St. Teresa relates her life with the well-known long-winded self-complacency of the hysterical subject.  She frequently had visions of Jesus, and again and again she emphasised the beauty of his hands.  “Standing by my side, he said to me:  ’I have come to thee, my daughter, I am here; it is I; show me thy hands.’  And it seemed to me that he took my hands in his, and laid them in his side.  ‘Behold my wound,’ he said, ‘thou art not separated from me; bear this brief exile on earth....’” etc.

On one occasion she had a vision of an angel whom she describes as follows:  “He was not tall but small, very beautiful, his face so radiant that he seemed to be one of the highest angels, who are, I believe, all fire ... in his hand he held a golden spear, at the point of which was a little flame; he appeared to thrust this spear into my heart again and again; it penetrated my entrails, and as he drew it out he seemed to draw them out also, and leave me on fire with a great love of God.  The pain was so intense that I could not but sigh deeply; yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this pain that it made me wish never to be without it.  It is not physical, but spiritual pain, although the body often suffers greatly from it.  The caressing love between God and the soul is so sweet that I implore Him of His mercy to let all those experience it who believe that I am lying.”

The treatise Thoughts of the Love of God on some Words of the Song of Songs is crowded with purely sensuous passages.  In accordance with the general custom, she interprets this naively sensual Semitic poem allegorically, becomes tremendously excited in meditating on the kiss of the beloved and discusses the question of what the soul should do to “satisfy so sweet a bridegroom.”

In the pamphlet The Fortress of the Soul and its Seven Dwellings, St. Teresa describes similar states of mind:  “The bridegroom commands the doors of the dwellings to be closed and also the gates of the fortress and its surrounding walls.  In freeing the soul from the body, he stops the body’s breathing so that, even if the other senses are not quite deadened, speech is impossible.  At other times all sensuous perceptions disappear simultaneously; body and hands grow rigid and it seems as if the soul had left the body, which is scarcely breathing.  This condition is of short duration.  The rigidity passes away to some extent, the body slowly regains life, the breath comes and goes, only to die away again and thus endow the soul with greater freedom.  But this deep trance does not endure long.”  She continues to describe her ecstasies and is careful to point out the complete fusion of supreme delight and bodily pain.  Perhaps no hysterical subject has ever described her states of mind so well.  Her avowal (made in a letter to Father Rodrigue Alvarez) of her complete unconsciousness of her body is quite in harmony with those states of rapture.  She wrote a number of spiritual love-songs which are said to be conspicuous for their ardour and beauty; probably they have never been translated from the original Spanish.