How Does the Body Pray

When I usually think about prayer, I think about inner life, having a conversation with the Divine in a way that is personal. I also think about singing the melodies and how the vibrations it creates reverberates within and stirs my soul. But prayer also manifests in the body.

A couple summers ago, I participated in a partially silent retreat with the Institute of Jewish Spirituality, and one of the sessions I attended was about embodied prayer. We practiced yoga and contemplated concepts from the personal standing prayer, the Amidah. Part of the prayer involves bowing, some initiated from the knees and one comes from a bend at the waist, but this is not the kind of bowing that brings you prostrate on the floor (we save that one for the High Holy Days). Most of the time when I recite the prayer, I am doing it quickly, and the bow becomes more of an elaborate dip forward than what it is intended to be, an acknowledgement of the relationship I have and am developing with the Divine with a posture of humility.

The bow that initiates at the waist is part of a prayer called the “modim”, where we speak of our gratefulness to God for many great gifts we and our ancestors have received. I started to play around a bit with how I would bow. After a morning of yoga, I tried it as a forward fold, like the part of a sun salutation. I bent over and touched my toes while channeling gratefulness. The experience was intense but didn’t seem practical as I would usually be holding my prayer book as well, and so I tried bowing again but deep enough so that I could still feel the stretch in the back of my legs. That felt that like a way to make sure that my body and mind remained focused on the meaning behind the prayer.

An interesting contrast to this is prayer pose in yoga which involves hands together, feet planted on the ground and chest open. This heart-open posture also feels like an invitation to the Divine but the upper body remains upright rather than supine.

I experienced this heart opening form of prayer through my experience learning archery this week. In order to be successful at archery, one needs to stand up tall, with your chest up while creating a strong tension between your two arms pulling apart the bow. The arm that pulls back the strings is bent at a 90 degree angle but the power comes from the shoulders. So you have one arm straight in front of you, one arm almost behind you, your chest is open and your head is high. As my teacher taught, for archery, you need to approach it with confidence.

We train our bodies to move a certain way and then over time, it becomes natural. However, standing tall with confidence is not a posture that comes naturally to me. In learning archery, I am retraining my neural pathways to assume a new stance: one of self-assurance and self-worth. As I practiced, I could feel that there was a lesson in Torah here. That prayer takes many forms, that we can stand before the Creator in a stance of “modim”, gratitude and supplication, and we can also appear before Them in our strength and agility. In allowing myself to stand as tall as I could while I harnessed the great power within, I was celebrating and feeling grateful for the gift of my body.

This isn’t the first time I have felt the interconnectedness of body and spirit, but it is my latest example of how we holistically connect to the self and the Divine.