The Bird Man of Alcatraz is on TV atm, and it occured to me how we deal with what life throws at us in so many different ways.

For some, there is that moment of epiphany when the purpose of life becomes clearer. This can be spiritual, or can be something mundane that we just observe and understand differenlty. I'm not explaining this terribly well, but hopefully you'll get a flavour at least of what I'm getting at here.

The Birdman became altered in his perceptions and understandings due to his passion for his canaries. Has anyone done similar? And for what sort of reasons - if any?

Ye Gawds - what a question.

Are you thinking about the 'road to damascus' stuff - the blinding light/lightbulb experience? Or the 'Room 101' stuff when the pressure seems to be come intolerable and then something gives, somewhere, and your perceptions change?

Menopause, does that count? it gave me a whole different perspective on everything. I'm much more aware of the preciousness of life, and the things that used to wind me up don't do it any more (mostly).

Yes to both kinds. I've always believed that Them Upstairs have their own ways of getting the message across to us when they want to tell us something, and when a entle tap on the shoulder doesn't work, a sharp rap between the eyes with a mallet usually does the trick, Since I haven't always paid attention to the former, I've been the recipient of not a few of the latter over the years .

Mostly though, they've been intensely personal, private, and painful moments. One such was the first time I heard this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFKwyzb5S34.

I'd been left alone with my daughter, then a few months old, while my ex took the children camping with his family. I had a friend coming over for dinner later in the day, but he'd refused to go shopping for me, saying I should wait and get her to take me as she had a car and driver. But I wanted to get some food and prepare it before she came, so after they left I waited a bit, then put the baby in the pushchair to take her to the supermarket. The problem was that I had to pass my inlaw's house on the way, and when I got to the end of the street, I saw that they were still loading up their car. I turned around, and fled back home, as if running away from the scene of a crime. When my friend arrived shortly after, I was still shaking and scared in case I'd been seen. She took me to a different shop. I'd been living there 10 years at this point, and had no idea there was an upper floor, but there was, and they sold CD's, so I bought a copy of Mike Oldfield's Elements. Listening to it after she left, this track came on, and my knees buckled, I sank to the floor and sobbed. That was when I started plotting our escape in earnest.

There have been others, some related to my faith, and some to nudge me back on course when I've either wandered off course or ignored what I'm supposed to be doing. Or when several random strands of life suddenly coalesce to form a coherent whole. I'm almost sure I've heard sighs of relief that I've finally got it then!

For me the strongest one I can remember is the first conversation Mr S and I had about having children together. A friend had just given birth and we were sitting outside a cafe in Brighton having a coffee. We'd only been together a few months and up to this point my attitude to kids had been akin to Baroness Bomburst from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We got to talking about whether we'd ever have kids and all of a sudden I realised that YES ! This was the person I'd be sharing the rest of my life with, and YES! I did want to have his child and YES! This time it really would work out and be ok. I just burst into tears, and so did he

It was a spiritual experience in that I did feel that I'd been led there, or given this, but mainly it was just a huge affirmation of life. I could suddenly understand why people wanted to have children together, and recognise that I was fit to be loved and have a family of my own after all. It was the first step on the path to having T who is now a constant revelation of life's meaning and many wonders

Strewth this ones's a wake up for a Sunday.

Mine ame through some life shattering changes to event's that I had very little controle over.

The first happend when I was leaving school, I reacted totally instinctively in a situation as any of my ancestors would have done. An eye for and eye etc. This got me into one big heap of trouble. Then I was haned the get out of Jail card. but with a clauses like 2 years of my life and ask no questions why etc, but if you do all is forgotten. At that age I took the card option, and ended up in Siberia.

No2: Many years later I return form Canada and the USA after a life time trip away. To find everything in my world had been turned upside down. Ok so I had a medicne dreanm taht I'd writen down due to a medicine man badgering me until I did son, but that all kinda got forgotten at that point in my life. I only found the acount which had told me that this was all going to happen and a few other things again months later.

Let's just put it as the biggest give away of my life, I had lost just about every thing home , income the lot. And had to give away everything I 'd worked so hard to build up including virtually all my horses.

Did I learn form them both? Yep that I can safely say I did. And despite everything at those times being so black and bad, I now actually don't regert going through them. There's a greater plan of things and we only know some of it, the rest situations that are forced on us teach us the rest. It the big wake up call we all need periodically. When it happens to me it's just very big.

Siksika

Some years back, when the relationship I was in was breaking down, something inside me woke up. I don't mean a lightbulb moment; I mean I felt something alive wake, stretch itself and shake something off.

Riiight, I thought. Now what? Now was that I was, almost immediately, presented with a nasty real life situation. In the middle of trying to deal with - I didn't have much time, just a matter of a day or so, I realised I was being offered a doorway.

I could walk through the door, or not. If I didn't, it might never be offered me again. If I did, I was going to experience big time shit for an unlimited period but, at the end of that, I would have crossed some barrier and be different in a way I wanted to be different. And in unexpected ways. And receive gifts I was not going to be told about in advance, and which, if I went through the door just in order to receive, wouldn't come my way. (Not that anyone in their right minds would do that!)

That may sound pretentious, but that's how it was. I don't regret walking through the door, but I can honestly say I'd never, ever, want to go through that again.

It's late.

Tasxx

I could have written that myself hon, went through exactly the same thing. 

I don't recall any occasion in my life that allowed me enough time to evolve a false sense of security. I always knew my mother as brain damaged from head injuries before I was born. My father was obsessed with military life as a convenient escape from any domestic problems. He told me himself the only reason he married and had children was to get out of the barracks. Indeed, when the going got rough he was never around. As the first born, any childhood I had was hard fought against everyone elses responsibilities being perpetually dumped on me. It was a time when women were regarded as little more than a domestic commodity. This made my brother their crown prince, with grand expectations that I play both surrogate mother and father. I could do no right and he could do no wrong. No matter how I rebelled, what couldn't be beaten into me was simply dumped on me whenever they went out for a good time (and that was often). There was no such a thing as babysitters or daycare centers. To make matters all the more complicated, we never lived anywhere longer than five or six years, with thousands of miles between each relocation. They also had such an amazing talent to make the worst possible enemies in every community we lived. Thus I have always had to use the most elaborate and diabolical cunning to master what little integrity was attainable through all this hair-brained chaos, and under the persisting circumstances I hardly expect that to change by itself. I have long learned never to trust anything that proposes itself as the "ideal solution". I have never seen such a thing in reality. If there is such a thing as Valhalla though, I'm sure there's gonna be a chair reserved for me at the "Stammtisch". Otherwise, they're the ones who are going to be in for a rude awakening.

Heh. How late?

This is proving to be (for me at any rate) an extremely interesting and thought provoking thread.

I am still in the process of processing a lot of things myself - I'll share as and when I reach any conclusions!

Short answer, yes. Last October, it was as a result of an Indian head massage given to me after a night out clubbing. Yeah I know its not exactly the most amazing thing but the effects of it are still rippling and reflecting backwards and forwards through my life.

In the last 9 months I've made my piece with the xian beliefs, not a small feat I might add. Come to terms, I mean ream terms with my own mortality and more recently left a huge chunk of negativity which had been goring at my soul for many years in a forest in Wales.

The only regret is it never got kicked off earlier. But then would I have been ready? Probably not.

No I think your explaining it far better then many do. The people who have been there will recognise it.

Lupine, Indian head massage is an extremely potent therapy!
Many years ago, my then partner was cheating and finally left me and my two small daughters. I was going to a physio who used a form of cranial therapy (similar in some ways in that it releases pressure held in the cranial bones) which had earth shattering effects later on that evening.

Basically, it enabled me to let go of some pretty horrendous pain and rage - to the extent I howled like a beast and was actually chewing at the kitchen lino! After I subdued, it felt so utterly calm. Through that, I realised how much pent-up angst I had been burdening myself with when he had remained in control, and it began a process of regenaration and self affirmation.

Years later, my friend gave me Indian head massage - the results differed as I wasn't holding onto negativity - in this instance I ended up tripping! It was fantastic!

Oh I fully approciate what it is and it's potency.

It was the person who gave it to me, the timing of it and a few other things associated with it which came as a complete bolt out of the blue. I'm by no means new to all of this.

There are people on here who really know me and know allot more about this but because of some of the people involved I cannot ellaborate further.

Nuff said!

I have had a few of these moments of clarity over the years, some small and others have been of the more earth shattering kind. But most of them have been short lived even if the consequences of them lingered on for a while.

But the last 8 months or so have been a real adventure in just about every way, and it isnt finished yet. Its scary and exhilirating at the same time

As to the reaffirmations of the title, I think sometimes the ptb are forced to remind us and we get jolted either gently or violently towards something and in doing that we get reminded of who we are.

Oh, I've just remembered one I had relatively recently!

I've spent a large part of my life wondering why I was so inept at everything, why I had such low self-esteem etc. As probably most people do! One time, in my bumbling search for a job that I could actually do, I got myself appointed as a kindergarten teacher in the Steiner school my children were attending. I had done the Steiner training and sat in on lots of kindergartens, and reckoned I knew what it was all about.

I spent a strenuous term trying to gain control of a small class of little wild things. I spent all my waking hours trying to puzzle out how to make it work. The Steiner training had given me a lot of guff about spirituality and rhythm, not shouting at them but preserving their etheric dream state etc.

What it hadn't told me was that you have to threaten them. I didn't know you had to threaten children to make them conform. I didn't know how. I had never had to do that with my own children, though from a Steiner standpoint also I had been bringing them up all wrong because I would reason with them and shout when necessary - both no-no's in the kindergarten.

For me, the big no-no was manipulation and calculated punishment. I thought you didn't need them, and I was still trying to work through my experiences of being manipulated and criticised as a child. I went to a fancy New Age therapist who got me to look more closely at an event that happened when I was six years old, when I and my older sister were taken by our father to visit his relatives in Germany and sneakily abandoned there for three months.

We spoke no German, obviously. Our aunt and uncle had basic English, but we were pretty isolated. One day our aunt and our cousin came back from a shopping trip, and our cousin said she had presents for us. She proceeded to hold something behind her back, make us choose which hand, and otherwise play with our emotions before presenting us with identical peach coloured cotton jersey tops with elasticated cuffs and waists. They looked uncomfortable. They weren't my idea of a present, which would have been a toy. I didn't like mine, and said so.

The resulting storm of emotion was unbelievable. My aunt cried and insisted that I apologise. I had no idea what I was supposed to apologise for. My sister told me you were supposed to pretend you liked something even if you didn't. I was very literal-minded, not to mention deeply hurt that nobody had ever told me this and now I was being punished for it. I would have like to apologise just to get the whole embarrassing thing over with, but I couldn't make myself do it, not after the fuss my aunt had made.

So my aunt locked me in the toilet until I apologised. I had a real emotional storm. I never experienced anything like that before or since. My sister stood outside telling me that all I had to do was say 'sorry', and I didn't have to mean it. It was a very long time before I managed to force the lie out from between my exhausted lips.

Thinking about this in a way I had not ever done before, I realised that my reluctance to threaten or punish in a manipulative kind of way was rooted in this experience. No way would I ever want to inflict on some other poor child what I had had to endure. The only punishment I thought a child would be able to understand and respond to, would be the demonstration of anger - the shout or slap that I had grown up with and passed on to my own children - but that was not allowed in the Kindergarten.

Towards the end of that first term, it became clear that I was not succeeding in holding the group, and it was taken away from me. The anguish of that prompted a lot more soul-searching and attempts to find out where I was going wrong in life. It still chokes me up, now. I tried so hard, and somehow, it wasn't enough.

Fast forward to - guess who - Supernanny! I had been watching the programmes for some time before the epiphany came to me and I made the connection. The child transgresses, you make her sit on the naughty chair until she apologises. She learns not to transgress again. This was my aunt's methodology. My aunt was following tried and tested principles of childrearing. It was not her fault that I didn't know about them.

Other things I couldn't possibly have known about her - having had to flee a life of luxury in Eastern Europe and losing everything during the war - these must have influenced her attitude too. To her, a fashionable item of clothing was a big treat. To me, knowing nothing of fashion, clothes were just something you had to wear, not something to make a fuss about.

So where does this leave me? Not all that far on. I guess I still wouldn't be able to control a class. You have to start practising that sort of thing while you're still at school, probably. But in theory, I understand how it works, and I have thrown off my father's vapid pacifism and come to the awareness that all our order within society and our ordered relationships with other countries, come not from being civilised, but from being able to threaten. And the biggest problem in education now is the removal of teachers' ability to threaten sufficient pain.

And you know what? My father came across as such a simple honest upfront sort of fellow - but when he left us with his brother's family, he didn't tell us he was leaving us there, and he didn't say goodbye. Appearances can be so deceptive.

"And the biggest problem in education now is the removal of teachers' ability to threaten sufficient pain."

Sorry Julai, but I disagree, though only to a small extent. I cannot, nor would I ever, hold the threat of pain over a recalcitrent/rude/disruptive pupil. But what I CAN do (and do successfully!) is what my O.H. terms "horse whispering". I am adept at isolating troublemakers from the group. It's something I find relatively easy to do, and believe me - kids WANT to fit in, to be accepted as an integral part of their peer group, and also to have rules. Rules make kids feel safe. They know the boundaries, and know that I will defend their rights as well as those of their peers - just so long as they adapt their attitude sufficiently!
Maybe I should write a book?!

And good for you having identified what happened and dealt with it. It is traumatic and unpleasant, but what doesn't destroy us makes us strong!

Tas, you definitely should write a book! You have the wisdom and the experience.

Scuttles off towards sofa!