volitional prayer

when reading Teresa of Avila’s book “The Way of Perfection” I’ve come to understand that what is known as the prayer of recollection is actually a volitional state. Now what the prayer of recollection is, is when all of your senses and faculties are focused on Holy Spirit inside of you, more properly God in you. So essentially what this does is it cuts off your understanding and distraction from the outside world. This enables you to be completely focused on God when you pray. This is something I’d never realized so now in my prayer times when I begin feeling God’s Spirit I immediately focus on Him in sort of lean into Him. This causes me to have what I can only describe as a falling feeling. Every time I begin having this it causes me to kind of freak out and I lose my focus on God and I have to start all over. I vaguely remember reading about this in her other book “Interior Castle.” And she warned that as we were getting used to this feeling it would be scary. Now I know that should probably go without saying; how could it not be scary having your senses lose focus on the outside world but I’m glad she warned us about it anyhow. There was one thing she said I really appreciated, she said that what we are learning here in this state is how to give our soul control over our faculties. I can see why this would have to be the first stage in contemplative prayer.

All this being said does anybody else out there have any experience in this and if so how did they go about mastering this type of prayer?