When you experience the undifferentiated, general, and loving Presence of God beyond any thought, don’t go back to the sacred word. You are already at your destination.
Accept the fact that thoughts will come. Don’t try to make the mind a blank. That is not interior silence.
Our best response is to ignore them; not with a feeling of annoyance but with one of acceptance and peace.
Every response to God must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment.
The constant starting over with the sacred word with patience, calm and acceptance trains us for the acceptance of the whole of life.
It prepares us for action.
There should be a basic acceptance of what is actually happening before we decide what to do with it.
Our first reflex is to want to change reality or at least control it. (Thomas Keating, OMOH 2005, p. 40,46)
Receiving the inflow of God’s love is all about receptivity. That is the key! We become more aware of our relationship with God. (Bill Sheehan)

I would like to reflect on how we can expand the walls of our inner room to the embrace the day. Fr. Keating states that we should not fight our thoughts or evaluate our prayer time. Simply accept the presence of our thoughts. Constantly return to the sacred word to cultivate detachment from them as they flow through us. So too we can accept and not resist what happens to us over the course of the day.

The beauty of this acceptance is that we can then decide what the current situation is calling out of us. How would God have us respond in this particular situation? Instead of being reactive with our emotions in charge of our response, we can pause. In the pause, we experience the purity of our God-given emotions as we accept what is happening and discern the appropriate response. Instead of an instinctual first movement of our wills, we catch ourselves and make a godly second movement as we act out of who it is God has made us to be.

We may even recognize that a particular situation that triggered us in the past, does so no longer. God’s purifying perhaps even emotionally painful touch that arises from the circumstances gives us an opportunity to open ourselves to God’s help. Using the daily events that arise as our practice becomes a means for God’s healing touch. Let us see that God is constantly working moment to moment in our lives. We are in relationship to God always.