How to Use the Centering Prayer Throughout Your Day
Last blog I shared a meditation/prayer practice with you called the centering prayer. If you missed it, here’s a link to the post. The centering prayer is a wonderful example of a powerful tool that you can apply both -into your regular meditation practice AND in your everyday, going about town life. As a quick review, here’s the basic idea:
Last blog I shared a meditation/prayer practice with you called the centering prayer. If you missed it, here’s a link to the post.
As a quick review, here’s the basic idea:
1. Choose a word (or phrase) to focus on during your meditation.
2. Ensure that you’re sitting comfortably with your eyes closed.
Begin repeating the word or phrase silently to yourself over and over again slowly. Deepen into the phrase, slowly and intentionally, giving your thought-mind something to focus on. If your phrase is: “I rest in God,” begin by saying that phrase. Eventually it may become “I rest,” or “God” that gets repeated as you slow down and deepen into the words.
3. Whenever you get distracted by another thought or body sensation, simply return to your word or phrase.
How do you then extend this practice to your day!?
It’s easy!
You’re gardening. Allow your mind to tune into your word or phrase. Repeat it over and over to yourself silently or aloud.
You’re driving. Same thing. Bring your thoughts back to your word or phrase. Keep repeating it. If you get sidetracked, simply come back.
You’re upset after reading an article about _____ (fill in the blank). Invite your word or phrase to come into your awareness. Continue to repeat it. Notice if your nervous system calms down.
And on and on, throughout your day.
The centering prayer is a wonderful example of a powerful tool that you can apply both -into your regular meditation practice AND in your everyday, going about town life.
Pick a phrase and give it a try!
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How to Have a Centering Prayer Practice
Today I have a cool meditation/prayer for you. It’s called the centering prayer. 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.
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.
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3 Ways to Manage the Rate of Change in the World
Have you experienced the past few months as intense, chaotic, and full of uncertainty?
Yes?
You’re not alone.
Some days feel like a tough slog. Like we’re moving through dense resistance. Which is all the more reason to embrace your spiritual practice and deepen into it.
Many seers have spoken of this time we are in as an amplification, when everything is speeding up and gaining power. This is exactly why you have to choose your own sanity, clarity and peace.
Not only because the chaos is ever growing, but because the benefit of you doing your inner work is amplified during this time. In other words, you can use this time to fast track your liberation.
Have you experienced the past few months as intense, chaotic, and full of uncertainty?
Yes?
You’re not alone.
Some days feel like a tough slog. Like we’re moving through dense resistance. Which is all the more reason to embrace your spiritual practice and deepen into it.
Many seers have spoken of this time we are in as an amplification, when everything is speeding up and gaining power. This is exactly why you have to choose your own sanity, clarity and peace.
Not only because the chaos is ever growing, but because the benefit of you doing your inner work is amplified during this time. In other words, you can use this time to fast track your liberation.
Here are 3 Ways:
1. Be the Eye
Maybe it’s from living in Florida for 16 years, but the imagery I often see is that of a hurricane. The chaos of the world is swirling around and your job is to stand in the eye. The eye is the place of silence, stillness. In Buddhist terms, perhaps this is the place of the silent witness. The one that is untouched by ether, air, fire, or water.
Take a deep breath in. And another. Allow yourself to feel the winds die down around you as you return to silence. To the place where you are in the world but not of the world. To the place of calmness, of timelessness.
2. Remember Your Truth
When we take time to meditate, do yoga or intentional exercise, chant, pray or participate in ritual, we are inviting ourselves to return to the truth of who we are.
And what is that? Peace, Love, Kindness, Generosity, Flow.
More than ever, we are being asked to connect into the light within.
Be intentional right now – create or deepen into a practice where you can connect to this truth every single day.
It will make a world of difference for you and everyone else.
3. Anchor Into What Is Real & Seek Support
More than ever, the world needs your light, your love, peace and grounded-ness. Why? Because in duality, light and dark are always balanced.
It may be easy to feel the darkness, but that isn’t only what’s happening. The light is concentrating, too.
How can you show up and be even more light filled, loving, and present?
What support do you need to do that?
Of course, a personal practice is vital as is community.
What group is calling to you?
How can you feel more genuinely supported by others right now?
When I was a girl, I often heard dreadful stories from my parents and others about the hardships experienced during the depression. Then one day, my nana told me she missed those days. Surprised by her lament, I asked her why and she said, “because everyone helped each other.”
I hear her words echo in my head ever more loudly these days. For it seems that more than ever we need one another. So ask, who can I connect to that will help me feel sustained and supported?
Near or far we can do this for each other. And please know I am only an email away.
Join me in connecting to your light that we may shine brightly today and everyday.
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