Thomas Keating: Centering Prayer

In Intimacy with God (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996) Thomas Keating explores what often occurs within many who practices Centering Prayer.

Rest grows deeper as our trust in God deepens, and the emotional doubts about our self-worth, impressed upon us in early childhood by various rejections or excessive competition with other siblings, begin to relax. Because the rest is so profound, the body rests as never before. The body is the storehouse of the emotional pain of early life as well as the consequences of trying to deal with that pain through coping mechanisms such as repression and compensatory activity. As a result, the hardpan of defence mechanisms around the emotional weeds of a lifetime begins to soften, the body's extraordinary capacity for health revives, and the psyche begins to release its waste materials. Our awareness during prayer becomes a channel of evacuation similar to the evacuation channels of the physical body. The psyche then starts to disgorge the undigested emotional material of a lifetime in what might be called an attack of "psychic nausea." Early emotional traumas were never fully digested, integrated, or evacuatedbecause as infants and children we could not articulate our pain. We could not speak yet, or if we could, we did not have the language or the courage needed to express what we felt. Unarticulated emotional experiences that are traumatizing may be pushed into the unconscious where their energy remains. Emotions are energy. They can only be dissipated by acknowledging or articulating them. (78-79)