You may wonder how an ‘aha’ moment, an epiphany of understanding, or revelation happens. You may wonder how you can accept as a Truth something that just ‘bubbles’ up seemingly from out of nowhere—that you can’t quite trace back the linear logic that got you there. Some people say, “it resonated with me.” Is ‘resonates’ really even a thing? That’s sorta what happened to me in Auto Therapy (Post 16). I fairly vibrated with the information that bubbled through from somewhere even though I could not retrace a logical progression of A to B to C afterwards.
Quick version: if something resonates with you, it’s an internal, almost perceptible bodily vibration when your mind/consciousness/psyche/soul recognizes a Truth. Some people may call it a ‘knowing.’ They just ‘knew.’ Sometimes it’s felt like a ‘glow’ in your gut, solar plexus.
So it’s happened to me, I questioned it, and then found evidence of the universality of it in all of us. And, I’m gonna say, even a scientific basis.
Feeling the Glow.
Here’s my experience: If you read Post 6 and 7 (The Catalyst, Part I and Part II), I had worried most of all about the heartbreak I was causing my daughters, my grandmother, my family. Tearing apart my life and family to claim a life of my own, could it truly be the ‘right’ thing to do? At a bookstore visit during the hardest times of the break-up, there, right at the cash register was the book, “Co-Parenting.” It was a new concept at the time, but I felt it was meant just for me to find it and offer it as a mediating solution. Mrs. True, our counselor, always expressed her pride in how both the girls’ father and I were able to put the girls first as we worked through the pain.
I’m not sure if it was months or even a year of co-parenting when it happened. I had chosen to move to the outer edge of the girls’ school district and the price I was willing to pay was driving the girls to school each morning, most years to two different schools before I would then get ready for my own job.
One such morning, I had dropped first one daughter at her elementary school, took the second daughter to her middle school and back home, to get ready for work. I’ve sorta accepted that we pay a price for most everything, and I was comfortable with the price of driving every school morning that I had the girls, feeling happy even that I was comfortable with the cost of the arrangement.
I can see it as plain as day exactly where I was when it occurred. I was getting ready to enter the on-ramp to the interstate that would take me to work. Perhaps I’d still been feeling the self-satisfaction of the progress my choices had been giving me. All of a sudden, I felt this glow is all I can use to describe it. Right in the middle of my gut. I may even have reached my hand to touch it. And with the glow came a realization that my daughters would not have to go through the pain I did to claim a life of their own. They would inherit it from me! I had absorbed the pain so they wouldn’t have to go through it.
I had lived into the answer to my emotional question.
Did the glow come first or the realization and answer to my question? I can’t say. I just know I felt the glow radiating from the pit of my stomach, and as the illumined answer to my worries about my daughters came, that glow warmed my heart all the way to every extremity. It was more than an answer; I felt it a reaffirmation that I had made the right decisions. So, I extrapolated: a revelation of something hidden and previously unknown that is True, well, the atoms in your body vibrate with the excitement of Knowing a Truth!
Perhaps you’ve felt something ‘resonate.’ You read something, someone speaks something, and you feel a bodily ‘knowing’ it’s true. A micro tremor of the atoms somewhere in the gut region (solar plexus), sometimes throughout your entire body. I haven’t gotten into atom research (yet)—maybe they do increase their vibrations—but if you have ever felt it, you know exactly what it feels like. Here are the Dots that help explain this bodily reaction to Truth or Knowing.
Nobel Prize Winning Dot #1. The Clue.
The first clue was a Dot I picked up long long ago (and retained) from a book, “A Life of One’s Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married” by Joan Dash. (I also retained the book because I felt some day it would be pertinent for me to have it—like to quote this Dot to you.)
The three gifted women were Margaret Sanger, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Margaret Sanger was a nurse whose mother died at 50, presumably from the wear and tear of having birthed eleven children. Margaret worked/advocated/politicked for birth control for women in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
Edna St. Vincent Millay won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her poetry and verse which she went on to use as her medium in her activism also for women’s rights.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer is probably less well-known as a nuclear physicist who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for her work in “discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure.” Out of my ilk for sure, but…it is her description and other scientists’ descriptions of something resonating bodily that I retained for decades. (And please note that the feeling was so great, it made receiving a Nobel Prize pale in comparison!) From the book:
“But it happened in her mind even before she saw it on the paper, an awesome process that Maria would never forget; and before it happened in her mind, she felt it almost bodily: the feeling she had then was what made the day of the Nobel Prize an anticlimax. James Franck once said that the way he could tell a new idea was really important was the feeling of terror that seized him;…And Robert Wilson, a distinguished nuclear experimentalist, described at length the aspect of terror in his creative insights in an interview in ‘The Way of the Scientist,’ by the editors of ‘Science and Technology:’
…the real kicks come, of course, when you have…filled yourself with a particular problem, and—you know—you have a great desire to have some clarity in it. You go through this long, hard period of filling yourself up with as much information as you can. You just sort of feel it all rumbling around inside of you, not particularly at a conscious level. Then—it can happen at any time—you begin to feel a solution, a resolution, bubbling up to your consciousness. At the same time you begin to get very excited, tremendously elated—pervaded by a fantastic sense of joy….
But there’s an aspect of terror too in these moments of creativity. You must come pretty close—can you call it the life force?…I think there’s something universal about the experience of something coming from your subconscious almost fully formed. It’s like throwing up when you’re sick.”
That’s resonating. Your body atoms ‘knowing’ something is true/infallible even before your mind registers it.
Nobel Prize Winning Dot #2. The Science.
Fast forward several years from that book, I discovered that Nashville had a C. G. Jung Society which met once a month. I started attending, found most of the speakers presenting more and more ideas and insights that strengthened and lengthened my understanding of human beings, dreams, egos, shadows, all of it! I have also shared, many times, that the Jungian Group was the first place I ever felt totally accepted. No question was questioned. No thought or feeling trivialized.
One such speaker told us about another Nobel Prize recipient, a Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine. In 1977 he was awarded the Prize in Chemistry for his Dissipative Structure Theory. To my layperson thinking, it explains just how that whole bodily ‘aha moment’ can occur to anyone with a brain (literally).
Prigogine’s Theory is about the functioning of closed and open systems. He named ‘dissipative structures’ which are systems that seem to be self-organizing—taking all the chaos and making ‘a new order out of the chaos.’
The Jungian-based guest speaker (and I apologize for not being able to credit him) correlated Prigogine’s dissipative structure to our brain, which is an ‘open’ system. He explained that in a closed system, no new information is introduced. An open system is one that receives new ‘information’ from the outside, limitless information even, always feeding more and more new information into it. Then, if all that new information is stirred up, (what Prigogine called “perturbations’)—stirred stirred stirred—all of a sudden the open system can and will totally reorganize itself into a whole new (and improved) complex structure-paradigm-answer-resolution-order.
If we feed more and more new information into it, then stir it up, thinking about it, asking questions, pondering, inquiring, (all perturbations), our brain can totally reorganize into a whole new perception/aha/answer—and it will bodily resonate through the atoms. (Doesn’t that sound exactly like what Robert Wilson described in the quote above?)
The description the scientists talk about was because they had a theory! Most new discoveries are based on theorizing first (suspending ones’ self out over an abyss, home of the pumas (Post 4). Then they exerted energy, zoomed atoms around at supersonic speeds thinking of possibilities and probabilities, testing and retesting, heating the brain to the core to find an answer…and the brain totally reorganized…put the pieces of the puzzle into place. Atoms vibrated and there was the answer bubbling up!
My theorizing is that the phenomenon is not limited to scientists. We all have a brain. We all have access to new information. We all know how to perturb, I’m sure. Ask your question, any question, fill that question up with information, searching, asking, then stir it stir it stir it up! Wait for those atoms to rearrange, reorganize and relay a whole new thought/view/perspective! It happened in my Auto Therapy trip. (Post 16)
Open the parachute (Post 15). Ask your questions. Fill it up. Stir it up. Don’t give up.