred attentiveness.
The Perennial Philosophy, Made Practical - Contemplation, prayer, or meditation toward the larger
Use a contemplative practice to dissolve, briefly, the boundary of the self.
Self-Transcendence: Beyond the Self
Related concerns
- Contemplative Outreach
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 Practices Meaning
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.
- Contemplation And Active Life
Practice the Cloud’s method within an active life — Keating and Merton both affirm it is possible.
The mixed life: contemplation alongside action
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey When Starting Out
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.
- Contemplatio Resting Prayer
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
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