Prayer - Mutual Affection

Prayer has sometimes been defined as "receiving the ever benevolent gaze of God, returning it in kind, mutually gazing and finally recognizing that it is one single gaze received and bounced back."

If that is true, then it makes sense that when I despair, I am neither giving nor receiving the benevolent gaze of God. When I fall into despair, I am saying on some level that life is hard, life will always be hard, and life is especially hard for me. But not only am I saying that life is hard, I am saying that inherent in the hardness of life is a callousness from God. In other words, there is no "benevolent gazing" going on.

Through a great deal of training (as a result of desperation), I have learned to harness my thoughts. When I slide into despair, I ask myself, do you really want your energy to go in this direction? And since I really don't like despair, I have learned to literally stop despairing thoughts in their "tracks" and choose to enter into the "one single gaze received and bounced back".