Another important piece of advice that we can glean from this sichah is that we shouldn’t delay our davening with other aspects of taking care of our bodies. For example, we shouldn’t spend time walking around, drinking coffee, and so on. There are some tzaddikim who do these avodos with very deep kavanos, and thus, they really help them to reach higher levels of tefillah. For us, however, these things only take away from our ability to truly connect to davening, and they very often can cause us to miss the times for Krias Shema and Shemoneh Esrei, G-d forbid.
Rather, we should wake up and begin to sanctify our bodies for tefillah by washing our hands, through which we push away all the klipos from our physical form, as the sefarim hakedoshim explain. Then, after we go to the bathroom, we recite “Asher Aatzar” and thank Hashem for the miracles that He does to make our bodies function properly. Next, we say Birchos HaShachar, most of which mention the incredible physical blessings that Hashem gave us – the ability to see, stand up, walk, etc. Through this, we prepare our bodies for avodas Hashem, for the sake of Heaven.
After saying Birchos HaShachar, it is very good to learn Torah and go to a mikveh before davening. Nonetheless, we should make sure to wake up early enough to do these things without missing the zmanim. As we mentioned before, these avodos don’t need to take a long time. Even twenty minutes of learning can awaken our seichel and completely transform our tefillah, especially when we study chassidus, which opens up our minds to think about the deeper meaning of the prayers and our connection to Hashem.
