How to Practice Centering Prayer

What is centering prayer?

Centering prayer is a contemporary form of Christian contemplative prayer developed in the 1970s by three Trappist monks — Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington — at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. It draws on the ancient monastic tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the fourteenth-century English classic The Cloud of Unknowing, and the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. The monks were responding, in part, to a pastoral need of their time: many Christians were leaving for Eastern forms of meditation because they had never been shown that their own tradition held a deep contemplative treasury of its own.

Unlike meditation that reflects on a Scripture passage (lectio divina) or vocal prayer that speaks words to God, centering prayer is a prayer of resting. Its aim is not to have particular experiences or to empty the mind, but simply to consent to God's presence and action within you. Thoughts will come and go; the practice is learning to let them pass without following them, the way you might let boats drift by on a river without climbing into any of them.

Keating called it a method that disposes you to the gift of contemplation. You do not make contemplation happen — you cultivate the interior silence in which God can work. For this reason it is often described as a prayer of intention rather than attention. The whole of your part is a repeated, gentle yes. God's part is everything else, and it is hidden, quiet, and usually beyond anything you will notice while you are praying. That hiddenness is not a defect of the method; it is the point.

It helps to name what centering prayer is not. It is not a relaxation technique, though you may feel calmer. It is not self-improvement or a way of managing stress, though a settled heart is a real fruit. It is not a substitute for the sacraments, for Scripture, or for the fellowship of the Church, but a companion to them. Keating always placed it within the broader life of a Christian, not above it.

Where did centering prayer come from?

The word centering echoes a phrase associated with the Trappist writer Thomas Merton, who spoke of finding one's center in God. But the substance of the practice is far older than the twentieth century. Its immediate source is The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous English spiritual guide from the late 1300s, which counsels the person who prays to lift the heart toward God with a short word and to place all distracting thoughts beneath a cloud of forgetting. Centering prayer's sacred word is a direct descendant of that counsel.

Behind The Cloud stands a still older stream: the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third and fourth centuries, who withdrew to the deserts of Egypt and Syria to pray without ceasing, often repeating a single brief phrase of Scripture to still the wandering mind. John Cassian, who carried their wisdom to the West, recorded their use of a short verse repeated in the heart. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelites, mapped the deeper reaches of this silent prayer with great care.

Keating, Meninger, and Pennington did not invent a new spirituality, then, so much as repackage an ancient one in a simple, teachable form for ordinary people living ordinary lives. Keating spent the rest of his life — he died in 2018 — teaching it, and founded Contemplative Outreach in 1984 to support practitioners through local prayer groups, retreats, and formation. Knowing this lineage guards the practice against the charge that it is merely a Christianized import; its roots run straight back through the whole contemplative history of the Church.

Is centering prayer based on Scripture?

Centering prayer does not rest on a single proof text, but on a broad Scriptural witness to silence, hiddenness, and interior prayer. The clearest single verse is Psalm 46:10: "Be still, and know that I am God." The stillness commended there is not idleness but a deliberate quieting of the self so that God may be known. Centering prayer is one very concrete way of obeying that invitation.

Jesus himself points inward and toward hiddenness. In Matthew 6:6 he says, "But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret." The inner room has long been read by contemplatives as the heart, and the shut door as the turning away from the noise of thought and image. In the same passage, Matthew 6:7, Jesus warns against heaping up empty phrases and thinking we will be heard for our many words — a caution that the simplicity of centering prayer takes to heart.

Two further threads run underneath the practice. The first is consent to God's indwelling: "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21, in the traditional rendering), and Paul's declaration that "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). The second is trust that the Spirit prays where our words run out: "the Spirit helps us in our weakness... the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words" (Romans 8:26). Centering prayer is, in a sense, a deliberate stepping back so that this deeper prayer of the Spirit has room to rise.

The four guidelines of centering prayer

Keating distilled the practice into four simple guidelines. They are worth memorizing, because the whole method rests on them:

1. Settle on a sacred word — a single word that stands for your willingness to let God be present and at work within you.

2. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed, take a moment to grow still, and quietly bring the sacred word to mind as a sign of that willingness.

3. Whenever you notice you have drifted into thoughts, return softly and without effort to the sacred word.

4. When the prayer time ends, stay in silence with your eyes closed for a couple of minutes before you rise.

Notice what these guidelines do not ask. They do not ask you to repeat the word continuously like a mantra, to fight your thoughts, or to achieve any special stillness. The word is only a gesture of consent, picked up lightly and set down again whenever you realize you have wandered.

It is worth dwelling on how much is packed into the word gently. Almost everything that goes wrong in centering prayer comes from trying too hard — gripping the word, monitoring your progress, straining to feel God's nearness. The guidelines describe a posture of relaxed willingness, not of vigilance. If you can return to the sacred word the way you would turn your face toward someone you love who has just entered the room — naturally, warmly, without drama — you have understood the method.

How do you practice centering prayer step by step?

1. Choose your sacred word. Pick a single word that expresses your willingness to be with God — for example God, Jesus, Abba, peace, love, mercy, or trust. It need not be meaningful in itself; it is a symbol of your intention. Once chosen, keep the same word throughout the prayer period rather than searching for a better one. Choosing a word ahead of time, and even keeping the same word over many weeks, saves you from turning the prayer into a hunt for the perfect syllable.

2. Settle into a comfortable position. Sit upright but relaxed in a chair, feet flat, hands resting in your lap, eyes gently closed. A quiet place and a set time — many find early morning best — help the practice take root. An upright posture keeps you alert without straining; slumping tends to invite sleep, and rigidity invites tension.

3. Introduce the sacred word. Take a moment to settle, then silently and interiorly bring the word to mind, as gently as laying a feather on cotton. This is your quiet yes to God's presence and work within you. You are not saying the word to God so much as using it to signal your own consent.

4. Return whenever thoughts arise. You will notice memories, plans, feelings, even prayerful thoughts. This is normal and not a failure. Each time you become aware that you have been carried off, return ever so gently to the sacred word, without irritation or self-judgment. Keating taught that a single period may involve returning hundreds of times, and each return is itself the prayer — a small act of love and surrender repeated again and again.

5. Continue for about twenty minutes. The classic period is twenty minutes, practiced ideally twice a day. Beginners may start with ten minutes and lengthen gradually. Use a soft timer so you are not watching the clock, and choose a gentle sound so the end of the period does not jolt you.

6. Rest in silence at the end. When the time is up, do not jump up. Remain still with eyes closed for two or three minutes, letting the silence linger. Many finish by slowly praying a familiar prayer such as the Our Father, allowing the words to carry the quiet of the silence back into speech and then into the rest of the day.

When and where should you pray?

Centering prayer asks little of your surroundings, but it rewards a little planning. Choose a place where you are unlikely to be interrupted — a corner of a bedroom, a chair by a window, a quiet church if one is open. Some people keep a simple sign of prayer nearby, an icon or a candle or a cross, not as an object of attention during the prayer but as a way of marking the space as set apart. The room does not need to be silent, only reasonably free of demands on your attention.

Timing matters more than location. Keating recommended morning and evening, and there is wisdom in the morning slot in particular: the mind is often quieter before the day's concerns have gathered, and beginning the day with consent sets a tone that lasts. Attaching the prayer to something you already do every day — after you wake, before a meal, when you come home — helps it survive the weeks when motivation runs thin. The evening period is best kept early enough that you are not fighting sleep.

Be realistic about your season of life. A parent of small children, a shift worker, or someone caring for the sick may not manage two unhurried twenty-minute periods, and that is no reason to abandon the practice. A single faithful ten-minute sitting, kept most days, will form you far more than an ambitious plan kept for a week and dropped. The aim is a rhythm you can actually sustain, not a heroic schedule you will resent.

What do you do when your mind wanders?

The single most common worry of beginners is that their minds are too busy for this prayer. Keating's reassurance was direct and freeing: the practice is not about stopping thoughts but about your response to them. A period thick with distractions in which you keep returning to the sacred word is a good period of centering prayer. You cannot fail at it by having thoughts; you can only step away from it by chasing them and forgetting to come back.

There is a subtle art in the return itself. Do not scold yourself, analyze why you drifted, or try to slam the door on the thought. Simply notice, with something like relief, that you have wandered, and let the sacred word float back into your awareness. Then let even the word settle into silence again. Between returns you are not repeating the word; you are resting in an open, wordless willingness, and you reach for the word only when you catch yourself engaged with a thought.

Sleepiness, restlessness, boredom, and even unexpected emotions can surface as the mind quiets. Keating described this unloading of the unconscious as a normal part of the process: as the surface chatter settles, deeper material — old griefs, buried tensions, forgotten memories — sometimes rises to be released. Treat whatever comes as one more thought, and return gently to the word. You do not need to interpret it or hold on to it. Consistency over weeks and months matters far more than the quality of any single sitting, and the days that feel most scattered are often quietly doing the deepest work.

Common mistakes to avoid

The first and most frequent mistake is turning the sacred word into a mantra recited without pause. Centering prayer is not the continuous repetition of a word to occupy the mind; the word is a light touch you use only when you notice you have become engaged with a thought. If you find yourself chanting it steadily, ease off and let it fall silent, keeping it in reserve for when it is actually needed.

A second mistake is measuring the prayer by how it feels. Because the real action is God's and hidden, a period of deep peace and a period of dry distraction may be equally fruitful — or the dry one may be the more fruitful of the two, since it asks more faith. If you start judging sittings as good or bad by your feelings, you have quietly shifted from consent back to concentration and results. Let go of the scorecard.

A third mistake is expecting visions, insights, or dramatic experiences, and feeling cheated when they do not come. Centering prayer is deliberately imageless and contentless; its fruits appear not during the prayer but in the rest of life, as a slowly growing patience, humility, and love. A fourth, more practical error is trying to run before you can walk — leaping to two long periods a day and burning out within a fortnight. Start small, keep it regular, and let the practice lengthen naturally. And when you notice you have been making any of these mistakes, apply the method to that very noticing: observe it without self-reproach, and return, gently, to the word.

How does centering prayer differ across traditions?

Centering prayer is practiced across many Christian traditions, but it sits within a wider family of contemplative prayer, and it helps to see how the neighbors differ. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the characteristic contemplative practice is the Jesus Prayer — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" — repeated rhythmically, often coordinated with the breath and sometimes counted on a prayer rope, or chotki. This is a prayer of continual repetition and attentiveness, which is a genuinely different method from centering prayer's lighter, intermittent use of a single word; the two should not be confused, and Orthodox teachers generally present the Jesus Prayer within the careful guidance of the hesychast tradition.

Within the Roman Catholic and Anglican worlds, centering prayer as taught by Keating has spread widely, alongside the closely related Christian Meditation movement associated with the Benedictine John Main, which does use a continually repeated prayer word (traditionally the Aramaic Maranatha, meaning "Come, Lord"). Many parishes of both communions host groups for one or the other. These share centering prayer's silence and simplicity but differ in whether the word is repeated throughout or only returned to as needed.

Some Christians, particularly within certain Evangelical and Reformed circles, approach any wordless or imageless prayer with caution, concerned that it can drift toward emptying the mind or toward practices borrowed from non-Christian meditation. Keating and his colleagues consistently answered that centering prayer is not about emptying the mind but about consenting to the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and that it stands squarely within the historic Christian contemplative tradition. It is worth naming this range of views honestly rather than presenting the practice as unanimously received; a thoughtful practitioner will hold it within, not apart from, the Scriptures and the teaching of their own church.

A simple daily rule

A rule of life is just a gentle structure that keeps a good intention from evaporating. For centering prayer, a workable starting rule might look like this: one period each morning of ten to twenty minutes, at the same time and in the same place, bracketed by a slow reading of a short Scripture passage beforehand and the Our Father afterward. If a second period fits your day, add it in the early evening; if it does not, one faithful period is enough to begin.

Frame the silence with other forms of prayer rather than isolating it. Keating recommended pairing centering prayer with lectio divina — reading a few verses slowly, letting a word or phrase catch you, resting in it — so that Scripture feeds the silence and the silence deepens the reading. Sunday worship, the sacraments, and the ordinary prayers of your tradition remain the wider soil in which this practice grows; centering prayer is a room in the house of prayer, not the whole house.

Community sustains what solitude begins. Contemplative Outreach, the organization Keating founded, encourages praying with others when possible, since a weekly group carries you through the dry stretches when practicing alone is hard. Even one other person committed to the same rhythm can make the difference between a practice that lasts and one that quietly lapses. Review your rule every so often, loosen it when life is heavy and tighten it when you have room, and measure it not by intensity but by whether you are still, gently, showing up.

Building a lasting contemplative habit

Centering prayer rewards regularity above all. The fruits it promises — a steadier patience, a softening of old resentments, a quicker readiness to forgive, a deeper sense of being loved — do not usually arrive in the prayer itself but ripen slowly in daily life, often unnoticed by the one who is changing. This is why perseverance through unremarkable, distracted sittings matters so much: you are planting rather than harvesting, and the harvest is not on your schedule.

If a timer and a quiet room are hard to keep up on your own, a guided version can help you settle. Bosko includes a guided Centering Prayer among its guided prayer library, walking you through choosing a sacred word, the opening silence, the returns, and the closing rest, so you can give your attention to consent rather than to the clock. A gentle voice at the beginning and end can be a real support in the early months, until the shape of the practice becomes second nature.

Whatever form your practice takes — alone or in a group, guided or in bare silence, ten minutes or twenty, once a day or twice — the invitation is always the same: to sit, to consent, and to let God be God within you. You bring only your willingness, offered and re-offered each time your attention slips. Everything else is grace, and grace is patient. Begin where you are, keep coming back, and trust the quiet work you cannot see.

Frequently asked questions

How long should centering prayer last?

The traditional period is about twenty minutes, practiced twice daily — ideally morning and evening. Beginners can start with ten minutes and lengthen it gradually as the practice becomes familiar. A shorter period kept faithfully most days forms you far more than a long one kept only occasionally.

What is a sacred word in centering prayer?

It is a single word — such as God, Jesus, Abba, peace, mercy, or trust — that symbolizes your intention to consent to God's presence and action within you. It need not be meaningful in itself, and you keep the same word throughout the period. It is not a mantra; you return to it only when you notice a thought has carried you away, and let it fall silent in between.

Is centering prayer the same as meditation?

It shares outward stillness with meditation but differs in aim. Centering prayer is not about emptying the mind or reaching a particular state; it is a Christian prayer of consenting to the God revealed in Jesus Christ and letting the Spirit pray within you. Its closest Scriptural anchor is Psalm 46:10, "Be still, and know that I am God."

What do I do when my mind keeps wandering?

Return ever so gently to your sacred word, without frustration or analysis, then let even the word settle back into silence. Wandering thoughts are expected and are not a failure; Keating taught that a single period may involve returning hundreds of times. Each gentle return is itself the practice, a small repeated act of love and surrender.

Is centering prayer biblical?

It does not rest on one proof text but draws on a broad Scriptural witness to silence and interior prayer — Psalm 46:10 ("Be still, and know that I am God"), Jesus' counsel to pray to the Father in secret and not to heap up empty words (Matthew 6:6-7), and Paul's teaching that the Spirit intercedes within us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). Its method also descends from the Desert Fathers and the medieval Cloud of Unknowing.

Who developed centering prayer, and how does it relate to other traditions?

Trappist monks Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington developed the method in the 1970s at St. Joseph's Abbey, drawing on The Cloud of Unknowing and the wider Christian contemplative tradition. It is widely practiced among Catholics and Anglicans, sits alongside the Orthodox Jesus Prayer and John Main's Christian Meditation, and is approached with more caution in some Evangelical and Reformed circles — so it is best held within the Scriptures and the teaching of your own church.

Do I need to be experienced to try centering prayer?

No. The four guidelines are simple enough for a beginner to start today, and no special training, feeling, or experience is required. What matters most is showing up regularly and returning gently to your sacred word, not the quality or calm of any single sitting.