This year keeps breaking our hearts. A partial list: a divisive presidential election seeding anger and anxiety and resentment by the day; violence in Gaza and Israel; devastating floods and hurricanes and climbing sea levels.

And those are just the headlines. Private lives seem no calmer. Certainly that was true for me. In 2024, my husband was hospitalized for weeks with a life-threatening illness, my best friend died, medical bills descended and my marriage faltered. I lost any security upon which I had come to rely.

What can we do when our hearts are breaking? When we are filled with stress and anxiety, when the sadnesses stack up, when hopelessness isn’t an irrational response but a genuine reflection of daily reality? What can we do when we don’t know what to do?

We can pray.

Prayer requires no formal religious observance. You need not attend a temple or church or synagogue or mosque. Prayer need not be a poem or acrostic or hymn. Prayers can simply bubble up from the deepest place inside of yourself. It can be prayer in your own words. It can be prayer with no words.

Many of us were raised to believe that prayer is about communicating with God. It can be, of course. But prayer can also be a way of communicating with ourselves, a tool of self-inquiry. It can be entirely our own, bespoke.

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. But, in the years after I left home, I slowly gave up observance, shedding the strictures about what to eat and what to wear and the prohibitions against the use of electricity on the Sabbath. Much of the practice I was raised with no longer serves me; prayer was the one thing I grabbed on my way out.