In Centering Prayer, we aim to fulfill the command “Be still and know that I am God.” We sit in stillness and quiet for 20 minutes, letting go of our thoughts and consenting to God’s presence in us. Someone asked why 20 minutes, what is special about that duration? The answer is that 20 minutes is the time it takes for the average person’s mind to come to rest, for thinking to begin to slow down.
We are so married to our thoughts, to thinking, that we equate living with thinking and so we might believe that to stop thinking is to stop living. Likewise, we come to a false understanding of “knowing,” believing that knowing is only achieved by thinking. We see knowing as capturing knowledge, like snaring a wild animal in a trap. But knowing God is not like that. God is elusive, like a wild animal that you know is out there, but that you never see, let alone trap. Knowing is not capturing. Knowing is communing with God, uniting with God.
And that is what contemplation is, knowing without capturing. Centering Prayer is a method that trains us to begin to let go of our dependency on thinking in order to know God.
Father Thomas Keating says that Centering Prayer is a journey into the unknown, a training in letting go of thoughts, desires, words, and eventually oneself.
We do not understand the inner workings of our own minds. But we do observe certain things about our minds that help us to gain insights. The activity of our mind changes levels depending on the time of day and what we are engaged in. We go unconscious when we go to sleep. When we are awake, not sleeping, we are conscious. However, there is a brief period when we are going from our waking, thinking frame of mind and dropping into the unconscious state. In this brief time, our thoughts totally subside, and we perceive a timeless solitude before we sink into sleep.
In Centering Prayer, we are seeking this peaceful stillness of our minds while conscious. Someone compared Centering Prayer as rebooting our mind. If you own a computer, you’ve probably learned that sometimes your computer “locks up” and to get it to work properly, it must be rebooted or restarted. The most common advice I’ve received from computer specialists is to turn off the computer and wait 30 seconds before starting it again. When I’ve asked, “why 30 seconds?” the response has been something like, “that’s enough time to let all the electrons come to rest in the hard drive and the circuitry and for everything to be reset.”
The 20-minute period for Centering Prayer is what the contemplatives and mystics have determined to be the minimum time for most people to reach a resting state of their minds. Centering Prayer may not be an attractive practice to everyone, but many who try it and give it more than just a few days find that this daily practice fosters a whole different attitude toward one’s feelings and puts them in a different frame of reference – a different way of being. In a mysterious way, Centering Prayer allows us to know God without thinking.

Keep up the practice and let others know about your experience!