Sit in the silence

In the 1970s three Trappist monks in a Massachusetts abbey, led by Thomas Keating, noticed that young Americans were going to Asia to learn meditation and had no idea that their own tradition had a contemplative practice fourteen centuries deep. So they went back to a fourteenth-century English book called The Cloud of Unknowing, and to the desert fathers before it, and built a practice anyone could learn in an afternoon. Centering Prayer.

It's silence. Twenty minutes, twice a day. You choose a single sacred word, any word, as a sign of your consent to rest in God's presence. You sit, and when you notice you've been caught by a thought, you return, gently, to the word. Not as a mantra to repeat; as a sign to come back. That's the whole practice.

If the religious vocabulary isn't yours, I'd still read this one. Keating's insight was that the deepest thing a person can do in prayer is stop talking. Most prayer is asking, thanking, confessing, which is talking. Centering Prayer is listening, with no agenda, to whatever is underneath the words. He called it consent. You're not doing anything. You're agreeing to be present to what's already there.

It's in the month of Awareness because it's the Christian form of exactly what Zen, TM and Vipassana are doing: attention without content. Different vocabulary, same door. Vault Human's year says your tradition returns as your choice. For a great many people, this is where it returns.

Keating's rule for distractions is the kindest I know: "Ever so gently return to the sacred word." Ever so gently. No scolding. The thought came; you came back. That's the practice working, not failing.