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Trappist monk Paul Quenon, in In Praise of the Useless Life, writes of willpower.
At least it [willpower] is a vice if taken for raw willpower. As a virtue, it is a natural instinct bequeathed by nature itself. It is a yielding to life, to the Spirit operating in a hidden, undramatic way, and to the operation of grace. Even though nothing appears to be happening, something is. It means long, patient abiding in the poverty of the present moment, without making great claims concerning it. Something much bigger, indeed, is at work all the time. To take stock and measure it is to diminish it. To define it yields a fiction - it cannot be objectified. At best, I may name it, rather than define it, since a name comes closer to mystery, for who knows what is in a name?
That we can have yielding willpower seems to go against our usual idea of willpower as self-assertive, even aggressive. Yet, spiritually, this willpower is a divine grace to surrender our self-will to the Divine-will. Without will, we cannot even say, as Jesus to his Father, in the garden before his arrest, "... not my will, but Your will be done" (Gospel of Luke 22.42). He has not abdicated his will; he has surrendered it to its natural place in the Will of the All. In Passive Prayer, the self-will rests silently in the Divine Presence.
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Rest in the Light occurs by allowing oneself to sink down, a telling image from the Quaker tradition. One will often feel the sinking during silence; the body relaxes and the mind slows down. Then, one can feel more the spaciousness one exists within, and all things live within. The sense of boundaries of the body will dissipate. If the will works in trying to force this sinking down, it does not occur, except possibly briefly. To sink down and rest in clarity and receptivity, one needs to allow the sinking to happen on its own.
Preparation for this, or an introduction to it, one can use at the beginning of the silence - a mantra, a prayer phrase, an image, meditation on scripture, reflection on song lyrics or a poem, ... -, but needs to be let go once the sense of preparedness for the sinking is felt in the body. If the will clings to the means of entrance into the sinking, she or he will block the sinking, negating the motion into the subtle receptivity in the Quiet. Likewise, one will remain in a concentrative mode of focused consciousness, rather than consciousness being open, so receptive to the inner movements of Grace, as well as receptivity to the outer world of the movements of Nature - for openness is not only to inner motions but, also, outer motions.
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Quenon's words remind us of three things to encourage us in this Passive posture through divine Grace.
1) Nothing seeming to happen is much of the life of prayer, like much of life. In Passive Prayer, one is not trying to make something happen, certainly not trying to have "religious" or "spiritual" experiences. One is resting in the natural rhythms of the body and Nature ~ the human body and the Body of Life ~ in God.
2) What happens in Passive Prayer is a training in how to live outside times in silence. If faithful to our times in silence, we will see how we live life outside silence freer of the prior personal willpower and more from energy arising from Presence. We may be doing the same things we did before, yet there will be less struggle, more contentment in the duties of the moment.
3) In Passive Prayer, much is happening. Jesus gives a captivating statement on this, in Matthew 13.33:
The kingdom of heavens is like what happens when a woman hides a little yeast in three big batches of flour. All the dough expands.
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