Centering Prayer: The Method of Thomas Keating

Consent, sacred word, and silence — Keating’s method and the transformation it aims at

What is centering prayer and how do you practice it?

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.

In the 1970s, a group of Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, responded to the wave of interest in Eastern meditation by recovering a forgotten strand of their own tradition: the contemplative prayer methods described in The Cloud of Unknowing, John Cassian, and the Desert Fathers. Thomas Keating became the primary teacher and theorist of what they called Centering Prayer. Its hallmark is deliberate simplicity: one sacred word, released thoughts, 20 minutes of silence. Below are the core practices, each with the mechanism that makes the method more than sitting still.