The exercises you ask about originated in this way, from the Fathers observing what happened to them when they were in a state of prayer.

In physical nature we see it in the ebb and flow of the tide, the contraction and expansion of our muscles, day and night, rest and activity of all kinds . . . In human society the rhythm flows between collective work and festivity, hierarchy and equality, public roles and general crowds, diversity and unity, a collective sense of eternity and history. With individuals the rhythm pulses between effort and relaxation, analysis and intuition, animus and anima, sexuality and androgyny, engagement and withdrawal, health and sickness, anticipation and presence, thrust and balance, activity and receptivity, manipulation and appreciation, doing and being, problem and mystery, action and contemplation.

The monk practices spiritual reading. For him a book is not a source of information, but a way to pray. What if we always read as prayer, every book a scripture, whether science, fiction, or theology? Our minds might release some of their authority and influence, allowing our hearts, or some other place of reflection, to be nourished.

It is of the essence of the monk's life to rise early. Whenever we get up in the small hours of morning we particip0ate in the monk's praise and enjoyment of dawn. In this liminal place, on the threshold between dream and life, sleep and waking, and darkness and sunshine, we find a special doorway to the spiritual and the eternal. The monk seeks out periods of spiritual ripeness and simply opens his heart to their effluence.

All the classical things that have been said about prayer are true—petition, praise, adoration, communion, conversation. But one’s notion of God and divinity has to be sufficiently empty, its mystery sufficiently accounted for, or else prayer becomes exploitation of the divine.p>Prayer only makes sense in the paradoxical presence of both human pain and desire on one hand, and divine infinitude on the other.