Centring Prayer is a method of prayer for awakening to the gift of contemplation and contributing to bringing the knowledge and experience of God’s love into the general consciousness of the human family.

It is a movement of Divine Love designed to renew the Christian contemplative tradition. It consists of        consenting to God’s presence and action within.  It is based on the format for the profound form of prayer that Jesus suggests in Matthew 6:6.

                    If you want to pray, enter your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.                                                       Then your Father who sees in secret, will reward you.

In Centring Prayer, we consent to God’s presence and action within, surrendering our will completely to God, and relating to God who dwells in secret, which is the silence of self.  Centring Prayer elicits a commitment to the goal of inner transformation and is an invitation to interior silence and openness to Divine Indwelling.   We withdraw our attention from the ordinary flow of thoughts and open to a deeper part of ourselves, the spiritual level.

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Excerpts from the late Fr Thomas Keating’s Book:  Open Mind Open Heart, which gives detailed guidance to the method of Centring Prayer.

Fr Thomas, was a Cistercian (Trappist) monk of St Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, he was one of the founders of the Centring Prayer movement, and a leader within the Catholic world in the task of recovering our Christian contemplative heritage.

See also, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening and The Heart of Centering Prayer – both books by The Rev’d Dr Cynthia Bourgeault, Author, and Anglican Priest.  Cynthia was a student of Fr Thomas Keating.

Centering Prayer