Father Thomas Keating

If you want to heal your relationship with God, with others and yourself, enter your inner room, the office where the divine therapy takes place. Close the door so you don't run away.

quiet your interior dialogue, so that you can listen to what the spirit is saying to you.

An enormous intelligence is guiding us through this process with a love that is unconditional and determined to bring about this healing whatever the cost to itself.

Gregory the Great expressed it as resting in God.

Don't judge centering prayer on the basis of how many thoughts come, or how much peace you enjoy.

The deeper one's awareness of one's powerlessness

and the more desperate, the more willing one is to reach out for help. This help is offered in the next two steps.

You turn yourself over to a higher power who you believe can heal you and work with you in the long journey of dismantling the emotional programs for happiness. They are the root causes of all our problems.

How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them.

Feelings that have been repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again in order to be left behind for good.

The radical healing is the acceptance of the situation.

because in some way God is present there. .

The real work of prayer is just to get rid of the very assumption that was the foundation of all these other modes of prayer. It is a matter of shifting the location of the sense of identity.

The false self is deeply entrenched.

We have to accept that the word I does not have a fixed and clear and obvious referent. This is where the transformation that we undergo becomes more and more radical.

with each breakthrough or illumination.

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process,

because it is the only self we know.

nothing is more helpful to reduce pride than the actual experience of self-knowledge if we are discouraged by it we have misunderstood its meaning

God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us change our attitudes towards them. That is what holiness really is.