Coaching practices for Dry Prayer Practice

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Dry Prayer Practice, 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
• I already pray five times a day, but the long hours in between feel spiritually empty
• When I try to pray it turns into thinking about God
• My silent prayer keeps drifting
• I keep starting this nightly prayer practice and then dropping it the second life gets busy, because I’ve made it this long involved thing

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. Integrating dhikr with the five daily prayers
   Use dhikr to extend the orientation of salat throughout the day, not just in formal practice periods.
   Sufi Dhikr: The Practice of Remembrance
3. 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
4. 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
5. 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
6. Making lectio divina a brief, daily practice
   Practice a short lectio daily rather than a long lectio occasionally.
   Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
7. 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
8. Understanding who this practice is for
   Recognize that the Cloud’s method is not for beginners — it requires prior formation.
   The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts
9. Oratio: praying in response to what arose
   Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
   Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
10. Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
    Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
    Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.