Epilepsy: emotional and spiritual meaning

What epilepsy is

Epilepsy is a disorder in which groups of brain cells fire too readily, so a surge spreads. The seizures differ. An absence can look like a few seconds of being elsewhere, with no memory of them. A convulsive seizure stiffens the body and shakes it, and consciousness goes. The illness is electrical. It is not a decision to leave the room, and it is not violence turned back on yourself as a sentence you passed. Many people live well with it when the medicine is steady. Sleep, missed doses, and some lights or illnesses can lower the threshold. A clinician sets that plan.

The emotional meaning of epilepsy

Spiritually, this is a failure of communication inside the brain, a buildup that becomes a shock wave. An absence is placed next to wanting to flee a situation whose responsibilities feel too large, with anxiety and impatience alongside. Too much attention on the rational side, and a cut from one's own feelings, is the climate it names. A harsher line in the pages, that the seizure shows a violence turned against yourself and a habit of self-punishment, is a question about how hard you judge yourself. It is not why the cells fire.

A convulsive seizure is set beside a belief that life offers only rejection, violence, anger, and despair. The sense is of always having to fight, of being persecuted, of feeling guilty for an aggressiveness that is pushed down with every other feeling that wants out. The head is full of ideas and none of them is clear. Life feels unstable, like a prison, after having had to submit. Someone or something larger seems to hold the reins. You fight an enemy you sometimes cannot name. The resistance is so total that the spiritual interpretation imagines the body having to discharge the load. Intense anguish is what it says knocks the controls out of your hands.

Fear of losing someone or something you think of as yours can blow through as panic. Losing consciousness is read as a protection, a short break from relationships that have become too hard, long enough to breathe. The duality is of feeling trapped. Living in the head, ahead of the moment, is said to overheat the circuits. Wanting so much control of other people that the body goes out of control is the irony the pages like. Enough is enough. The effort is too much. Life is rejected because it seems set on making you suffer, and at the same time life is felt as the persecutor.

The stiffness and the waves of convulsion are pictured as a protest, a way for old bitterness to leave. During a seizure the movements are said to express what could not be said or done before, and to warn the people nearby that love and attention are needed. A seizure can frighten the people who love you. It is not a method for obtaining attention, and it is not a way of feeling superior. Causes placed in early childhood, in the pregnancy, in guilt, or in an abuse, need the same care as any other story of harm: safety and help if someone is being hurt, and no description of the harm as a symbol. Separation from a father, or from one's own children, can be a real grief. It does not write the electrical pattern.

What can be taken from the pages without harm is the sense of overload. Daily life takes too much room. Events get amplified in the mind. There is a choice that is not being made. A great fear, of death or illness or of losing someone, can colour the wish to go forward, as when a funeral has to be attended and the body will not set out. The invitation afterwards is to notice what is happening inside, to see that love and beauty also arrive, and to stop living only inside a prison of thoughts. Other people can carry their part. The medicine is what keeps the surge from being the way the feeling leaves.

A gentler way to hold it

• After a seizure, when you are safe, name one feeling that had no other door.
• Hand back one responsibility that was never yours.
• The next dose is still due. Sharing the feeling is separate from that.