I am going to try to describe this. A very secular friend of my father and I were once talking about Wilhelm Reich and his Orgone experiments. The conversation tipped towards how this managed to cure cancer and the like. I asked him if he thought orgone energy was a metaphor for the ability of the human mind to heal the physical body. He replied, asking, what isn’t a metaphor for the human mind’s ability?

Good question. Perhaps tefillin are only another metaphor. But, just like sitting in an orgone box, wrapping tefillin is a physical act that focuses the mind on a particular task. The bottom line is when I lay tefillin in the morning I have a nice calm quiet day and things do not get to me.

I stand up in a quiet spot, set a timer for 20 minutes, and follow the ancient procedure of wrapping myself in a tallis, wrapping the arm, the head, completing the arm, saying the Shema, the Amidah, a few other prayers and then standing silently breathing in deeply with my eyes closed, thinking about the challenges of my day, thinking about Idan and hoping he isn’t missing Israel too much, my mom wresting loose from the pain of her childhood, my dad that he doesn’t kill himself on his mountain bike, Adam and Lisa are safe and happy, my sister learns to love herself, and asking for the ability to be patient with all this. Whilst the most important part, asking for the ability to see the lesson from the challenges I will face today, run through the whole ‘conversation’. It reminds me of when I guessed the Hebrew verb l’hitpalel meant to talk to one self. It means to pray. It cracked my teacher up…

20 minutes goes by and I open my eyes, reverse the process and I am calm cool and collected.

Try it, it will change your life. It is a combination of mediation, proprioceptic movement, concentrated thought, prayer, daily review, and recitation of the key components of being a good person conserved for thousands of years.