Hesychast practice centers on cultivating hesychia, an inner stillness understood as the condition in which continuous prayer becomes possible, pursued within Eastern Orthodox monasticism through withdrawal, silence, and disciplined attention. Its most characteristic practice is the frequent or continuous repetition of the Jesus Prayer, a short invocation calling on the name and mercy of Christ, which hesychast teachers describe as gradually descending from repeated recitation with the lips to a prayer that continues, as the tradition puts it, in the heart, largely of its own accord and independent of conscious effort.
Later hesychast teachers, including Gregory of Sinai, associated this practice with specific bodily postures and coordination with the breath, methods hesychast literature itself treats as aids appropriate to some practitioners rather than as necessary or universal, and traditionally recommends be taken up only under the guidance of an experienced spiritual father within a monastic or closely supervised setting rather than adopted independently from a written description. The tradition's most striking theological claim, defended by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, is that sustained hesychast prayer can lead to direct experience of an uncreated divine light, comparable to the light Christ's disciples reported at his Transfiguration, a claim Palamas grounded in his distinction between God's essence, which remains forever unknowable, and God's energies, through which Orthodox theology holds that God can genuinely be experienced.