Coaching practices for Expressive Prayer
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Expressive Prayer, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- When I pray I fall back on memorized, safe phrases that don’t touch what’s really in me
- My prayer life has quietly become a place I retreat to and stay
- When I try to pray it turns into thinking about God
- I find a real stillness in my prayer time and then snap right back into the same reactive, defended person the moment I get up
- I want to sit silently with God, but the second I try, my mind grabs onto a thought and runs
Practices that may help
- Oratio: praying in response to what arose
Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - 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 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 - Carrying contemplative consent into daily activity
Let the quality of openness and consent from the sit carry into how you move through the day.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - 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. - Choosing and using a sacred word
Select one simple word as your symbol of consent to God’s presence and action within.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - Combining lectio divina with centering prayer
Use a brief lectio as preparation that deepens the consent you bring to centering prayer.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - Allowing the "divine therapy" — psychological healing through practice
Expect that regular centering prayer surfaces buried emotional material, and allow it.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - 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
Related concerns
- Apophatic Prayer
Let go of all mental images and concepts of God to rest in what transcends concepts.
Apophatic prayer: releasing images of God
- Apophatic Prayer Practice
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
Bearing the darkness of not-knowing
- Apophatic Prayer Practices
Let go of all mental images and concepts of God to rest in what transcends concepts.
- Centering Prayer The Method Of Thomas Keating With My Partner
Centering Prayer is a contemporary Christian contemplative practice developed by Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington in the 1970s, drawing on The Cloud of Unknowing and the Desert Father tradition. The method is simple: sit in silence for 20 minutes, use a sacred word as a gentle intention to consent to God’s presence, and release all thoughts as they arise. It is a devotional practice; some components parallel studied meditation mechanisms, but centering prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Consent Symbol Prayer
Select one simple word as your symbol of consent to God’s presence and action within.
Choosing and using a sacred word
- Hesychia Christian Tradition
Study and apply the radical simplicity, discernment, and watchfulness of the desert tradition.
Learning from the Desert Fathers and Mothers
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