All Christian prayer is basically the experience of being filled with the Spirit, and so, in any talking or thinking about prayer, we should fix the spotlight firmly on the Spirit, not ourselves. In Romans 8: 26-27, Paul puts it this way: "We do not even know how to pray, but through our inarticulate groans, the Spirit Himself is pleading for us, and God, who searches our inmost being, knows what the Spirit means."
This experience of prayer, of being filled with the Spirit, increases our capacity for wonder and our capacity for understanding the transcendent potential of our own being. There is a sense in which we can say that before prayer our principal conviction about reality is of its limitations. We see everything in its transient dimension passing away from us. We feel ourselves caught in the unavoidable cycle of birth and death. But after prayer, our principal conviction about ourselves and the whole of creation is of the infinite capacity in everything to mediate the wonder and splendor of God.
A marvelous thing then happens. With this growing sense of wonder at God's power within us, there comes an ever-deepening awareness of the harmony, the creative wholeness that we possess, and we begin to feel that we know ourselves for the first time. But the truly transcendent nature of this discovery is that we do not begin to appreciate our own personal harmony alone, but we begin to experience it as a new capacity for true empathy, a capacity to be at peace with others, and indeed at peace with the whole of creation.
(This quote is taken from the book, Word into Silence, by John Main, OSB. The book is published by Continuum Publishing Group -- New York -- 2004. The quote is found on page 13.)
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