Show Notes
Are you seeking to deepen your interior life through the practice of Centering Prayer? Do you have a desire to develop a closer connection to the divine as well as those around you?
Opening Minds, Opening Hearts is a podcast for both the curious meditator and long-time practitioner of Centering Prayer. On each episode, hosts Colleen Thomas and Mark Dannenfelser will reflect on the method of Centering Prayer with some friends of Contemplative Outreach who share their personal experiences of encountering God through the prayer, and through their work in the world. Topics discussed will include New Monasticism, the value of silence, the practice of contemplation and the call to social action.
Through this podcast, we hope to provide new perspectives on the future of this prayer in the rapidly changing spiritual and technological landscape. Centering Prayer is a practice and a gift and we are excited to share this blessing with our listeners.
More from Opening Minds, Opening Hearts
When 12-Step recovery meets the contemplative tradition, something profoundly practical emerges. Jim McElroy has spent decades at that intersection, sharing how Centering Prayer and the Welcoming Prayer offer those in recovery a new relationship to pain, not an escape from it. In this conversation, through vulnerable storytelling and the wisdom of Thomas Keating, Jim explores healing as integration rather than elimination, and how both practices bridge the language of 12-Step powerlessness with the contemplative language of consent.
In this episode, we are joined by Heather Ruce, a spiritual director and somatic practitioner, to explore how healing truly happens in the body. Heather shares how understanding the nervous system and integrating somatic practices deepen rather than compete with Centering Prayer. Together, we explore what it means to include our whole self in the divine therapy, how the body holds unintegrated material waiting to be processed, and why practices like orienting to our senses and opening to pleasure are essential companions to our contemplative practice.
We're back after a short break, and we're now at the mid-season mark of season four. In this episode, we step back from guest conversations to reflect on what we've been learning and the themes that have emerged so far.
This episode weaves together three healing modalities: 12-step recovery, psychotherapy, and Centering Prayer, through the wisdom and lived experience of Howard B. Howard shares what it truly means to accept our basic core of goodness as our true self, and why that acceptance becomes the foundation from which we can look at our shadow and false self. Together, we explore how this radical acceptance, grounded in the belief that we are loved unconditionally, transforms not only how we see ourselves but how we show up in the world.
Welcome back to Opening Minds, Opening Hearts. In this episode, we are joined by Lawrence H, who was introduced to Centering Prayer while serving time at Folsom State Prison in 2009 and has since dedicated his life to sharing the practice with others. In a conversation full of honesty, hard-won wisdom and real hope, Lawrence shares what it truly means to bring our trauma into God's presence and allow it to be transformed. Together, we also explore the dark night of the soul and how Father Thomas Keating understood it not as something to be feared but as a profound and hidden work of divine therapy that carries us toward deeper freedom.