Coaching practices for I'm Drawn to This Kind of Deep Contemplative Prayer but I Have a Job Kids a Full Life and it Feels Like it Was Written for Monks in Silence Not for Someone Trying to Fit Stillness in Between School Runs and Deadlines
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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m drawn to this kind of deep contemplative prayer but I have a job, kids, a full life
- 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 life has quietly become a place I retreat to and stay
- 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
Practices that may help
- 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 - Entering and sitting in silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Contemplation opening to universal compassion
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
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 - Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
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 - Moving from reading into wordless presence
Let sacred reading gradually release into silence rather than remaining an intellectual activity.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - 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 - Bring contemplative attention to ordinary moments
Practice full presence in mundane activities as a form of sacred attentiveness.
The Perennial Philosophy, 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
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey With My Partner
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
Contemplation opening to universal compassion
- When Contemplative Prayer Merton Universal Compassion
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
- Contemplative Practice
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey At Work
Contemplative prayer is a Christian tradition of silent, receptive prayer that moves beyond words and petition toward direct communion with God — what Thomas Merton called "a gaze of faith " resting in God’s presence. It draws on monastic traditions spanning the Desert Fathers through medieval mystics. As a spiritual practice its aims are devotional; components like stillness and silence overlap with studied meditation mechanisms, but contemplative prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey During A Big Change
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
- Contemplative Prayer The Inner Journey During Conflict
Let interior transformation express outward as deeper care for others, not withdrawal from them.
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