oh, and i was happy, too: light and full of ease and just in general my better self, less weighted down by the ugly anorak of self-doubt.

which is awesome, obvs,

sometimes the realizations slow down; i often don’t have time to meditate and reflect on what’s just happened to me but instead jump up to get ready for the rest of the day. sometimes, when i have more time to sit, they wallop me (i am an ocean cave! there’s a masochistic basketball coach living inside me! i can be safe in the present moment! and other such things that make so little sense when i try to communicate their power). most of the time, though, there’s just this incredibly deep sense of not just being comfortable in my own skin, but REVELING in it, which is slightly miraculous but not in the epiphany-ish sense. and writing! i started writing poems again! and journaling!

i read in a book the other day that the light at the end of the tunnel is looking at the situation in the upside down way: the light at the tunnel can become just another tunnel, but the tunnel itself has the power to become light. so it is, i think, with epiphanies: they are potential tunnels. if i focus too much on them, i’ll miss out on everything else that comes along with my practice, or start to push myself too hard to get them, and ignore everything else. i think i’m learning what i’m supposed to be learning: i may very well be my own developing epiphany.

Sometimes there are big, noticeable epiphanies (POOF! which take a while to assimilate fully), and sometimes it’s just a bunch of little, matter-of-fact realizations that only make the smallest of “piph” sounds…and sometimes I get impatient that it’s not POOF! POOF! POOF! all the time.

But recently I figured out (piph!) that it comes down to this: I like myself better on days when I do Shivanata.

Joyce busted it out in Stephen Hero and other works to describe a realization, and BAM! English has a new word to describe that feeling. For some intense analysis check this out: http://www.mrbauld.com/epiphany.html

See also satori.

I guess we also have insight and realization as more entrenched synonyms in English.

–Thorin the wordwhore
.-= Thorin Messer´s last post … What I woulda wrote =-.

(And my comment is late, but it’s been a busy weekend. I know it’s Monday but where I live – Tokyo – it’s a long weekend.)

“One day I realized that I was afraid to take time for myself, and that smoking was a form of permission.” When I read that, I had an epiphany about something I do that similarly gives me permission to take a break.

I also remembered a funny story about one of my friends.

Years ago we worked in a bank together in Toronto. At some point, smoking in the workplace was banned (so you know this is going back a while) and thus began the now time-honoured tradition of smokers going outside or to coffee shops to smoke. Meanwhile, the non-smokers only got pee-breaks or a quick take-out coffee+sweet.

One afternoon our boss was passing through the staff lounge and noticed my friend sitting there, doing nothing. He asked what she was doing.

“I’m taking a mental cigarette break”, she replied.

Mental Cigarette Break. It’s just one guy.

P.S. The boss started looking for her cigarette and wondering why he couldn’t smell smoke. He thought she’d said “menthol”.

Now, a few ideas from a few different places have fallen into my lap in the last few weeks that feel like they changed everything – big epiphanies. I wondered why these, why now, and why not the other times this year I’ve been searching – then the image of a giant hourglass popped up. Each small moment of growth building almost invisibly on themselves to make the big change. Maybe sometimes change is like a light switch, but maybe most other times it can be as small as a grain of sand. (you know, to mix metaphors a wee bit)

So once again, thanks for the reminder about the goodness being in the mistakes.
.-= Katy´s last post … Christine Kane’s 5 Large Life Lessons of 2009 =-.

I do PSYCH-K work, and I get these little bits of insight as I sit in whole brain position that are like flashes of sunlight off of a shiny windchime. I have to be open to NOTICING the flashes, then exploring the flashes, and pairing them together with other flashes and THEN I see the pattern. I usually don’t see the solution to break up the pattern for a while. That requires more openness and more noticing.

I’d say all the big epiphanies I’ve had in my life, such as This Job Is Killing Me or I Want to Have a Baby have all come as a culmination of lots of drips of insight. I can’t remember ever having a “heavens opening up and singing” moment without them.
.-= lynn @ human, being´s last post … Happy (belated) Ham Day, or why I need an odd sense of humor to live in my house =-.

And shiva-gasms… *makes shifty eyes* that shouldn’t be hot…

But seriously, very cool metaphor.
.-= Amy´s last post … Thrumming Brains =-.