Ann Jauregui has been a practicing therapist, consultant, and teacher for more than 25 years. She is a cofounder and associate of Vine Street, a multidisciplinary center for healing arts in Berkeley, CA, and adjunct professor at the Wright Institute. The Foreword is by Huston Smith. This was a gift book.

The back cover summary: “To experience an epiphany is to have sudden insight into the essential meaning of something, unleashed sometimes in exquisitely slow motion, sometimes in a flash. In an intimate, lyrical integration of the science of psychology and transcendence of spirituality, celebrated clinician Ann Jauregui introduces us to nine individuals who have undergone astonishing transformations by exploring a world quite different from the one described by our five senses. With moments of miraculous and joyful surprise, Epiphanies exposes a reality outside of everyday existence that has momentous implications for life’s ultimate questions. ‘Shyly we venture out with these stories,’ Dr. Jauregui writes, ‘into a world where science itself is struggling to describe a realm out of time and space and language.’ We are the beneficiaries of these extraordinary shifts of perspective, invited into a sparkling conversation that allows us to see the potential residing in all of us.”

In his Foreword Huston Smith begins, “The best way I can think of to introduce this slim book is to say that in my long life of happy reading it is unique.” I fully agree with him. Jauregui gives the reader insights into two seemingly very different situations. One is about how some of her therapy patients had epiphanies in her office while searching for words to explain their problem to her. She observes the patient’s change of expression and speech as something very important – a lost memory or a new way of perceiving something – takes place. Such epiphanies can develop slowly but in depth, often with a few (as few as possible) words from Jauregui, but the end result can be a complete cure or resolution of the patient’s problem. The other situation is when she speaks of physicists who had the flash of recognition or epiphany that led to something amazingly new – a paradigm shift in the way a certain entity or process is perceived, one that will introduce a whole new way of thinking, even a new reality.

She begins the Preface to the new Edition with the story of her first public reading of Epiphanies in her neighborhood bookstore in Berkeley in 2003. After reading selections before a crowded audience, she was asked a question by a woman who wanted to share her epiphany. A few weeks later her letter carrier asked why so much mail lately. When she said it was about her new book Epiphany, he recalled an incident from his past that came to him now as an epiphany since it was a new perception of a boyhood event. In her Introduction she tells of her childhood and some experiences she had at a tranquil summer cabin at a lake of her ‘coming undone’: “In the warmth of the sun, in the sparkle of the water and clear northern light, I would suddenly bloom up out of myself, past my skin, my thoughts, my sense of place, into an airy and ecstatic hugeness. I’m out, were the words that came to me. And everything is alive!” I have had very similar feelings several times when alone in nature – the revelation that the whole universe seems alive. Sometimes listening to beautiful music while at rest with closed eyes can bring on such a feeling. Over the years I’ve learned that nature or music has caused such feelings to many, and often they can’t be described by mere words. Such events are never forgotten. But it is not always beauty and silence that brings on an epiphany. Ann Jauregui says: “But my favorite part of the definition of epiphany tells us that the revelation is usually brought on by some simple, homely, or commonplace experience.”

She tells the stories so well (as Huston Smith said: ”The author can write – vividly, pacing herself with dramatic touches that keep the narrative moving, and never wasting a word.”) that you’ll probably want to do as he and I did – read this book in a sitting, then slowly reread it. The cases of the patients she helped guide as or after they had an epiphany in her therapy office are all very interesting, but those of greatest interest to me were reading of her perspective of how great scientists had their sudden insights or epiphanies. She goes back to Galileo and Newton. In Ch 4 – Isaac Newton’s Nervous Breakdown – she talks of Newton’s state of mind regarding the conflict between his religious beliefs and the revolutionary new science in his famous masterwork The Principia. Ch 2 – Quantum Physics on the Car Radio – tells of her epiphany upon hearing the new paradigm of quantum physics explained on NPR; she had to park on the side of the road so she could concentrate fully and then try to digest what she had heard. It seems that taking a walk (along a well-known path) after a day of trying to figure out some puzzling new physics data, led to the world-breaking new paradigms of Einstein’s relativity ideas and Heisenberg’s quantum physics ideas. As with many great physicists whose works I have studied in depth, the new world for the physical sciences began with some epiphanies, often an overturning of classical physics that requires much more work to get from the epiphany to further, fuller hypotheses, then on to a new mathematical theory. Her 11-pp Bibliography shows that she has read thoroughly of science and of books about scientists, especially of physics and her field of psychology and therapy. I give this book my highest recommendation. It is a real joy to read!