Living Our Own Epiphanies Living Our Own Epiphanies Living Our Own Epiphanies
Many self-help books are written, as well as articles, offering top tips on how to live your life to the fullest. Others tell us how to see each experience as an opportunity to learn or grow.
Today, there are virtual mass-access platforms where everyone is choosing which topic, proposal or worldview is more relevant or which one they identify more with in that moment of their lives.
We seek what we think we need, but not necessarily what we want. Here lies the question: how do we discover what we really want?
All of these books or articles have a common denominator: the dark night of the soul, inflection, to hit rock bottom, shadow confrontation, or a divine message or call.
As for myself, like all those who undertake this conscious or unconscious search with the essence that moves them, I decided to call it an epiphany. And although the term seems to already have a connotation connected to a religious celebration, what I extract is that it is nothing more than the description of a moment in which a path or message is revealed to us. It’s like a guiding light that we experience as a strong feeling of peace, a moment in which we strip ourselves of prejudices, beliefs, expectations, external demands, fears, doubts and social constructs.
Perhaps for a fraction of a second, everything that is not part of that pleasant moment of revelation doesn’t matter anymore. It’s an exquisite moment of ecstasy, filled with deep peace, joy and gratitude for living the wonderful gift of being totally present and enjoying life consciously — even for just a moment.
Here and now
The great challenge is to hold on to this epiphany, here and now, as we move away from this ecstasy and return to the old. That old comes like a thief and steals the very essence of living and leads us back to that mechanical way of existing.
I confess that my greatest moments of fulfillment have been those where I have achieved that state of being present, that enjoyment and living to the fullest, an awareness of each situation or experience that is either misnamed “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” And I say misnamed because these words are loaded in a belief system. Our moments or experiences are just that, and each of us are the ones who give these terms their meaning and we live them that way.