Interior Movement During Centering Prayer

As you begin Centering Prayer, you may be disappointed as you become aware again of all the internal noise and distraction.  The inner noise, however, is to be expected.  You are loading the mind with less and less technique.  As a result, your mind tends to wander more.  Expect this, and gently bring the mind back to center with your sacred word.  

After a time of practice, you will find your mind growing calmer and less distracted.  The purpose of these deep forms of interior prayer is hesychia, or stillness.  You may enter into a profound stillness during the time of your Centering Prayer.  This is a place that has no words, thoughts, or images.  When this occurs, rest here at the center and enter the Mind of God.  What we are doing in our prayer is letting go of our mental constructs, letting go of our 'ideas' of ourselves and God, so that we can experience ourselves and our God directly.  This is the difference between experiencing the map and experiencing the territory it covers.  While the map is helpful in many respects, we can never truly know the territory from a map.

You will have noticed, as we progress in our description of different kinds of monologistic prayer, that Centering Prayer is a relatively advanced technique.  As we have sequenced the preceding prayers, from the Jesus Prayer to the Cloud to Centering Prayer, there is less and less to occupy the mind.  As you progress in your practice, you are able to hold your attention on the Divine with less and less loading.  

People usually expect to encounter fewer problems with interior prayer as they progress to more advanced techniques.  It rarely works out this way.  Indeed, it sometimes seems like we are constantly starting over.  In our subjective experience, it seems that the more we practice, the more aware we become of our wandering mind.  When we notice this at an advanced level, there may be some despair about making any real progress.  

We must understand this phenomenon of wandering mind in order to prevent despair.  Father Keating likens this process to shining a light of progressively greater intensity on the surface of a carpet.  Under dim light, the carpet looks clean.  As we increase the intensity of the light, we begin to see big specks of dirt.  When we put thousands of watts of light on a small patch of the same carpet, we see even the little tiny specks of dust.  

It is the same with the mind and meditation.  As we attempt to settle our wandering minds, at first, only gross interruptions interfere with our concentration.  The neighbor's dog barks, we compulsively think about an upsetting event:  these are the sorts of things that disturb us.  As we gain strength in our practice, we find that we no longer notice these things.  Instead, we notice a subtle flow of thought in the back of our minds.  This often seems like the same kind of interruption, but it is not.  

As you continue with your practice, you will find progressively finer flows of thought.  Each of these has always existed in you, flowing in steady streams.  However, due to your involvement with the larger, more significant events, you have just never noticed the more subtle streams.  When we can disengage from our obsessive self-absorption, only then are we free to engage with the Divine.

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The Results of Practice.  Intensive practice of Centering Prayer serves as a kind of divine therapy, allowing the false self to surface and the compulsive, destructive patterns to resolve.  While this process should never substitute for psychotherapy, it can have a remarkable impact in ways that are quite similar.  

The power of this divine therapy is illustrated in the story of a colleague of mine.  This woman, in her early forties, came from a dysfunctional family and was unable to affirm herself in any meaningful way.  She found herself compulsively attending to the needs of others and sacrificing her own well-being in the process.  Despite five years of psychotherapy with very skilled therapists, she was unable to resolve the false-self complexes that drove these behaviors in her.  While she obtained some relief, there was no lasting behavior change, despite her best efforts and those of her therapists.  

After learning meditation and practicing for some years, she went on a ten-day Centering Prayer Intensive under the direction of Father Keating.  During this time, she had a series of transformative experiences.  After four days of intensive Centering Prayer practice, this is what happened:

While chanting, I became aware that all I need to do is to say "yes" and God will be a part of my life forever.  It was so simple.  I said "yes" and was immediately flooded with an intense feeling of love and the gift of tears.  There are no words to describe what the tears are; they are not tears of grief, sorrow, pity.  Perhaps the best way to describe them would be to say that they are tears of coming home, similar to the tears one has when one has been away from home for a long time and returns to the bosom of his/her family.  They are not necessarily tears of joy or happiness, more a sense of overwhelming grace.

Later, while sitting in meditation, I felt as though God were gazing into my very being, flooding me with love.  I have never been so tenderly loved, so completely loved, so totally accepted.

I sat down one night, determined to ask God to make changes in my life.  I expected to wait quite a while before I got a sense of response, but this came instantaneously.  I was overcome by a spiritual vomiting.  One thing after another from my past came up.  I no sooner recognized it, then another thing came up.  These things that I was vomiting were the experiences of my false self:  my pride, my self-pity, my preconceptions, my ideas about myself and the world.  This kept up for hours, until I was exhausted.  I went to bed, fully expecting to sleep because I was so emotionally drained.  

Instead, as I lay there, I became engaged in wrestling with God.  I know now that I was wrestling with my true self, but then it felt as though I were wrestling God.  I kept holding onto all those things that I had vomited up earlier.  I would not let go of them.  They were how I defined and knew myself and my world.  I knew that if I let go of them, my 'I' would cease to be.  It seemed as though there was a soft being with me, urging me gently to let go of my vomit.  But I kept wrestling with that soft being, only I wasn't strong enough.  I wrestled and fought, but still that being held on.  I didn't sleep at all that night.

I was still wrestling as I walked to mass in the morning.  Along the road, I was 'debating' with God.  I was asking God what would happen if I let go of myself.  (As I write these words, now, the answer seems obvious.  But you must remember that I was totally engaged in this tremendous struggle for my very being.)  What would be left?  Then I had a waking 'vision.'  I'm still not sure what to call it.  I was aware of myself looking into a mirror and seeing no reflection.  I was aware of myself holding the mirror, but no reflection or anything else was coming back at me.  There was just nothing in the mirror.  

This, for some reason that I still don't understand, was very reassuring to me.  It was as though I was still there, but I was nothing.  So I said "Okay" to God and let go of myself.  The next sensation I had was the experience of free-floating.  Then I just was, with no more sense of falling or floating.  I did not know who I was.  I did know where I was and what I was doing.  But I had no sense of who I was.  This continued for a while.  It was not bothersome.  In fact, it was quite intriguing.  I knew I still existed, but I did not know who this 'I' was.  

I spent the next few days exploring aspects of this 'I', which was my true self, which had been hidden deep inside, below all the garbage that I had accumulated.  It was like listening to an inner voice, instead of my usual thinking about things.  My perception of reality shifted slightly.  I became aware of the unity of all people and all things in God.  This has stayed with me until today (a time period of several years).

This woman returned from the ten-day intensive as a changed person.  Not only has her perception of reality shifted, as she indicates above, but her behavior has undergone a radical change.  She no longer feels compelled to take care of others and to sacrifice herself for their needs.  Yet, paradoxically, she seems more effective in her interactions with others and is perceived as immensely compassionate.  This woman even looks different.  Her husband said that when he met her at the plane, he didn't recognize her at first.  

The account of this modern-day pilgrim describes what these forms of deep prayer are about.  They are transformative tools that enable us to discover our true nature as children of God.  The practice of meditation and contemplative prayer helps us to see ourselves as God sees us.  More importantly, these practices help us to be ourselves.  In the process, we come to know ourselves as participating in God's holy Presence.  Here is where we find our deepest, truest nature.

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Centering Prayer is rooted in the apophatic mysticism of the Western Church and is based on the prayer described in The Cloud of Unknowing.  Centering Prayer is rooted in a profoundly incarnational theology.  It rests on the understanding that God is always with us, that the Divine is always accessible to us in our deepest center.  In addition, with the work of Father Keating, there is an expansion of the Pauline doctrine of "putting on the armor of light."  This theological expansion provides words for describing and understanding the transformations that occur in meditation and contemplative prayer.  Thus, it enables greater precision in description and a deeper understanding of the process.

One of my concerns as a teacher and a psychologist is the applicability of different meditations for different people.  For example, there is a clear developmental sequence in these meditations, which I have tried to illustrate in these newsletters.  But are there certain meditations that would work better for one kind of person than another?  Since we all learn in different ways, it is likely that some people will learn more effectively from one type of technique than another.

Over the years, I have found some confirming evidence for this, as we compare the Jesus Prayer with Centering Prayer.  In my experience with these two techniques, I have found that their efficacy is related to personality styles.  For introverts, Centering Prayer appears to be a more suitable option.  Introverts work better when they don't have to 'talk', even when the talk is internal.  Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to find the Jesus Prayer more compatible.  The Jesus Prayer provides them with a way to go deeply into prayer, while still chatting away.  

Centering Prayer is a vital technique for spiritual transformation.  It is not, however, a tool for beginners.  The focus of Centering Prayer is too diffuse for most beginners.  They have difficulty concentrating their awareness on the inner center.  Thus, Centering Prayer is for those who have developed some ability to focus attention and to rest it in God.  The contemplative practices that we will describe later will further enhance our ability to focus attention.

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That’s it for this week.  Next week, I plan to delve deeply into the concept of karma.  The concept of karma is pretty straightforward – we are each responsible for all our actions.  This idea is found in all major religions, although each has developed its own terminology to describe the same phenomenon.

Please continue to meditate regularly.  You now have an array of meditative practices to choose from.  You will make the most progress if you pick one practice and stick with that for a time. 

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

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