Preparation for Prayer

I've been to several Jewish Meditation groups where the meditation was a 15-20 minute silent meditation followed by regular prayers. My understanding is that the source for this (I'll try to find the actual source) is in the Talmud where it describes the first rabbi's taking an hour to prepare for praying.

This has never sat well with me, though I don't know why. It makes sense that someone wants to get in the right frame of mind to pray, but doing mindfulness meditation or just focusing on the breath didn't feel right for me.

Tonight, before devening evening prayers, I felt overwhelmed with fear. It's a fear I've been interacting with over the past few days, and it felt like I needed to sit with it for awhile before I prayed. I sat for awhile and then had particularly powerful davening, lots of energy, lots of souls.

And then it hit me, the line is "the first step in wisdom is fear of God", but I could never find any particular place in the liturgy that would give us a moment to feel our fear. So maybe this is what it's referring to: sit and feel your fear first, and then interact with God. Use that time at the beginning to be with your fear and that will open the way to use the prayers to talk to God.

I'm going to have to sit with this awhile longer and play around with it, but something feels right about it.