Coaching practices for The Moment I Go Quiet to Pray My Head Fills Up Not Just the to Do List but Even Good Holy Thoughts I Feel I Should Follow and I Don't Know How to Let All of it Go Without Either Chasing it or Wrestling it Down
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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- The moment I go quiet to pray, my head fills up
- 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
- I want to sit silently with God, but the second I try, my mind grabs onto a thought and runs
- My days are wall-to-wall noise, inside and out, and I can’t find the quiet to pray the way I want to
- 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
- 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 - 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 - 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 - Entering and sitting in silence
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - Contemplatio: resting in wordless presence
Release words and rest in simple, open presence — the fruit and culmination of the practice.
Lectio Divina: Sacred Reading - Resting in the gap between thoughts
Notice the small silences between thoughts and let attention settle there.
The Power of Now, In Practice - 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 - 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 - Moving from reading into wordless presence
Let sacred reading gradually release into silence rather than remaining an intellectual activity.
Contemplative Prayer: The Inner Journey - 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
Related concerns
- Silent Prayer Method
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
- When Centering Prayer Releasing Thoughts
Let every thought — pleasant or unpleasant, trivial or profound — pass without engaging it.
Releasing all thoughts without judgment
- Centering Prayer Duration
Centering Prayer is a contemporary Christian contemplative practice developed by Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington in the 1970s, drawing on The Cloud of Unknowing and the Desert Father tradition. The method is simple: sit in silence for 20 minutes, use a sacred word as a gentle intention to consent to God’s presence, and release all thoughts as they arise. It is a devotional practice; some components parallel studied meditation mechanisms, but centering prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Centering Prayer The Method Of Thomas Keating Before Bed
Centering Prayer is a contemporary Christian contemplative practice developed by Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington in the 1970s, drawing on The Cloud of Unknowing and the Desert Father tradition. The method is simple: sit in silence for 20 minutes, use a sacred word as a gentle intention to consent to God’s presence, and release all thoughts as they arise. It is a devotional practice; some components parallel studied meditation mechanisms, but centering prayer as a whole has not been evaluated in controlled trials.
- Contemplative Silence Practice
Create interior and exterior silence — the necessary soil for contemplative prayer to grow.
Entering and sitting in silence
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