What we do
We teach about and practice prayer both to enhance participants' clarity, strength, satisfaction and understanding of their own prayer lives, and to help them understand how to better craft and facilitate prayer experiences for the people with whom they work. Initially, the emphasis of our work is far more on the personal dimension than the professional dimension. This emphasis reflects our commitment to working with our participants to help them develop a sense of their own personal spiritual path. As leaders of prayer, they receive the frustration, doubt, anxiety, fear, antipathy, resistance and rejection projected from their congregants and constituents. In response, they often feel that they have to “stand up for” the form of prayer that they have inherited, even as they seek to preserve (let alone enhance) their own prayer experience. This dynamic is an invitation to paralysis and stagnation – both for the professional, and for the prayer service in their institution.
The first step in easing this stasis is to invite the professionals to encounter prayer anew, to renew their own personal experience of the prayer experience. It is only as they have retrieved a personal experience, and have had an opportunity to step away from the stance they have been positioned to hold in response to their constituents, that they are able to begin to consider what they might do to make prayer possible for themselves – and then for their constituents.
How We Do This
Our primary arena is in the practice of prayer itself, and so it is largely on retreat that we are able to engage in it as an experience (rather than a subject of study). We approach the experience of prayer from two sides: the experience when engaged in communal worship that uses traditional Jewish liturgy; the experience of prayer when engaged in individually, outside of the structure of traditional Jewish communal worship. We take it as a given that Jews pray daily. As a community we gather and offer opportunities for our participants to daven three times a day. We use those as opportunities and formats in which to address the different aspects of prayer we seek to develop.
The morning service is that which receives our primary emphasis as communal, liturgical worship. We take for granted the traditional form of prayer, and assume participants’ presence and involvement. It is that “givenness” that is the foundation of the participants’ experience of the prayer service as “congregants,” receiving that which is offered, free of distractions. As participants in the prayer service (and grateful not to be its leaders) the rabbis and cantors are able to learn to sense the movement of energy in the kahal, to experience the way in which Spirit can move in the group, bringing people together into a strongly bonded community. Further, we are able to introduce new ways of engaging in prayer through niggun, chant, silence and contemplation. It is in this context that the participants are able to begin to reconnect to their own personal experience of the liturgical prayer as a spiritual practice.
On the other hand, we approach the afternoon and evening services as opportunities for our professionals to experience their own, individual and private prayer. We have taken minchah as a time for more contemplative forms of worship, stripping the experience of most of its liturgy, emphasizing instead the internal awareness of the arising of prayer. Related to this, we introduce our participants to hitbodedut practice (private prayer vocalized as continuous speech, separated from conscious direction, manifesting the deepest awareness of the heart). In this way we open up the practice of prayer to include contemplation and meditation as practices and forms of prayer experience. To further support these more private experiences, we incorporate journaling as part of the process of reflection and integration. The evening service is even more open, presented as a time in which participants may join together for a more formal service (as a time to recite Kaddish), to sit further in meditation at the conclusion of the day, or to engage in any of the other prayer practices that move them at that time.
In addition to this focus on experience as an avenue to renewed liveliness in prayer, we do also address prayer as a subject of study. Our faculty members reflect with our participants on their personal experience, and also offer an introduction to other ways of conceptualizing the prayer experience. In particular, the central role of prayer and worship in the Hasidic tradition, and how it was conceived there, is part of our curriculum. To deepen awareness of this, we ask our participants to read academic articles in the field, and assign primary texts regarding the meaning and experience of prayer during the interim study periods.
Relation to Other Practices
Prayer is clearly related to the practices of spiritual direction, meditation and yoga. Traditionally, spiritual direction was a place where one came specifically to discuss one's prayer life, and to seek direction for it. For our participants, who may only now have been introduced to contemplative prayer, or the inner experience of the movement awareness of God’s presence as a form of prayer, the connection of Spiritual Direction to their prayer life may be powerfully transforming. When this form of prayer comes alive, further supported by Spiritual Direction, it may then feed back into the formal, liturgical prayer experience. Although the spectrum has widened in terms of the kinds of issues people bring to spiritual direction to discuss, the texture and activity of one's prayer life is still, for many people, a central part of their work in spiritual direction. Connecting those other issues to one’s prayer life through Spiritual Direction helps to deepen and expand the possibility of prayer for our participants.
Many of the themes taught in mindfulness meditation and in yoga are the same themes that are encountered in prayer: gratitude, acceptance, surrender, mystery, uniqueness, awe and praise. They are different avenues for exploring much of the same material, and therefore beautifully reinforce one another. Further, in mindfulness meditation and in yoga we are brought to deeper awareness of the arising of reactions: resistance or judgment, anxiety or joy. When we invite our participants to sit back and join in prayer, without being leaders, we invite them also to open to their inner reactions. They may come to recognize how they feel pressed by their congregants to make changes in the prayer service that they feel are inappropriate or resisted by them when they offer innovations. They may feel resentment at the loss of their earlier love of prayer, and fear that the positive experience on the retreat will never be realized in their institution. They may learn of their own dissatisfaction with the traditional service or the form of prayer in their tradition. Mindfulness practice and yoga provide them with tools to regain balance, a degree of acceptance and renewed energy for investigation of new possibilities.
Yoga is the practice we employ in our program to raise up the embodied experience of the moment. We re-value physical experience as a possible, and powerful, source of awareness of God. As such, we are reminded that the physical has its place in the worship experience. From the body awareness that we deepen through yoga, two possibilities arise in prayer: the embodied experience of the moment is brought to consciousness and so made present for inclusion (even) in liturgical prayer; deepened awareness of emotional and spiritual sensation in the body through prayer invites expression in physical movement.
Many of our participants, new to mindfulness meditation and moved deeply by it, feel challenged to incorporate it into their daily spiritual practice. This, frequently, creates a sense of conflict between what had been a daily practice – prayer – and meditation (this may also be true relative to the practice of yoga, but less so in terms of overall numbers). Within the givens of professional life, there many not at first seem as if there is time for both. Part of the work of the Institute is to help participants experience the tension, and then examine the impetus for both prayer and meditation, discern the intention that moves one to pray or to meditate, and then grapple with the possibility of change. This might mean continuing with an “either/or” approach, or it might lead to a new mode of practice: meditation as prayer (with or without incorporating phrases or passages of the traditional liturgy); mindful awareness in prayer (deepening or enriching current prayer/liturgical practice); prayer as a means of discerning intention, to be carried and nurtured by mindful awareness outside of the prayer experience or meditation. Of course, there may be other forms and approaches. The significant element here is the interaction of these practices, and the opportunity for growth generated by their similarities and differences.