Definitions of key words...

We can get into trouble if there is not agreement about certain words. I find very different approches to the term "meditation," for example. Buddhists, and those whose experience with what Abbott Thomas Keating and Dom Basil Pennington call "centering prayer" began with Buddhist experience, call "meditation" the use of a "mantra" (e.g., Maranatha) to achieve a deeper level of spirituality. Abbott Keating and Dom Basil Pennington call this "centering prayer" and that is the term I use for this process. So here are the terms as I use them...

MEDITATION - conceptually thinking about something, such as "the Love of God," or "Redemption," or "Greater love has no one than to lay down one's life for one's friends," or some such. Could be called "daydreaming about God..."

CONTEMPLATION - clearing one's mind of other thoughts altogether and sitting, waiting on God's response.

CENTERING PRAYER - the use of a repetitive sacred phrase, combined with regular, slow, deep breathing to center one's self down to the presence of the Lord. See link on this phrase.

JOURNALING - the style Fr. Price teaches is that of writing a letter to the Lord so as to shut out distractions and keep one's mind on the event of praying but this has the excellent side benefit of providing one's self with a journal of reflections on the life's issues. Best done in conjunction with dreamwork.

DREAMWORK - the style Fr. Price teaches is that proposed by Carl Jung, expanded upon by Fr. Morton Kelsey and others, that almost everything in your dream is a symbol of some aspect of your personality, depicted in a highly subjective way for you to understand and work with the symbols.

Updated September 15, 2002