How long should I pray every day as a beginner?
If you are anything like me, you probably started at a point in your life where you had no idea how to pray. That was me at 18, 19 years old. I had very little experience of prayer, very little understanding, and it was not until I became Orthodox at 25 that I really began to understand prayer in a systematic fashion. So let me distill two decades of experience with prayer into a very simple recipe for fixing your prayer life.
Number one: think about your prayer life as sets and reps. All the principles baked into the physical life are also baked into the spiritual life, because all the principles undergirding the universe are built on the character of God. People often think about prayer in terms of a time and a mood and an energy and what they are going to say. Get rid of all that and start from the very basics.
It is like going to the gym. If you go one day for 60 minutes and then do not go for four days, you are never going to make any progress. But a person who goes every single day for 15 minutes will see exponential progress versus the person who goes one day and takes three days off. When I first started to pray, my spiritual mother asked me, how long can you pray for?
Realistically, what can you do every day? I told her something very, very beginner level, five or ten minutes. She said, great. Set a timer, do not look at it, and when the timer goes off, you have completed your time of prayer. If you want to go a little past it, that is fine, but you are only expected to hit the timer. It is quantifiable. How often do I need to pray?
Every single day. She gave me a prayer rule, every single day, and we agreed on a time. From that point on you have a baseline to work from. This really should be done with your spiritual father or your parish priest, whoever is available to you, but it needs to be something practical and tangible. She told me one of the number one problems is quantity over quality.
God does not need a lot of prayers. He wants quality prayers. What you can do and stay focused on is more important than running through your prayers at 90 miles per hour trying to complete some arbitrary goal. Focus on the time you are going to spend in prayer. In my experience, that is absolutely the best way to do it. It reminds me of a story from the life of St Sophrony of Essex.
In the monastery there was a prayer rule they were supposed to complete every day, an hour and a half of prayers. One monk would be so immersed in the first minute's worth of prayers that it took him the full hour and a half to get through three lines. He talked to the abbot of the monastery, and the abbot said, well, you probably need to finish all the prayers.
But then he went to his spiritual father, St Sophrony, and St Sophrony said, just keep doing what you are doing. If you only make it through those first ten lines of prayer, stick with that, even if it takes an hour and a half. The quantity is not important. The amount of words you say is not important. The quality of what you say, for the amount of time you are able to keep to on an every single day basis, is absolutely important.
And the number one thing I learned when I first started to really pray was that every day I prayed, my day would be exponentially better. It did not matter that I was only praying for five minutes, because that was the hardest five minutes of my day. But I was doing it every day. And every day that I skipped it, woke up late, got busy, got distracted, it was like my heart became hard and the whole day was just off.
I realized the heart is like silly putty. When you grab silly putty, it is hard, but when you massage it, it becomes soft and gooey and malleable. When I go to bed and wake up in the morning, my heart starts to get hard, and I need to warm it up, massage it, get it soft toward God again. That is why morning prayers are so integral. Wake up and pray whatever amount of time you can pray. That is number one: sets and reps.
