In the chapter on Elul, we reviewed the role prayer and meditation play in this process. Both of these activities sneak up on the heart. They disarm the heart by focusing on something else—the breath or the body or the words of the prayer book—and then the heart, which has always craved our attention anyway, unwittingly discloses itself by stealing our attention away from our breathing or our prayers with a continuous stream of thoughts and feelings and impulses.
