Coaching practices for Mixed Life Prayer
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Mixed Life Prayer, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- 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
- When I pray I fall back on memorized, safe phrases that don’t touch what’s really in me
- 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
- 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 - Oratio: praying in response to what arose
Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - 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 - 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 - Making lectio divina a brief, daily practice
Practice a short lectio daily rather than a long lectio occasionally.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - 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 - Pair the prayer with a gratitude practice for what is already working
The prayer focuses on difficulty; balancing it with acknowledgment of what is already good stabilises perspective.
The Serenity Prayer as a Practice Framework - Use the prayer in community or accountability practice
The prayer was designed to be said together — community amplifies both the acceptance and the courage.
The Serenity Prayer as a Practice Framework - 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
Related concerns
- Community Prayer Practice
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
Contemplation opening to universal compassion
- 20 Minutes Twice Daily Prayer
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
Sitting for twenty minutes, twice daily
- Benedictine And Trappist Prayer
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.
- Benedictine Prayer Method
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 And Healing
Expect that regular centering prayer surfaces buried emotional material, and allow it.
Allowing the "divine therapy" — psychological healing through practice
- Centering Prayer Fruits
Let the quality of openness and consent from the sit carry into how you move through the day.
Carrying contemplative consent into daily activity
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.