It’s Your Hour

Many of us who have heard about the benefits of personal prayer have felt with our own hearts the tremendous impact it has on bringing a person closer to Hashem.  In fact it can be an exhilarating experience to connect in prayer on your own time and in your own words. But that’s just it, many of us have encountered the challenges regarding setting aside time to making personal prayer a fixed hour in our lives every day.

In the army I connected to personal prayer while guarding on the Israeli-Lebanese border in a guard tower. I’d be up there for three hours at a time with just me, thousands of stars, and silence. With my battle vest on and machine gun in hand I’d be up there doing personal prayer. In between guard shifts I would read Rabbi Shalom Arush’s In Forest Fields a guide to hitbodedut, or personal prayer. But what happened after I discharged from the army was that I felt it much harder to schedule in my personal prayer sessions. Whereas in the army my schedule was made for me, now I had to take responsibility for my own time and time for prayer.

Most of us Jewish or not have prayer as an almost daily activity. Those of us who are observant in Torah have the obligations of praying the different services three times a day. Although these standardized prayers allow one to connect to Hashem, they are normally rushed services which hinder one’s true desires to feel spirituality and unification with the Creator. Think about it, there is no lack of distractions throughout the day: concerns with money, work, and family leave us spread thin when it comes to standing before Hashem and truly focusing on the meaning of the prayer liturgy.  In the following paragraphs I want to share with you some tips on how to overcome these problems and lead a truly connected life on your own terms.

After reading “In Forest Fields,” we learn that the best place to pray privately is in a natural environment such as a forest or meadow. The problem is that for most of us city dwellers who are just starting personal prayer, it may be too difficult to make it out to those places on a daily basis. For me personally, I couldn’t live up to making it out to the forest daily so I’d start in my living room on my couch. The problem with that is I started to become drowsy and would fall asleep accidently during my hour prayer session.  What I realized was that even though I set aside my hour to pray free of distractions, I kept getting drowsy and unfocused.  I needed to keep my body busy to stay focused, that’s when I started to think, how can I make this work?

For already a few years now, I have taken my daily exercise routine and turned it into a personal prayer session. This way I am keeping my body busy, getting healthier and accomplishing my desire to pray. Instead of going to a gym and paying a large bill every month, I have opted to go running throughout the city of Jerusalem and also to the forest. The results are amazing; it has cured that drowsy feeling for sure and brought a wonderful feeling of being stronger physically and spiritually – accomplishing them both in the same hour.

Another great tool that you can use if you are married is to take that hour and while your loved one is asleep, clean up around the house while you pray. You can mop the floor, do the dishes, or get the house tidied up at the same time that you do your prayer session. All these techniques are to help those who are just beginning who have a yearning to pray but suffer from the difficulty to focus because of time constraints or exhaustion.

You have to find your own tools, maybe if you have an artistic background you can paint or draw while you pray. The idea is to make it personal and comfortable for you to focus.

Personal prayer is so important for our generation because it is what builds our emuna and allows us to assess ourselves over the past 24 hours. Our greatest need as a nation now is Jewish unity, that means throwing away any barriers to peace. We all are being taught by our greatest leader Rabbi Shalom Arush that we need to increase peace within our own people before we can expect anything to get better in the world as a whole.

Homework: Whether it be art, exercise, kind deeds or whatever, focus on bringing your personality and interests into your prayer session and assess yourself, how can you bring more peace into the world?