On Seizure, Euphoria, and …

On Seizure, Euphoria, and Hearing the Body

An acquaintance asked me recently about seizures and their after-effects, and at their further request I would like to do an essay on this. Someone wanted to know whether the initial release can feel good. It’s a strange question, and a difficult subject—because seizure experience is intensely individual, and because the language we use to describe it often collapses into metaphor long before it reaches understanding.

For most of my life, I did not think of myself as epileptic. I am not someone who grew up with a diagnosis or a long history of seizures. What I did have, beginning in adolescence, were brief episodes where I would wake up, take a few steps, and collapse. These were not seizures. They were likely orthostatic—my body adjusting too quickly from rest, blood pressure shifting, hormones raging through puberty. The episodes lasted about a year and then stopped.

What did persist throughout my life were headaches. Migraines, accompanied by aura—halos, spots, distortions of light. Over time they worsened, stretching into weeks, sometimes months, with only brief breaks of relief. More recently, new warning signs appeared: a sudden drop in the stomach, waves of heat or cold, a deep internal signal that says sit down now. These are not pleasant sensations. They are not euphoric. They are the body speaking in urgency.

The seizure itself—the one that changed my medical record—was severe and complex. It began as a focal seizure and progressed into a generalized tonic-clonic seizure. I walked while unaware, loosing all memory of that period. I have seen footage of myself moving, functioning, until I collapsed, and the second phase was violent and unmistakable: convulsions, loss of consciousness, the body overtaken by a neurological storm.

I was lucky. I have had only one seizure of that magnitude and did not have another within that year, and so far I have not had one again. Repeated generalized seizures can be devastating to the brain, many people live with that risk constantly. I do not take my luck lightly.

What followed—what surprised me—was not fear, but a lot of clarity.

There is a phenomenon in neurology sometimes referred to as Dostoevsky’s epilepsy: a rare form of ecstatic aura or post-ictal state in which a person experiences overwhelming euphoria, unity, meaning, and beauty. This is not a spiritual vision, nor it is not divine revelation. It is a neurological event—documented, studied, and named because the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky described it with such precision that physicians still recognize it today.

This is what I experience.

When I sense an aura approaching, I listen. I stop. I sit. I breathe. I become quiet inside, though not in a meditative sense, but in a physiological one. Sometimes the episode passes, and when it does, what follows can feel like a profound love-high: a state of intense appreciation, lucidity, and tenderness toward the world. Everything seems beautiful. Everything feels connected. The impulse is not to cling to it, but to share it.

The urge to tell everyone is perhaps the most difficult part, because I know what this is. I know it is neurological, grounded in biology, in the brain’s circuitry, in chemistry and electrical patterns. And yet the feeling itself is so expansive that language strains to hold it.

Historically, experiences like this were often misunderstood. Saints, visionaries, artists—some were likely having neurological events that went unrecognized. Others were not. Retrospective diagnosis is a dangerous game, so I do not claim lineage with prophets or martyrs. I am not comparing myself to them. I am saying only this: the human brain is capable of producing states of meaning so intense that cultures have spent centuries trying to explain them with myth.

Medicine does not debunk the experience. It struggles to understand it and attempts to frame it.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in a supernatural God as it is traditionally described. But I also do not believe there is nothing. I believe everything we need is here—on this planet, in the atmosphere, in the galaxy, and most of all within our bodies. Our medicine, warning systems, capacity for compassion and understanding—they are embodied. We are simply not listening, and worse — we not aware how much we can and “should”.

For me, this seizure was a wake-up call. Not a punishment. Not a miracle. A signal.

In the years leading up to it, I experienced cascading losses: family ruptures, grief, creative paralysis, prolonged stress, and a political climate that felt terrifying in its implications for the world. I went years unable to draw or write—something that had always been as natural to me as breathing. My body eventually said no more.

Now, when stress rises, I slow down, rest. I sleep. I let my mind focus narrowly, sometimes through something as simple as a video game, until the overwhelm recedes. Then I return to my work, and slowly, I am falling in love with my art again. As of today, I cannot imagine how I survived separate from it. I am lucky to be alive.

I am careful when I say this: I manage my condition through vigilance, diet, and deep bodily awareness—but I do not recommend this approach for others. Epilepsy is not one thing, and works for me may be dangerous for someone else. Listening to one’s body does not mean rejecting medicine. It means partnering with it, and what each person needs medicinally is different.

The euphoria I experience does not make me special, not does not make me chosen. It makes me human.

To me, it feels like love stripped of motivation. Love without object. It’s a reminder that kindness, curiosity, self-awareness, and compassion are not moral luxuries, but survival mechanisms. Civilizations endure but never through fear or dominance, but through the capacity to understand one another without hatred, through calm clarity and sound bodies/minds.

I wish I could place my hand on another person and say, feel this. But I cannot. All I can do is speak honestly.

This is what my seizure taught me:

that fear is corrosive, the body keeps its own tally long before the mind admits exhaustion, and that meaning does not require magic to be real.

We are already holding everything we need.

M.

Marni Fraser by Jon Beckmann