Thomas Keating advises people over and over again not to look for the fruits of this prayer in their subjective experience of it.  Centering Prayer is not about accessing sublime states of consciousness or having mystical experiences.  The fruits of this prayer are seen in daily life.  They express themselves in your ability to be a bit more present in your life, more flexible and forgiving with those you live and work with, more honest and comfortable in your own being.  These are the real signs that the inner depths have been touched and have begun to set in motion their transformative work.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

[The sacred word] is not a "special" word....It is simply a place-holder, the finger pointing at the moon of your intention...

After a while you begin to discover yet another added benefit of this sacred word: It will sometimes pop up even when you are not in Centering Prayer--right int he middle of your busy life--to bring you back to center when you find yourself getting agitated or ungrounded.  I can't recall the number of times I've been caught in traffic jams or airport security lines, my blood pressure escalating rapidly, only to have my word sweetly bubble up from the depths to remind me that every moment I'm actually here, I'm in the presence of God.

...the word itself is neutral.  It's your intention that makes it sacred.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 26-27

Whatever your mind serves you up is just fine.  If you sink immediately into such depths of stillness that when the bowl bell is rung at the end of twenty minutes, it seems like only a minute, great!  You've had an easy and blessed time of it.  If every minute feels like twenty and you've been bedeviled by thoughts more prolific than the heads of Medusa, but still you've been doing your best to let them go and return to the openness, great!  You've gotten a good aerobic workout of your "muscle" of surrender.

...For the moment it's enough simply to reiterate Thomas Keating's reassurance that "the only thing you can do wrong in this prayer is to get up and walk out."  To sit there and quietly continue to do the practice, even if you perceive your efforts as totally unsuccessful, is, in his words, to know what it means to "consent to the presence and action of God within us" in whatever for it comes.  The power of this prayer lies in the consent.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24-25

I sometimes call Centering Prayer "boot camp in Gethsemane," for it practices over and over, thought by thought, the basic gesture of Jesus' night of struggle in the garden: "Not my will be done, Oh Lord, but thine."

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24

In one of the very earliest training workshops, led by Thomas Keating, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, "Oh, Father Thomas, I'm such a failure at this prayer.  In twenty minutes, I've had ten thousand thoughts."
"How lovely!" Responded Thomas Keating without missing a beat.  "Ten thousand opportunities to return to God!"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 23-24

Meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 16

If we could picture our plight, then, in this unusual state of our being, which spiritual masters from time immemorial have described as "sleep," we could say that each one of us has a Mary deep within us, glued to the feet of the Master.  There are incredible luminous depths within in which we know how to listen and to whom we are listening.  But the clarity of our listening is obscured because out on the periphery we also have a Martha who thinks that the whole world is riding on her back and drowns out the inner music with her constant barrage of "I need," "I want," "Pay attention to me,"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 15

At the center of our being is an innermost point of truth which shares not only the likeness, but perhaps even the substance of God's own being.  And yet, following the bent of Christian tradition, he makes it absolutely clear that access to this center is not at our command; it is entered only through the gateway of our complete poverty and nothingness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

You might picture [spiritual awareness] as a kind of interior compass whose magnetic north is always fixed on God.  It's thre, it's as much a part of what hold you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat.  And its purpose, just like a compass, is for orientation.

...spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole and an innate sense of belonging.  It's something like sounding the note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that surround it to make it a chord.  and since spiritual awareness is perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates life at the ordinary level of awareness.

If we have within us a compass pointing to the magnetic north of God, does this mean taht God dwells within us, as the center of our being?...Caustously, the answer to this question is "yes."  I say "cautiously" because Christian theology makes very clear that the human being is not god and that ht einnermost core of our being is not itself divine.  And yet theology has always upheld the reality of our own divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 12

Like most of the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity.  The person I normally take myself to be--that busy, anxious little "I" so preoccupied with its goals,fear, desire, and issues--is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life.  This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his "life" (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.  Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller "I" with its insatiable needs and demands.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 10

Intentional silence almost always feels like work.  It doesn't come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself: "You mean I just sit there and make my mind a blank?"  Then the inner talking begins in earnest, and you ask yourself, "How can this be prayer?  How can God give me my imagination, reason, and feelings and then expect me not to use them?"  "Where do 'I' go to if I stop thinking?"  "Is it safe?"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 8-9

Silence is God's first language.

-John of the Cross

quoted in Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 7

What goes on in those silent depths during the time of Centering Prayer is no one's business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine once said, "God is closer to your soul than you are yourself."  your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened--except for the more or less continuous motion of letting go of thoughts.  But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 6