Coaching practices for My Days Are Wall to Wall Noise Inside and Out and I Can't Find the Quiet to Pray the Way I Want to I Keep Meaning to Carve Out Real Silence and it Always Gets Crowded Out Before I Ever Get There
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For My Days Are Wall to Wall Noise Inside and Out and I Can't Find the Quiet to Pray the Way I Want to I Keep Meaning to Carve Out Real Silence and it Always Gets Crowded Out Before I Ever Get There, 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
- When I try to pray in silence my mind floods with thoughts, and I end up grabbing the "holy" ones and fighting off the distracting ones
- There’s never a single quiet moment
- The noise and demands of everyone around me get inside my head until I have no peace anywhere
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 - 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 - Practising intentional silence
Build short periods of deliberate quiet into the day — no input, no output — as a return to ground.
Pu: Taoist Simplicity and the Uncarved Block - Retreat to the inner citadel
When the world presses in, withdraw into your own mind — the one place no one can occupy.
Meditations, as Marcus Practiced It - 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 - 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 - Resting in the gap between thoughts
Notice the small silences between thoughts and let attention settle there.
The Power of Now, In Practice - The value of emptiness — making space
Deliberately preserve unscheduled, unstructured time as the space from which clarity and creativity arise.
The Tao Te Ching, Made Practical - Solitude as transformative practice, not escape
Enter solitude not to avoid the world but to meet yourself honestly within it.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey
Related concerns
- Deliberate Emptiness
Create deliberate emptiness — in your schedule, your mind, your output — and let it do its work.
Find the use of empty space
- How To Enter Silence Prayer
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Entering and sitting in silence
- How To Practice Solitude
Enter solitude not to avoid the world but to meet yourself honestly within it.
Solitude as transformative practice, not escape
- Interior Silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
- Silent Prayer Practice
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
Sitting for twenty minutes, twice daily
- Silent Presence After Prayer
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
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