My personal Aha moments

A week or so ago our association of facilitators of group processes had another of our regular sharing-and-learning meetings and the topic was how to create a supportive environment within a group for the Aha moments to emerge. Aha moments being defined as moments of new realizations within a group, breakthroughs to another level of perception, the magical moments that bring about completely new realities…

Although we were primarily talking about Aha moments in the context of facilitating group processes and models that could help us there, my mind was constantly digging towards it’s preferred realms of self-exploration. I was wandering what, throughout my past, brought about my personal Aha moments, what factors played the key role, whether the sequence of internal events was always the same… Now, it is, of course, impossible to have a complete and accurate overview across Aha moments in my life, but as far as I can remember they generally follow the same pattern:

1. I sense a discomfort, a discrepancy between my needs and between the perceived reality.

2. The discomfort grows and finally I choose to do something about it.

3. I try to resolve this issue with everything that my mind can possibly create, with the help of logic, reasoning… Be it in attempts to discover a deeper truth within myself or to solve a practical problem in my life.

4. Having used up all my mental constructs, I persist, wilfully, trying to force the solution to appear, to somehow squeeze it out of the situation.

5. Banging my head brings no result and so my frustration grows.

6. In a certain moment I give up, completely let go of any attempts.

7. A vacuum appears, nothingness, my mind relaxes, breath comes back, no fixed ideas in my mind, blankness.

8. Aha moment happens, out of the blue, a revealing and liberating insight into what seems to be a deeper nature of the issue. Everything seems to be simple, flow comes back…

It is not, of course, always like this, but as much as I can gather this is the general line of events in my being. Looking at what I have written it reminds me a lot about Elisabeth Kübler Ross’ five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) which are, in psychology, also often observed as stages through which people need to pass on our way of facing changes in our lives. Changes that, for our minds, always pose a certain dimension of a threat and a step from the known (and safe) into the unknown (and threatening).

I guess artist are the people who depend on the Aha moments the most so perhaps they are the ones to be asked about this magical process. Any artist willing to share the secret?