Coaching practices for Stages of Prayer

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Stages of 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 silent prayer keeps drifting
• 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
• I jumped straight into the deepest, most advanced form of contemplative prayer because it sounded profound, and now I just sit there feeling lost and like nothing is happening
• 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

Practices that may help

1. Oratio: praying in response to what arose
   Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
   Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
2. 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
3. Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
   Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
   Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading
4. 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
5. 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
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. 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
8. 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
9. Contemplation opening to universal compassion
   Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
   Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey
10. The Serenity Prayer as a Practice Framework
    The Serenity Prayer — asking for serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what can be, and wisdom to know the difference — encodes a three-part cognitive and behavioural process: accurate classification of control, appropriate action or acceptance, and the discernment to distinguish between them. It predates and converges with the Stoic dichotomy of control, ACT’s acceptance-action balance, and modern stress-appraisal research. The prayer’s value is as a practical diagnostic, not just an aspiration.

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