Sheila Munro, Brentwood Bay, B.C.

A couple of years ago, I had an experience during my usual meditation practice that lead me in a new direction. I was repeating a mantra and trying to empty my mind and cultivate detachment when suddenly I had to stop what I was doing and recognize that this was not what I wanted to be doing, that I was somehow heading in the wrong direction.

Instead of going towards empti- ness, I was suddenly aware of Pres- ence, a divine spirit, some cosmic aliveness outside of myself entering my consciousness. It was something I could feel; the air around me was crackling with it. The word contem- plation came to me then, contempla- tion implies an object, a relationship, and that was the direction to go in.

When a friend told me about the Contemplative Society of Victoria, I began reading articles, watching videos, and learning of retreats and workshops as a new world opened up. Soon I was reading books by one of its founders, Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopalian priest who has written doing this you allow your awareness of the God presence inside you to grow.

What makes Centering Prayer different from most other forms of meditation, is its avoidance of any kind of focus or goal, anything that draws the mind’s attention towards it. It doesn’t employ any of the usual meditation techniques, like following the breath, repeating a mantra or prayer, emptying the mind, focusing on an image, or perceiving reality in a certain way. And it isn’t about attaining a personal goal, such as wellbeing, relaxation, s elf – improvement, or even spiritual insight, which are part of ‘ordinary awareness’ of the ego self Keating described.

Ultimately Centering Prayer is an act o f surrende r, a p ractice Bourgeault compares to kenosis, the self-emptying love of Jesus. In those moments between thoughts, it is possible to enter a state of pure existence free of content, the state Cynthia Bourgeault called ‘object- less awareness.’ And in those nano-extensively on the Christian contem- plative life and specifically on a form of Christian meditation called Centering Prayer.

As someone who has been drawn to the mystical side of Christianity but leery of organized religion and Christian orthodoxy, who identified as ‘spiritual but not religious’, I was naturally drawn to the idea and practice Bourgeault described so eloquently. It was experiential, you didn’t need to be a Church going Christian to practice it, and I could start where I was without any special training or preparation.

As I read more and established a daily meditation of Centering Prayer, I found myself being led, not so much to the Christian Church itself, but to a more Christian understanding of things, particularly to the realization of God as love. What I saw as more significant than Church doctrines, were the actual teachings of Jesus and the attempt to emulate that way of life, to come from that spiritual center in yourself where, as Bourgeault put it, “you have in yourselves the same Mind as Christ.”

The practice of Centering Prayer did not begin with Bourgeault. Her teacher and mentor, the American Trappist monk Father Thomas Keating was the chief architect of the Centering Prayer movement.

While he was Abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Massachusetts in the sixties and early seventies, Keating watched as disaffected youth turned away from the Church and embraced Eastern religion and Eastern meditation, travelling to India, worshipping gurus, spending years in Ashrams. He sensed the spiritual hunger of the new generation and tried to be more relevant, inviting a Zen Master and a teacher of Transcendental Medita- tion to give workshops at the abbey, no doubt to the consternation of some of his superiors.

He tried to be accommodating, but he had to wonder why all these young seekers (many of whom were ex- Catholics) seemed to have no aware- ness whatsoever of the Christian mystical, contemplative tradition, dismissing it merely as an esoteric discipline practiced by monks living in cloistered austerity. He decided something had to be done about it.

Over the next few years, initially in a bid to bring back formerly Catholic youth, Keating pioneered a new and accessible form of Christian medita- tion that came to be known as Centering Prayer. From that time until his death in 2018 at the age of 95, he dedicated much of his life to teaching and writing about this new practice and the transformative power of the contemplative life.

For inspiration, Keating and some of the other monks looked to some the works in the Christian contemplative tradition, revisiting the Desert Fathers of early Christianity includ- ing John Cassian and Evagrius of Pontus, who famously said, “prayer is beyond concepts,” and the writings Unknowing, and adapted it as a kind of template for the new practice, which was originally called The Prayer of the Cloud.

The work’s anonymous author had written poetically of the need in contemplative prayer to let go of all thoughts, and ‘to beat against the cloud of unknowing’ that separates us from God, and recommended the use of a sacred word as a reminder of this intention. The constant letting go of thoughts and the employment of a sacred word became the cornerstones of the Centering Prayer practice.

As Keating reminds us, Centering Prayer is all about intention, the intention to enter silence, to drop out of yourself, to let go of everything that draws your attention. The practice itself is remarkably simple. Twice a day, for twenty minutes, you sit comfortably in a chair, and close your eyes. When a thought comes and you become aware of it, you repeat a sacred word you have chosen, a word like peace or love of stillness, which serves as a reminder, like a string tied around your finger, to let it go. (It should be mentioned that in this context a ‘thought’ can be an actual thought, feeling, an image, a sensa- tion, a memory).

The beauty of Centering Prayer is that you can’t fail at it. You can’t even do poorly at it. When one nun comd to that her mind Keating was so busy, she must have had 10,000 thoughts in her twenty-minute practice, he relied, “How lovely. Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.” You accept that the thoughts will keep coming and you remain willing to keep letting them go, and by doing this you allow your awareness of the God presence inside you to grow.

What makes Centering Prayer different from most other forms of meditation, is its avoidance of any kind of focus or goal, anything that draws the mind’s attention towards it. It doesn’t employ any of the usual meditation techniques, like following the breath, repeating a mantra or prayer, emptying the mind, focusing on an image, or perceiving reality in a certain way. And it isn’t about attaining a personal goal, such as wellbeing, relaxation, selfimprovement, or even spiritual insight, which are part of ‘ordinary awareness’ of the ego self Keating described.

Ultimately Centering Prayer is an act of surrender, a practice Bourgeault compares to kenosis, the self-emptying love of Jesus. In those moments between thoughts, it is possible to enter a state of pure existence free of content, the state Cynthia Bourgeault called ‘objectless awareness.’ And in those nano seconds when you are liberated from the endless machinations of the monkey mind, you can draw closer to your true spiritual self, and experi- ence that essence within you that is aligned with God as love. It is in trying to live from this place that the life of contemplation can truly begin.

For me, practicing Centering Prayer is like being on a journey to the place where I am already, and just didn’t know it. It makes me think of those words, ‘the kingdom of God is within.’

Sheila Munro is the author of “Lives of Mothers and Daughters” (2001).