Embrace the silence, Don’t avoid the silence, It’s not something to fear, Let the silence surround you, And calmness will appear. Anonymous  Autumn  I hope you all have had a good summer despite the awful weather in some parts of the country.  We have been lucky, and all has stayed green, with leaves now turning to autumn colours and…

“ As the primitive character of our relationship with God moves on to more mature levels, we may still get lost from time to time, in the details of life, or as one poet put it. The dust of the world.”Thomas Keating”  Thomas Keating’s Experiment extracts from an article written in 1993 Continuation from the last Newsletter of…

Silence, Solitude, Solidarity, Service Thomas Keating’s Experiment extracts from an article written by Thomas in 1993  “I envisage Contemplative Outreach as an experiment to see if the fruit of the contemplative experience that I received in the monastery can be made available to people who are leading an ordinary life outside the monastery. It was…

Transformation The butterfly has long been a symbol of transformation.What begins as a caterpillar emerges from the cocoonand spreads wings of rainbow brilliance.We too can make changes in life that take us toGreater heights than we ever dreamed possible. We have made a prison for ourselves by building the walls of defence, the False Self….

My Beloved is the mountains, The solitary wooded valleys, The strange islands, The roaring torrents, From The Canticle by St. John of the Cross. LETTING GO OF THE SELF -MADE SELF. BY Thomas Keating OCSO. Without thinking or feeling some emotion, there is just awareness. There is then no desire for bliss, enlightenment, or to…

Pope John XXIII. Peace on Earth One of the programmes I recently watched on the Television was on the late Pope John XXIII. The programme inspired me to write the following article. On 11th April 1963 Pope John XXIII signed his last Encyclical before his death. It was entitled, “On Establishing Universal Peace in Truth,...

Prayer is a deep intimate relationship with the Ultimate Reality. It is a journey of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-realization. A journey which takes us the centre of our being where we meet the Creator of All. Prayer as a way of life. PART 1 If we are to take St. Paul’s words seriously in 1Thessalonians...

A thought for our times. We may think we are opened minded, socially conscious, anti-racist. Yet we all have old learned hidden biases that we need to exam. It is our responsibility to check ourselves daily for stereotypes, prejudices and ultimately discrimination of any kind. Letting Go of the Self-Made Self. by Thomas Keating OCSO...

Nothing is more beautiful than the uniqueness that God has created. | You don’t have to create the beauty – you’ve got the beauty. | You don’t have to create the freedom – you’ve got it. | You don’t have to create the image of God in you – you have it. | You don’t...

“Contemplative Outreach is a voice crying in the wilderness of the violence and disunity that still exists among the religions of the world today. … The purpose of Contemplative Outreach is to guide people attracted to the Christian understanding of the practice of contemplative transformation. … What Contemplative Outreach is trying to transmit is something...

In the silence which is active, the Inner Light begins to glow – a tiny spark. For the flame to be kindled and grow, subtle argument and the clamour of our emotions must be stilled. It is by attention full of love that we enable the Inner Light to blaze and illuminate our dwelling and...

Centering Prayer throws light on a new perspective of everything, to a new understanding of ourselves and all creation. It leads to a deep conversion of the heart. Centering Prayer is the path to a radical new way of seeing the world. It is not, as is sometimes thought, simply an act of devotional piety,...

“Thinking, which is the radical gift of rational consciousness, is of its nature controlling and inventing. It is limited in its capacities and bound by five senses and the thinking process. Putting this managing and controlling mind into the heart is a basic practice to awaken the divine presence within us.” – Thomas Keating, Contemplative...

What is Contemplative Outreach? Contemplative Outreach was founded by Fr. Thomas Keating specifically to support those who are practicing Centering Prayer as he envisaged it. To this intention he set about creating a systematic teaching which would make accessible to modern people the rich and long tradition of the Christian Contemplative teachings. There has always...