The practice

  1. Still Your heart when you awake and say the prayer

  2. Identify times during your day when you feel pressure or stress

  3. Pause during those times, even if it seems difficult, and say the prayer

  4. Say the prayer with concentration each time and try say the prayer with a sense of connection to God (Kavanah)

  5. Go on with your day

  6. If it helps, learn more about the Middot and try to discern which Middot are important in the particular events of your life

That’s it!

Notes

This practice, then, is intended to help you refocus your intent throughout the day, reminding you that (1) you are fortunate to have been created and (2) that even your smallest actions become holy when performed with the right intent

The goal of this practice is to carry out the actions in our daily life with the mindset of a servant or host who is preparing the house for a great guest

In our case, the world that we live in is the home and the guest is God

Our guest has built the house and has given us our lives and we prepare the house by fostering harmony and order and lovingkindness in all the elements of the house

How do we do this? There are no obvious floors to sweep or candlesticks to set in the window.

We do this in a mysterious way, by carrying out the actions of daily life with harmony, order and loving kindness.

These are three of 20 Middot which have been selected to guide our understanding

This task sounds easy. There are no mountains to climb and now radical vows of poverty to take. In practice, however, the task of constant mindful action, of constant Devikut— cleaving to God— is very difficult. We are distracted by dozens of things at any moment. In our own minds we spin out fantasies and react to imagined futures and fragmented memories. These worlds that we build in our own minds, these fears, obsessions and derogatory thoughts can form a shell, a barrier that prevents us from working harmoniously with the outside world