Jesus' teaching on prayer

From Matthew 6:5-8 comes Jesus' explicit teaching on prayer:

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

In The Naked Now (via this link), Richard Rohr speaks to how we may be missing the import of this:

When we emphasize [traditional] public, verbal, and social prayer forms, along with group rituals, while not giving people any inner experience of their own inner aliveness (the “Indwelling Spirit”), it tends to keep religion on the level of a social contract; this is often what we call cultural Christianity or civil religion. ... Social and public prayers hold groups and religions together, but they do not necessarily transform people at any deep level. In fact, group certitude and solidarity often becomes a substitute for any real journey of our own. ...

Prayer too easily became an attempt to change God and aggrandize ourselves instead of what it was meant to be – an interior practice to change the one who is praying, which will always happen if we stand calmly before this uncanny and utterly safe Presence, allowing the Divine Gaze to invade and heal our unconscious, the place where 95 percent of our motivations and reactions come from. All we can really do is return the gaze.

Jesus does give his disciples a specific verbal prayer: The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). After the jump, John Piper breaks down the specific asks.