Reddit reviews Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer

I've been reading Thomas Keating's Introduction to Centering Prayer and working with the intention to surrender to Divine Presence and enjoying adopting the Christian paradigm for spiritual practice. My partner (of a year-and-a-half now) has gotten lots of juice from that paradigm, so I've been learning the language of Christianity as applied to my actual experience as a pragmatic dharma practitioner, so that we can bond through a common language of spirituality.

The language we use, and the paradigm we adopt, can inform how the spiritual process unfolds, opens, and deepens. Anybody who has worked with overtly magickal models can attest to this. "Truth," whatever that might mean, is true regardless of the language we use to describe it, so as long as we don't mistake the finger for the moon or try and eat the menu, we can learn to be at home in many different spiritual systems, all designed to liberate all beings--although the nature of that process may be described differently depending on the tradition.

Here's how I've applied this paradigm in practice (note the language I use here, but don't get hung up on it): I've been focusing my intention to rest in Divine Presence, what some practitioners might call Awareness or Silence or Being. For me, the Divine Presence I seek to rest in and invoke is that of God, experienced as a broad Awareness infused with the unconditional love of a Father. This experience is easier given the love I feel for my own son; it's easy to imagine a Heavenly Father who always loves you, even when you don't always know what you want or get what you want or must confront challenges, hard times, and unpleasant experiences to grow as a spiritual being--a Good Father wants his child to be spiritually happy, free, and independent, and that requires allowing one's child to face spiritual challenges, sometimes feeling as if they are all alone--even if they never are. So, you accept the presence of that Heavenly Father, observing as non-judgmental Awareness, through your own eyes and sensing organs, even while experience unfolds, and you surrender to the embrace of that Father's Awareness--having Faith in its fundamental goodness and unconditional love. Doing so is a preparatory step to a deeper letting go, liberation, which cannot be achieved through direct action, but using the Christian paradigm, requires God's Grace after one has opened themselves to God and the Divine Presence. This is similar in Zen to "just sitting" in Zazen because you cannot *achieve* Enlightenment, only make yourself "accident prone," as they say.

It's a bit different than Zen, though, because you have Faith in the paradigm, accepting the model, allowing yourself to believe in the presence of this actual Divine Presence, a "real" entity that is watching over you. To go beyond concepts of "real" and "unreal"--the realm of God--you have to be able to let go fully into trusting the benevolence of this Divine Presence, surrendering completely to it. The Centering Prayer constantly reaffirms your intention to adopt this belief framework and surrender to it (again, as a preparatory step to liberating oneself from all frameworks, achievable only through God's Grace).

So far, this has been a rewarding practice.

Yes, I have a great many :)

Prayer can be anything you want it to be. It can be repetitive (rosary and chaplets), it can be scripture based (Liturgy of the Hours and Lectio Divina), it can be silenced based (Contemplation and silent Eucharistic Adoration), or it can be like "meditation" (Centering prayer).

Or, you can just totally wing it. Every catholic store you can think of have books on prayers by the Saints. Usually it's collections of different prayers ( I know the American Pontifical College at the Vatican puts out a really good manual of prayers that was originally designed for Seminarians that will have everything you would ever need).

I personally would recommend the Liturgy of the Hours or other Divine Offices, Lectio Divina, and Centering Prayer as good places to start if you haven't already, and are great complements to your Rosary and Chaplets.

Read this .99 book for the best introduction on Lectio Divina

For the Divine Office/Liturgy of the Hours, DivineOffice.org offers a downloadable app for $15.99 that has text and voice recordings of all the daily prayers for any iOS or Android device you have. iBreviary offers the same service, without voice recordings, and with lots of other divine offices and prayers (including the Little Office of the BVM!) for free in a downloadable App.

For centering prayer, I would look at this book for the best intro on the subject.

I would also highly recommend you read the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. I will freely admit to shilling for my Order's Patrons in this matter, but seriously, nobody understood true prayer like they did.