What is epiphany? If you look up in the dictionary there are different meanings to it. And ironically, I think you will only know what it means when you have reached your own.
I personally like this expression most, “a sudden illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure of an essential nature or meaning of something”. In short, a moment when you suddenly feel that you understand, or suddenly become conscious of, something. An example would be self-awareness.
You don’t necessary realise you do not “know” yourself very much until you reached your epiphany. Yes, you might say that you respect yourself, you know your self-worth, you appreciate your hard work and perseverance and you are proud of yourself. You might also know your weakness, your flaws and you thrive to improve yourself every day. But, do you know the reason of all these? Why you should know your self-worth? Why you have your weakness? What are the cause and effect and how to tackle them?
From my personal experience, most of all are ego based. It is important to know our self-worth as it protects us. But to what extent? Would it destroy us at the end if it gets too big? I have heard people with huge ego might lead to narcissistic traits, but is there a measurement to it? To me, knowing the fine line of the appropriate “ego” is the epiphany.
Appearing like a people pleaser doesn’t equal to having low self-esteem or lacking self-confidence. Being a peacemaker doesn’t mean you aren’t standing your ground. Having respect for others doesn’t mean you can’t set up healthy boundaries. There is no fine line to it but there is a word that might help with the concept, i.e. Love. You love yourself first but not only yourself. You know others’ worth but also yours. You respect others but also yourself. There is no right or wrong but it is important to know what comes first then second. If you don’t know how to love yourself first, if you don’t know your worthiness first, if you don’t respect yourself first, how can you “genuinely” do so for others?
Most of the time people reached their epiphany when they failed, not when they succeed. To some extent it is true, who will reflect on their values and beliefs when they feel powerful and successful? It is when you failed and then you realised, something is wrong; and when you keep making the same mistakes, going around the same cycles, then you will realise what actually went wrong at core.
This is exactly why you need to know the actual reason why things didn’t work, at the same time you should also know your self-worth in order to change. What made your weakness? What are the cause and effect and how to tackle them? Just say, when you hurt people you may find joy but you feel terrible when you find your match. Why would you hurt others? What happened in the past that made you feel that way? You may find joy helping people and you feel great when you can help people who has your same need. Why would you want to help them? What happened in the past made you want to find these people with the same wound?
There is always a reason, some say to find your inner child and fix the wound, some say to do self-affirmation to fix the subconsciousness, some say to do past life regression to find out the root cause. I don’t know what worked but I tried a lot of therapies, a lot of meditations, a lot of self-affirmative sub-liminal and even past life regressions. They only gave me pieces of jigsaw puzzles but not the full picture.
So I prayed. And God answered.
It is funny how when you tried to search for an answer you don’t find it. Because it is too much in your head. When you sleep, you relax and then you get an answer. I won’t go into details but for my epiphany, I was not satisfied until I had a series of dreams from God, Angels, Pastors and even animals. I was very surprised how the messages were all the same but I just don’t trust them. I thought I was becoming dilutional. But it was what I later discovered called “surrendering” that I was blessed to have a peek of the most genuine, righteous answer of all.
I like what comes after epiphany, the awakening. And I love what comes after that even more, the ascension.
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