Centering Prayer – Silent Communion
My Path to Centering Prayer
After three enriching years of intensive mindfulness training, I went looking for a similar practice: one that was inclusive and free of dogma, and rooted in the spiritual tradition of the West. I found it in America: Centering Prayer.
A Spiritual Practice Without Dogma
Centering Prayer requires no dogma and no difficult technique. It is a simple, wordless intention: to let go of control, to open ourselves, and to rest in God. It is about daring to let ourselves be loved.
My First Centering Prayer Retreat
My first retreat was an hour outside New York City: fourteen days of complete silence, with four hours of Centering Prayer each day. At the opening, the leader told us: “Don’t go off your meds.” I thought to myself: “I’m not letting go of my mindfulness practice.”
I was invited to choose a sacred word. It is not a mantra to be repeated over and over. It is a word that works like a gentle hand, releasing a thought the moment it arises. There is no neutral observing here, only surrender to God, the source of unconditional love and stillness in the heart.
As the days went by, it felt like sinking into a warm bath. I was held by the presence of the others and by the silence, to which I slowly and gently gave myself.
Connected with Nature and with God
I have practiced Centering Prayer for fifteen years since that retreat. I trained as a presenter with Contemplative Outreach, with whom I continue to work today. Over the years I have found that the surrender of the inner room has followed me out onto my silent walks all by itself: the sense of being always already loved, held by a love I cannot fall out of. I never planned it. It is simply an awareness and a connectedness [that I carry with me].
This kind of silence was once reserved for monasteries. Today it is growing all over the world, practiced in groups and on retreats on every continent by secular seekers, doubters and believers alike.
What Silence Does to Us
Many people find that Centering Prayer, like mindfulness, eases stress and restlessness and deepens our presence. Mindfulness often trains us to observe our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations from an inner witness position. Centering Prayer also holds a deep existential and relational dimension.
A 1,700-Year-Old Monastic Tradition for Today
The monastic tradition knew that silence works in us on its own. The Trappist monk Thomas Keating called it an inner healing process, or in his own words, “the divine therapy.” When we sit in silence, old tensions and unconscious patterns slowly loosen. Keating spoke of the false self, all the layers of defense we have built up to get by, and of the true self hidden beneath.
We do not stand alone in our presence. We come to know that we belong, deeply connected with God.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers
Centering Prayer rests on a long, wordless tradition. In the fourth century, men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers went out into the Egyptian desert to leave the noise of society behind and find their way to what truly matters. One of their best-known sayings is: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The monk John Cassian later carried this practice of silence to the West.
In the fourteenth century, an anonymous English author wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. It describes this very method: using a single word to let every thought rest beneath a “cloud of forgetting.” The same path runs through mystics such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, and in our own time through the writer and monk Thomas Merton.
Wordless Prayer Finds a Form for Today
In the 1970s, three monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, Thomas Keating, William Meninger and Basil Pennington, opened the monastery’s ancient practice to the world. They saw that many people were turning to Eastern meditation without knowing that the Christian tradition held a deep, wordless path of its own. So they offered it in a simple form, open to everyone, and in 1984 Keating co-founded Contemplative Outreach.
Roots in the Gospel
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus invites us to go into our inner room, close the door, and pray to our Father in secret (Matthew 6:6). It is the room of the heart, where we give ourselves to God’s unconditional love. There we are connected without images, without symbols or thoughts, simply being.
It is an experience we know in the body: the stillness of an old church, a room where everything settles, or a moment in nature when the noise falls silent. Centering Prayer is not something foreign we have to learn. It is a way home to the self. This is the path we walk together on my silent walks. We settle into the body, feel the earth beneath our feet and sink deeper into the heart, in silent communion with ourselves, with nature, and with God, in the silence and in our senses.
Upcoming Workshop: Loved Into Being –
Centering Prayer, the Welcoming Prayer, and mandala drawing
