How do we lay aside our thoughts, and come to this poverty of spirit? What the desert tradition advises is to take a single word or phrase and repeat it continuously in the mind and heart during the time of the meditation. To repeat this word or phrase (in Latin he called it a ‘formula’, John Main called it a mantra or prayer word, sacred word) to stay with the same word, or the same phrase makes it different from lectio divina where you of course move from phrase to phrase. In meditation, you stay with the same phrase or the same word, during the meditation and from day to day. This has an extraordinary effect, which is that the word then begins to sink into the heart like the seed growing, how we do not know.
( Sources of Wisdom by Laurence Freeman OSB )
