Centering Prayer was developed by Cistercian monks thomas-keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger as an accessible contemporary expression of the teaching of the anonymous 14th-century The Cloud of Unknowing.
The instructions are brief: choose a sacred word; sit silently for twenty minutes; when you notice you are thinking, gently return to the word. The word is not a mantra — it is a signal of consent to God’s presence and action within.