Hi, my name is Pete Scazzaro.

I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast.

Great to be with you.

Today I'm going to share with you a conversation with a Trappist monk on the four stages of prayer.

And so my life, as some of you may know, was profoundly altered in 2003 when I actually visited a trappist monastery for the first time.

Actually, it was my first time ever visiting a monastery period.

I had just wanted to learn about slowing down for Jesus

and what might be some of the implications they would have for me as pasturing,

an inner city church here in New York, I had no

idea it was going to alter my life. I felt like I'd gone back, I went back into history

of thousands of years ago when I entered that monastery. And it was really there, beginning in

2003, with the Trappist that I began to learn about,

learn experientially about silence and stillness and prayer on a level I never had experienced before that.

And for probably the next 12, 13, 14 years, yearly I'd go back to the same monastery for retreats,

whether it be for a few days or a week.

And I got to know some of the monks personally, although most of the time on retreat would be

spent in silence. But I learned a great deal. And of course I learned from other monks as well.

But the trappist, whom I like to call the SWAT team of monks, were a particular gift to me.

And I remember that the challenge of, and I would go every time, and I joined them in their

life of the daily office. We would wake up at, we'd have our first office at 3.45 in the

morning, the middle of the night. Then we meet again at 6 o'clock in the morning, then for Lodds,

and then 625 for prime, and then we meet at noon for sext, another office, and then at 2 o'clock

...