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Centering Prayer: A Bowl of Cereal for the Soul

Centering Prayer: A Bowl of Cereal for the Soul

Last updated on: August 14, 2026 at 5:47 am by Tom Rapsas

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Centering Prayer: A Bowl of Cereal for the Soul 2026-08-14T05:47:22-06:00 Tom Rapsas

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A simple bowl of cereal in a quiet hotel room—a reminder that sometimes getting back to basics is the best spiritual palate cleanser. Image by Gemini.

During my decades in advertising, I recall hearing a story about David Ogilvy, who many called the “Father of Advertising.” I worked for a time at the New York office of his namesake agency Ogilvy & Mather, once nervously riding up the elevator with the legendary adman to my eighth-floor office.

David’s taste for high culture was well known. As he traveled the world for high-profile meetings with agency execs and prospective clients, host after host tried to impress him with lavish, multi-course feasts. But these meals grew tiresome to him. It is said that he would sometimes cancel dinner plans and retire to his hotel for the meal he really wanted: a simple bowl of cereal.

It’s the same with spirituality: sometimes we need to get back to the basics.

I was thinking of this story the other day as I looked at the books I had been reading and writing about over the past couple of months. The topics included non-speakers with telepathic powers, people with deathbed visions, out-of-body consciousness, and a woman who sees angels everywhere. I needed a palate cleanser. The spiritual equivalent of a bowl of cornflakes.

To get back to the spiritual basics, I turned to a book that was collecting dust on my bookshelf. Judging by the bookmark inside it, I had only read the first few pages, when I’m sure a flashier book, on UFOs or a similar subject, caused me to put it down. That book was Reflections of the Unknowable by Father Thomas Keating. It was published a few years before his death in 2018, when the author was 90.

Keating introduced us to Centering Prayer, a Christian form of meditation.

In the 1970s, to the dismay of the Catholic church, many young people were turning to Eastern meditation practices. Keating and two fellow Trappist monks realized the Catholic tradition already had its own long-forgotten form of meditation. Drawing on ancient Christian texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, Keating helped reframe these contemplative practices into what we now call Centering Prayer.

In essence, Centering Prayer achieves the same effects as meditation. When done regularly, it has the power to calm the mind and reduce stress—and importantly, its effects often carry over to everyday life. But there’s an additional element to Centering Prayer not found in most meditation practices—the idea that when we strip away the noise of the ego, we can sense the presence of God. Keating explains:

Beyond the ego is a self that we normally don’t access except through meditation, prayer, or some special invasion of God’s presence in our life. At the deepest level, there is a self even beyond the true self, and this is the manifestation of God.

Keating writes that the goal of Centering Prayer is to realize that when we look into our deepest self, we can sense God’s presence within us. He believes that “God is omnipresent and everywhere” and through this practice we can gain “a sense of being in God, God being in you, or both.”

A Quick Guide to Centering Prayer

Here’s an edited version of Centering Prayer as explained by Keating in Reflections of the Unknowable. I’ve added a few thoughts in italics.

Step 1. Sit in a comfortable chair and close your eyes. Take deep breaths for about half a minute. I like to place a pillow on my lap to rest my hands on.

Step 2. Make the intention of welcoming God’s presence within you. Set aside thought or desire and open your heart to the Divine presence that’s within and around you. Some sense nothingness in this space, a great void. I sense a presence I call God.

Step 3. Introduce a sacred word. Make it a single syllable. It can be a name for God, or something like loveor peace or thanks. When you become distracted by thought, return to the sacred word. If your word is “love” introduce the word, but don’t repeat “love, love, love…” Think it once or twice, until you are back on track. You may be able to rely solely on focusing on the breath and not need the sacred word. But if you need it, use it.

What to contemplate when your brain won’t shut off.

Keating realized that thoughts had a way of interfering with the practice and tells us “That is normal and impossible to avoid.” He offers the following guidance:

You may notice you’re engaged with a thought like “what am I going to make for dinner?” As soon as you start thinking about the ingredients of the meal, you need to disengage. Returning patiently to the sacred word again and again, maybe a hundred times in a twenty-minute period of Centering Prayer.
The experience might be compared to a river with boats moving on top of it. You can’t stop the boats, but you can stop yourself from getting on a boat to see what’s inside it. Just let the thoughts come and let them go like boats floating by you on the river.

More wisdom from Thomas Keating.

The book includes an interview with Keating, where he drops several pearls of wisdom that had me scrambling for my pencil to underline them. Here are three that stood out.

God brings people into our lives. Sometimes through a book, phone call, or an event—to see something about ourselves that had been hidden from us or that will help our spiritual growth. There is a sort of loving intelligence which we could call God, which is helping to bring about our progress and continuing evolution.
We’re always thinking about how to resolve problems instead of accepting them and moving on. Once we start accepting them, the sense of God’s presence is likely to appear in daily life and events. In time, the Holy Spirit begins to show us how to improve our response to people, difficulties, and challenges.
We have to grow out of the narrow-mindedness that puts nation or religion ahead of the basic goodness of being human. When we become aware of our oneness with God, we become better people.

In a world full of fantastical spirituality stories, and countless spiritual practices, sometimes the best thing we can do is to get back to the basics. Just like a simple bowl of cereal, a few quiet moments of Centering Prayer might be all our souls actually need. A good reason to try it today.

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