Coaching practices for Silent Presence After Prayer

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Silent Presence After Prayer, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • 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
  • The moment I go quiet to pray, my head fills up
  • 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 prayer has gone completely dry
  • I want to sit silently with God, but the second I try, my mind grabs onto a thought and runs

Practices that may help

  1. Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
    Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
    Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
  2. 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
  3. Entering and sitting in silence
    Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
    Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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

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