August was BUSY! How about you?
Today I have a cool meditation/prayer for you.
It’s called the Centering Prayer.
The Christian contemplative, Cynthia Bourgeault, has written extensively about this practice and teaches this technique around the world! It’s a way of praying that allows us to loosen our minds from thought and enter that transcendental space that can often feel elusive.
She shares that this practice was popularized by Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist priest. He was one of the first people to promote the Centering Prayer which is based on a 14th century Christian mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing.
Here’s the basic idea:
Choose a word (or phrase) to focus on during your meditation.
Ensure that you’re sitting comfortably, with your eyes closed. Begin repeating the word or phrase silently to yourself over and over again slowly. This is different than a mantra where you continually repeat the word. It’s more of a deepening into the phrase, slow and intentional. The idea is to give your thought-mind something to focus on. So, for example, if your phrase is: “I am love,” you begin by saying that phrase, eventually it may become “I am,” or “love” that gets repeated as you slow down and deepen into the words.
Whenever you get distracted by another thought or body sensation, the invitation is to return to your word/phrase.
Continue repeating it. What Bourgeault explains in her book, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, is that the slow repetition helps you relax into that liminal space, much like how you might fall asleep, when your mind shifts from one state into another.
The recommendation is to do this for 20 minutes. Father Keating suggested practicing it twice a day.
I’ve been utilizing it, and finding it really helpful. It’s both gentle and structured, which I like!
Here’s an adapted excerpt from Bourgeault’s book about this practice:
So are we really saying that in Centering Prayer you meditate by simply letting go of one thought after another?
That can certainly be our subjective experience of the practice, and this is exactly the frustration expressed by an early practitioner.
In one of the very earliest training workshops led by Keating himself, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, “Oh, Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty minutes, I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”
“How lovely,” responded Keating, without missing a beat. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”
This simple story captures the essence of Centering Prayer.
It is quintessentially a pathway of return in which every time the mind is released from engagement with a specific idea or impression, we move from a smaller and more constricted consciousness into that open, diffuse awareness in which our presence to divine reality makes itself known along a whole different pathway of perception.
That’s what the anonymous author of the fourteenth-century spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing may have had in mind when he wrote, “God may be reached and held close by means of love, but by means of thought never.”
“Love” is this author’s pet word for that open, diffuse awareness which gradually allows another and deeper way of knowing to pervade one’s entire being.
Out of my own four decades of experience in Centering Prayer, I believe that this “love” indeed has nothing to do with emotions or feelings in the usual sense. It is rather the author’s nearest equivalent term to describe what we would nowadays call nondual perception anchored in the heart.
Want more tools to help you manage the chaos of the world?
Sign up today and get them directly in your inbox every Wednesday, FREE!
Image courtesy of Tabitha Turner on Unsplash