An October 18 episode of the Opening Minds, Opening Hearts podcast challenges a comforting assumption about contemplative practice: that becoming more spiritually grounded should steadily remove psychological pain. Guest Jesse Fox, a clinical psychologist and professor at Stetson University, argues that Centering Prayer may instead make previously avoided experiences more noticeable, while changing how a person relates to them.
The conversation, titled The Psychology of Centering Prayer, is the final guest episode of the podcast’s fourth season. Produced by Contemplative Outreach, the series explores the teachings of Thomas Keating and the Christian contemplative tradition. Fox approaches that tradition through both his professional study of psychology and his own experience of silent prayer.
One central distinction concerns the difference between participating in a practice and trying to control its results. In Centering Prayer, a person uses a sacred word as a symbol of consent to God’s presence, gently returning to it when caught in thought. Fox explains that the practice is not meant to manufacture a particular emotional state. Within its religious framework, it is an act of allowing rather than an achievement to be measured.
The episode examines what Keating called the unloading of the unconscious. Fox describes how silence can bring habitual narratives, painful memories and emotions into awareness after they have been kept at the margins of everyday attention. He cautions against treating that emergence automatically as pathology. At the same time, he does not suggest that every difficult reaction should simply be endured without help.
That distinction becomes especially important when contemplative practice feels destabilizing. Fox discusses his own experience of receiving counseling while developing his prayer practice and describes the value of working with someone who can help identify patterns that are hard to recognize alone. The conversation therefore makes room for psychological support without presenting spiritual practice as a substitute for professional care.
Another theme is the commercialization of contemplation. Fox questions the tendency to market meditation as a product promising successive states of calm or bliss. From his perspective, this can turn a practice of surrender into another project of self-improvement, recreating the very desire for control that contemplative prayer seeks to loosen.
For meditation teachers and coaches, the episode offers a specific professional challenge. A practice can be meaningful without always feeling pleasant, and the appearance of discomfort does not by itself demonstrate either progress or failure. Fox’s discussion invites facilitators to be clearer about the purpose and limits of their work, particularly when students bring expectations of emotional relief into spiritual settings.
The full episode and transcript are available through Contemplative Outreach. Its strongest contribution is the refusal to collapse spiritual growth, psychological wellbeing and the absence of suffering into the same outcome.
Source: Contemplative Outreach, Opening Minds, Opening Hearts podcast
Web: https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/podcast/the-psychology-of-centering-prayer/
