Coaching practices for How to Enter Silence Prayer
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Enter Silence Prayer, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My days are wall-to-wall noise, inside and out, and I can’t find the quiet to pray the way I want to
- My silent prayer keeps drifting
- I want to sit silently with God, but the second I try, my mind grabs onto a thought and runs
- I love sitting with scripture and I love silent prayer, but I do them as two separate things and they feel a little disconnected
- After I’ve read and reflected and prayed, I jump straight back into the noise of the day because just sitting in silence feels like doing nothing
Practices that may help
- Entering and sitting in silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - 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 - 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 - Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - Releasing all thoughts without judgment
Let every thought — pleasant or unpleasant, trivial or profound — pass without engaging it.
Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating - 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 - Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating
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. - Silent dhikr (khafi): inner remembrance
Repeat a divine name or phrase internally, with the heart rather than the tongue.
Sufi Dhikr: The Practice of Remembrance - 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
Related concerns
- Silent Prayer Method
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
Sitting for twenty minutes, twice daily
- Silent Prayer Practice
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
- Silent Presence After Prayer
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
- Centering Prayer Duration
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.
- Centering Prayer The Method Of Thomas Keating Before Bed
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.
- When Centering Prayer Releasing Thoughts
Let every thought — pleasant or unpleasant, trivial or profound — pass without engaging it.
Releasing all thoughts without judgment
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