I feel like for me, the New Testament leaves many questions unanswered when it comes to establishing formal practice outside of the 10 Big Ones (10 commandments) and the Golden Rule. Though, as you mentioned, there are some hints that Jesus provides towards meditative/introspective (perhaps 'hidden' is indeed an appropriate word) teachings ("the kingdom of heaven is within you"), and one of my favorites, from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,

"Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him"

A 'formal practice' established by the church, over however many hundreds (thousands) of years, are the sacraments.  Baptism, communion, marriage, etc.  Technically speaking, the sacraments are mysteries in that through these rites, there is a union between the self and God/Christ which is established that cannot be explained.  So, in a sense, even mainstream Christianity has mystical elements to it, regardless of whether or not mainstream practitioners consider themselves to be mystics.

I just ran into this interview with Bernadettehttps://www.spiritualteachers.org/bernadette-roberts-interview/. Here's the end:

Bernadette: First of all, I think there are more people in the state of oneness than we realize. For everyone we hear about there are thousands we will never hear about. Believing this state to be a rare achievement can be an impediment in itself. Unfortunately, those who write about it have a way of making it sound more extraordinary and blissful that it commonly is, and so false expectations are another impediment – we keep waiting and looking for an experience or state that never comes. But if I had to put my finger on the primary obstacle, I would say it is having wrong views of the journey.Paradoxical though it may seem, the passage through consciousness or self moves contrary to self, rubs it the wrong way – and in the end, will even rub it out. Because this passage goes against the grain of self, it is, therefore, a path of suffering. Both Christ and Buddha saw the passage as one of suffering, and basically found identical ways out. What they discovered and revealed to us was that each of us has within himself or herself a “stillpoint” – comparable, perhaps to the eye of a cyclone, a spot or center of calm, imperturbability, and non-movement. Buddha articulated this central eye in negative terms as “emptiness” or “void”, a refuge from the swirling cyclone of endless suffering. Christ articulated the eye in more positive terms as the “Kingdom of God” or the “Spirit within”, a place of refuge and salvation from a suffering self.For both of them, the easy out was first to find that stillpoint and then, by attaching ourselves to it, by becoming one with it, to find a stabilizing, balanced anchor in our lives. After that, the cyclone is gradually drawn into the eye, and the suffering self comes to an end. And when there is no longer a cyclone, there is also no longer an eye. So the storms, crises, and sufferings of life are a way of finding the eye. When everything is going our way, we do not see the eye, and we feel no need to find it. But when everything is going against us, then we find the eye. So the avoidance of suffering and the desire to have everything go our own way runs contrary to the whole movement of our journey; it is all a wrong view. With the right view, however, one should be able to come to the state of oneness in six or seven years – years not merely of suffering, but years of enlightenment, for right suffering is the essence of enlightenment. Because self is everyone’s experience underlying all culture. I do not regard cultural wrong views as an excuse for not searching out right views. After all, each person’s passage is his or her own; there is no such thing as a collective passage.

I think that one thing to keep firmly in mind when we’re looking for Jesus’ angle on the love of God and practice of that love is that Jesus as a Jew was always working from scripture himself, from the Hebrew Bible. His first public appearance in the gospel of Luke is at a synagogue in Nazareth (immediately following his 40-day meditation retreat and fast in the wilderness), where he stood up to read from the book of Isaiah, chapter 61, verse 1 and part of verse 2:


In mapping terms, this seems to me to be suggestive of the last stage of the Zen Oxherding cycle, “coming back to the city with bliss-bestowing hands.” He is speaking from some kind of fruition here, and he is talking about fruits, the good news of liberation and healing, not about the process and practice of moving toward fruition.
 
So what we’re really asking about here on this thread about practice is what was he doing for those forty days in the wilderness? And in his frequent resorts to prayer in solitude and isolated places during his ministry? And in all honesty, I just don’t think there’s enough in the gospels to put much together here. Even in the larger Hebrew scriptures, the material on prayer is very sketchy and thin on the ground, as far as actual practice goes, and you can’t really do much with it without an awful lot of exegesis and reading stuff in, which is how the rabbis and Merkabah mystics and kabbalists and Christian contemplatives have been doing it for thousands of years, making a scriptural molehill into a contemplative mountain. (No offense, lol, I’m climbing that molehill myself).
 
I guess part of what I’m getting at is that I just don’t think you’re going to get that far in unearthing or discerning a comparable “practice” from the words of Jesus alone, or even from the Bible as a whole by itself. Most of the Desert Fathers seem to have made do with "a word," a scrap of scripture, often given by an elder, that they took back to their cave or hut and found a way to meditate on for very long periods of time: 40 days in the wilderness all over again, and just as opaque about "technique." Most of the written Judeo-Christian contemplative tradition, while rooted in scripture, finds its elaboration in extra-canonical writings. John of the Cross, who really does seem to me to be the state of the art in the articulation of a Christian contemplative path, makes his main points with frequent, and sometimes spectacularly strained and even mistranslated, quotations from scripture, both Old and New Testament. The new cloth of his exegesis is woven around threads of scripture. The word “sutra” also means “thread,” and Hindu-Buddhist tradition also weaves its later layers of exegeses around scripture, but the eastern tradition is much more discursive and explicit, eventually, in its presentation of the path and the way along it. The Buddha’s sermons are standing on top of thousands of years of Upanishadic and Vedantic material, even as he renews and subverts it with his own fresh exegesis. And so on, with every fresh reading of the previous material, and every new contemporary exegesis, like MCTB or Bernadette Roberts, and right up to the present day. And all these shared sources ARE the traditions. We follow the threads that speak to us, working and studying and practicing to see what all the fuss has been about all these thousands of years. We make the tradition our own, we come to embody it in our degree. The Judeo-Christian didn’t begin or end with Jesus; the deep historical spirituality of the East did not begin or end with the Buddha. And when we compare the traditions, we compare them from precisely where we are now, in our own practice, as students and followers of the paths the traditions discuss and suggest; we try to make the footprints come alive beneath our own feet. I know that Buddhism has immeasurably enriched my own practice, and can try to articulate that to some extent; in context here, we are talking about whether that enrichment of practice can be two-way or not, whether Judeo-Christian tradition has anything whatsoever to offer in return.
 
 It really may not, lol. I usually suspect that it doesn’t, actually. I think it may come down to whether we can see dependent origination as the will of God, the three characteristics as the movement of the holy spirit, and the cloud of unknowing as sunyata. And to what the hell happens when that rock rolls away from the mouth of the tomb, and whether samsara is nirvana then or what. But if you can grok all that, in both vocabularies, and keep paying your rent and being kind to your neighbors. . . . well, waiter, I’ll have what he’s having.

love, tim

The clearest instance of this is in Luke 17:21: “The kingdom of God is within you.” In context, this is a direct reply to being challenged by some Pharisees to say when the kingdom of God was coming, a popular exercise in the Judaism of that time, as the Second Coming’s timing is in our times among certain Christians. In that context, the reply is a subversive immediacy that eludes the rhetorical trap of a specific prediction, which was characteristic of Jesus’ exchanges in dialogue with the religious establishment.

I think a lot of the parable teachings likening the word of God to a seed to be kept and sprouted and cultivated within one’s heart are along these same lines, and suggestive of a practice that is both immediate and looking toward a fruition in the longer term.

The clearest expression of this radical, even renunciate/monastic attitude toward material needs is in Matthew 6:24-34, especially in 31-34: Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For your heavenly
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

This is likewise good as a basic meditation tenet, let go of past and future, want and need, worry and projection, and attend to what
comes up: this particular day’s meditative grist suffices for good practice.

lol, amen!

I might qualify this one a bit: the Our Father prayer is for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” The realization of the kingdom
of God on earth is a perennial Jewish theme. We go beyond the senses, when we do, in prayer and practice, into the ungraspable “realm” of God, as part of a path of dissolving impediments, concepts, and attachments, in order eventually to conform to God’s loving desire on this earth made new (Isaiah has God say: Behold, I make all things new). I personally consider the conventional understanding of heaven as an immaterial destination to be unscriptural, and sort of stupid. It’s like the Pure Land Buddhist realms, a sort of vacation disneyland for
souls at best: it may be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. If God is not eventually realized here and now, then fuck this shit. IMHO, lol. 

One other verse, while we’re tossing candidates for exegesis into the pot, is Mark 13:37: “And what I say unto you, I say unto all: watch.” The Greek γρηγορέω here, the verb for for “watch,” means literally to wake or be awake, as Gautama is literally the Awakened One. But of course how we awaken or stay awake brings us full circle to practice.

love, tim

Hi Luke,

In the Path to No-Self, which is the work I'm most deeply familiar with, she doesn't give a moment to her practice or technique. The best clue is where she is talking about her experience in the convent, at age 18:

the novice mistress propmptly accused her of "quietism", and insisted that she return to "mental prayer," i.e., more structured practice, with a strong verbal element. It fucked her up, caught between her superior and God, and she had to go through a big round of doubt and fear before she worked it through. 

Most Christian contemplation is VERY simple, technique-wise. The Cloud of Unknowing is typical: lift your heart to God with a single syllable of longing. lol. 

love, tim