Coaching practices for I Already Pray Five Times a Day but the Long Hours in Between Feel Spiritually Empty I Forget God the Moment I Leave the Prayer Mat and I Want the Remembrance to Carry Through the Gaps So the Whole Day Stays Connected Rather Than Just Those Five Fixed Moments
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I Already Pray Five Times a Day but the Long Hours in Between Feel Spiritually Empty I Forget God the Moment I Leave the Prayer Mat and I Want the Remembrance to Carry Through the Gaps So the Whole Day Stays Connected Rather Than Just Those Five Fixed Moments, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I already pray five times a day, but the long hours in between feel spiritually empty
- 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
- My prayer has gone completely dry
- The moment I go quiet to pray, my head fills up
Practices that may help
- 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - Making lectio divina a brief, daily practice
Practice a short lectio daily rather than a long lectio occasionally.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - Entering and sitting in silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - The daily examen (end-of-day review)
Spend five minutes each evening reviewing where you were most and least true to yourself today.
Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice - The naked intent: directing love without images
Reach toward God with a bare, loving intention stripped of all thought and image.
The Cloud of Unknowing: Contemplation Beyond Concepts - 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
Related concerns
- Dry Prayer Practice
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
Bearing the darkness of not-knowing
- Spontaneous Prayer Practice
Let what the text touched in you become a prayer — honest, spontaneous, personal.
Oratio: praying in response to what arose
- 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
- Apophatic Prayer Practice
Tolerate the felt absence of light, experience, or consolation during the practice.
- Quiet Time Daily
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
- Silent Prayer Practice
Commit to 20 minutes, twice a day — the practice period Keating recommends for transformation to occur.
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