The Epigram of Four Lines

Here is the epigram of four lines. The epigram of four lines is like a prayer. It is something that you can memorize and have ready in your mind at any time to provide yourself with “a place to go” when you are jolted by an experience or feel lost and disoriented. 

To use the epigram of four lines, you can join it with mindful breathing. For example, repeat each line with each breath. Allow the lines to guide your thoughts and feelings, giving you a place to be even when the world around you is in some way disrupted. To have a place to go means that you are not swept away by the emotions of the moment. If something happens that disrupts your day – an accident or someone’s rudeness – you can put distance between your mental state and the event you encounter by invoking four lines. They guide you to remember that there is more to your life than what is transpiring right now. They help you overcome the reactive moment in which thoughts and feelings become things that bear down on you and seem beyond your control. You have somewhere to go other than staring with frozen features at what has happened.

In what follows, we visit the lines in two ways. One is short, giving you a primer for deepening your immediate awareness of the lines. The second is a deeper pass, one in which you explore some of the psychological and neuroscientific aspects of the lines. As you become more familiar with the fields of awareness that the lines enable you to access, you are also empowered to change them to accord with your own perspective.

First Pass: The Basics of the Four Lines of the Epigram

Here is a first pass at working into the different mental health dimensions of the Epigram of Four Lines:

1. Be with being (God). As you inhale, give your attention to the gift of the wholeness of being. As you exhale, give your attention to gratitude. This line calls to what might be viewed as the right brain—the undifferentiated, total sense of being. This is the underlying or overarching feeling in which you are immersed during the whole of your life. You access it, not by reducing and analyzing it, but by being open to it. It does not involve reductive thinking, analysis, or words. It is a feeling that you enter with the whole of your being. It is best accessed through mindful beathing, but there are different paths. 

2. Walk with my mentor (Jesus, Mary, Sidhartha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Muhammad, Moses, Socrates, Sophia). We communicate from ourselves to the wholeness of being through the mediation of a voice. The voice is a guide to feeling at peace with the universe. It allows us to safely identify our place in any setting in which we find ourselves. As you walk with your mentor, your mentor helps you be at peace with your feelings. You pay attention to the voice you hear within. This is the left brain as it communicates with the right brain. We name our feelings. When we name our emotional state, we narrate our sense of change. 

3. Seek Health, Healing, and Wholeness through the spirit. The spirit is the heath that unifies the whole of your life, from the first breath to the last. Over the whole of our life, from one breath to the next, we follow the path of health. If you do not feel healthy, then you begin to heal. When the healing begins, it moves toward wholeness. The nearer it comes to wholeness, the nearer you are to restored health, and when you feel whole, you enjoy the most complete experience of health.

4. Acknowledge and respect the shadow. Regardless of where you are in life, some part of your mind is dissociated. This occurs because as we develop and mature, we experience moments of trauma. Such moments result in experiences that are so emotionally charged that we cannot process them as we encounter them. The brain automatically dissociated them—shifts then into a suspended state until they can be accessed from a state that is characterized by strong feelings of safety. This can require many years, and for this reason, some part of us is in a shadowed, inaccessible state. This is the shadow, as Jung referred to it. It is important to always be aware of this. And during moments when we are made aware of the shadow, to approach it with care and compassion. Listen, take breaths to meet the shadow with compassion, and attend to it without judgment and with acceptance. 

Second Pass: Elaborating the Epigram of Four Lines

The Epigram of Four Lines can be elaborated as follows:

Being 

Be with being

Mental health depends on the sense of safety. The sense of safety is a condition in which the wholeness of self is experienced. Nothing needs to be added; nothing needs to be taken away; you are complete in the moment. It is important to feel with complete confidence that you have a place in the universe. You can find this place by breathing mindfully and allowing all thoughts to pass in a stream that you can be aware of with the sense of self-compassion. You recognize that the thoughts you experience are not things. Instead, you experience thoughts and feelings as a stream of mental awareness that changes continuously over the whole of your life, coming and going, like the floats in a parade. 

Such awareness of self is given to you at the start of life and continues as the stream of your life, as your journey of selfhood, for as long as you live. Think of it as something that you receive as a gift over the whole of life, as the moment that is changing into what always comes next. Experienced in this way, it becomes a foundation for gratitude. Think of this as opening out your arms to receive life. As you open your arms, you give of yourself to all that comes to you. One way to put this into words is to say that we get what we give. We open out to life, and then life comes to us. We must give of life to receive life. One gift is exchanged for another. Being arises in this way, as a giving of ourselves as we receive a gift for which we feel gratitude. 

In terms of the actions of the brain, we begin life without words. We begin in what is sometimes referred to as the right brain. From the time the brain develops, while we are in the womb until around sixteen months into infancy, the right brain prevails. It begins as a mirror of our mother’s neurological system. Jung referred to this condition as the mother archetype. Neuroscience has confirmed this reality by using neuroimaging to show that the areas in the mother’s brain that are active are also active in the brain of the fetus. During the first year of life, the child’s brain and neurological stats remain and extension of the neurological states of her or his mother or caregivers. This is a world of feelings, of safety sustained by care and nurturement. It offers an experience that can be the basis of life-long feelings of being whole and safe. It is for this reason that it is appropriate to think of it as a state in which being or God is most directly experienced.    

The Voice of Self in Relation to Being

Walk with my mentor.

As the left brain develops after around the first sixteen months of life, we acquire language and begin to symbolize the experiences of the right brain. We learn to name feelings. This is referred to as mentalizing—we name and create narratives of what we feel, what we experience. As has been explored by Daniel Siegel, the naming and creating of narratives can be viewed as a process by which the neurological energy of our brain moves from the right lobe to the left lobe and then back again. Integration of feelings with their stories is achieved. What we feel is given expression in words, and what we express in words is given depths of meaning by what we feel. 

A number of wonderfully revealing approaches to the phenomenon of naming and narrative have been developed over the centuries in different cultural contexts. Fullness of life involves finding words that narrate your feelings and that help you discover how meaningful moments arise to you. When you walk with your mentor, you are finding words to describe your feelings. Feeling comes before thought, so you are exploring how your voice arises from your feelings. Different approaches to this can be described. You begin with a feeling, and the feeling calls on you to tell the story of the feeling. If you tell the story in a way that allows you to feel comfortable with it, then you can add this to your life, to the story of your journey in life.

With voice, the possibility of conscious thought emerges, and with this, the ability to integrate experience. Mental health, in essential neurological terms, involves the path between the two hemispheres or major functional areas of the brain. This path is often identified as taking place through the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a kind of channel of integration, so it is associated with both increased emotional intelligence and cognitive strengths. In addition, as a center of white matter in the brain, it is associated with learning. 

Health, Healing, and Wholeness through the Spirit

Seek health, healing, and

wholeness through the spirit.

Let’s return to the notion that the left and right brains work in tandem through the corpus callosum to provide us with the capacity to integrate feeling and thought. Discussing the process in simple terms risks oversimplifying, but let’s accept that risk in this context to understand the basics of everyday integration of life experience. One general rule is this: as long as what we experience is not emotionally overwhelming, we can integrate it in the here-and-now. For example, let’s say that we have a glass of ice water on a streaming hot day. The feeling of being quenched is something that brings satisfaction to an immediate need, and with this satisfaction, as we put the glass down, we can say, for example, “That hits the spot! Cold, refreshing, just what I needed in this place at this time.” The feeling and its story are fulfilling and become a part of your life history that you can recall with ease. “I remember how great that glass of water tasted and felt when I came in from working in the garden that hot day.” Such experiences characterize most of our lives. 

This, then, is how mental health, in essential neurological terms, involves the path between the two hemispheres of the brain. But then, life involves moments when we cannot integrate feelings in the moment. This is when trauma occurs. Consider a scenario when coming in from working in the garden involves something deeply disturbing. Say that as you come into the kitchen, you faint from heat exhaustion. You fall. You require medical attention. A family member comes to your aid. Days or weeks later, you are probably still working to understand what happened, dealing with feelings of fear, shock, and ongoing worry about why such a thing happened. This is the nature of trauma. 

Whenever the level of feeling or emotion is so charged that it cannot be integrated into the moment, the brain automatically puts it into a state that prevents it from being accessed immediately and entirely. This gives us time to revisit the memory and gradually begin transforming it into an integrated state. Usually, this takes place naturally, and we then tell the story of the events without disruptive feelings or halting words. But in other cases, the event results in such strong emotional disruption that we cannot access the memory without therapy.

This, then, is where the path of health, healing, and wholeness begins as an endless process in life that involves moving and sustaining health by being aware of ourselves as we emerge from an infinite series of moments that we experience as our level of health. When health declines in some way, we begin a process of healing. Healing involves the flow of thought and feeling and the experience of what it is to retain the wholeness of our sense of self. With wholeness, we again feel healthy. But health always remains in flux and flow, rising and falling as we engage in healing with our attention to wholeness.

Health Healing Wholeness

Health

The corpus callosum allows two modes of awareness to be connected and integrated. Mental health requires integration between the left (language) and right (undifferentiated feeling) modes of the brain. One implication of the neurological behavior of the corpus callosum is that health is sustained through intentional efforts to bring feelings into relation to thoughts and narratives. As mentioned previously, this is generally referred to as mentalizing. The health of the corpus callosum is sustained by an endless cycle of mental processing that involves a flow of attention between feeling and thought.

The most fully integrated experiences are characterized by bringing thought and feeling together in the stories we tell about our lives. An event that is characterized by traumatic dissociation usually becomes apparent when, in therapeutic and other settings, we are not able to say what has happened to us. Instead, a triggering event might bring a flood of emotion that leaves us unable to speak and struggling with a glaring invasion of overwhelming memories. 

When our experiences are integrated, we know how to relate them through narrative and how we feel about them. Time, place, magnitude, and other categories of thinking characterize integrated memories. It is helpful to recall that feelings (the right brain) provide our first awareness of life. We are floating in a sea of feeling. There is no time, space, or words that reduce what is experienced to a symbolic form. After around 16 months of life, the left brain develops to the point that language names feelings. With further development, the categories of experience gain significance. We think of things as occurring in nearer or more distant times. We tell stories to relate experiences to each other. All the while, as we tell stories, we integrate feelings. With health, the developing child develops a sense of safety communicated through stories. 

Allan Schore has referred to the ideal developmental path as characterized by happy outcomes. A happy story involves, for example, being thirsty after playing in the sun and then getting a nice, cold drink of water. The healthy child tells a story: “I was thirsty. I told Mommy. Mommy got me a glass of water. While I drank the water, I looked at Mommy, and Mommy watched and smiled.” Schore refers to such happy paths as creating essential patterns that allow the child to develop to adulthood with a sense that problems can be solved and that with steady efforts, life brings rewards.

In the context of the neurobiological approaches offered by Daniel Siegel, Allan Schore, or the Jungian vision as presented by Joseph Campell, as we develop and mature, we follow a unique journey through which we discover ourselves. We are optimistic and grateful. We feel that the universe is calling to us and has rewards for us as we follow our particular path of life. We are most integrated when our life journey becomes available to us in the present moment through our autobiographical sense of self: our capacity to tell how things have worked out and how life has brought us to the here and now. 

Healing

Health is the state of equilibrium that we know as safety. But then we also encounter obstacles. If the obstacles are excessive, we can get stuck. If this happens, we cannot move forward on our happy path in life. We might be afraid. We might remain fixated on memories. Healing is needed. Healing characterizes much of life because our environment constantly challenges us. We cannot move on.

Consider that when we encounter something new, we are drawn out of the secure sense of health and into an activity that involves feeling incomplete. We are knocked, gently or otherwise, out of our state of peaceful equilibrium and asked to change, to adapt, to tolerate and be responsive to the world. We must then begin a process of renewal, of restoration, and of growth. 

We experience this when recovering from an injury or a medical procedure, an illness, or when we experience violence or loss of freedom. We know it with the loss of loved ones. We know it when we encounter something that we do not understand. We know it when we are seeking to sustain relationships during times when there are arguments. We encounter it when we seek a job, an educational or financial goal, or face a challenge we set for ourselves, like running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or seeking increased physical strength and agility. 

Healing in mental health always involves working through the infinite loop from thought to feeling to discover how to tell the story of what we have experienced. This is a process that involves opening ourselves to our feelings and allowing ourselves to say what the feelings mean to us. In therapeutic settings, efforts are needed in many instances to contact dissociated states of self and to gradually bring them into conscious awareness. We must let ourselves heal by finding a safe place in which to allow the pain to surface so that we can address it with self-compassion.

Wholeness

The path of healing leads to wholeness. Wholeness is the sense of progress or restoration. The feeling of wholeness is like a gauge that tells us when we have regained something lost. If you are asked if you are okay after working through a process of healing, you consult your sense of wholeness. Wholeness is a sense in the moment. Nothing needs to be added; nothing needs to be taken away: “I am just fine as I am. I feel whole.”

Sometimes, it is necessary to get help to know what it is to feel whole. This can involve a therapeutic path. If the situation involves a medical condition, then tests can be conducted, and we can obtain numbers that enable us to feel whole. In other situations, a test after breaking a bone might involve being able to step off a set of stairs or lift dishes from the table. The tests we find and the tests we create for ourselves all involve the feeling of being whole. 

Wholeness can be a perplexing quality to work with. Consider those situations when you are dealing with a child who is a picky eater. What allows the child to feel whole in this regard? It might be the color of the food or the way it is positioned on the plate. Or what enables you to feel safe about buying new clothes, fruit at the market, a car, or a house? A complex cluster of factors must be addressed before you feel whole. 

Spirit

We follow a path that is mediated by the spirit. The spirit can be understood as the succession of moments of healing that link our lives from beginning to end. The path of healing is sustained by the spirit, and it moves from health, to healing, to wholeness. When you feel healthy, you feel you are yourself and that all is well. But the time arrives when your health declines. Then you begin to heal. Healing is something you feel in relation to wholeness. You heal toward being complete, and in this way, your feeling of being whole is how you gauge your health. 

Spirit is used in therapeutic content to convey many things. But it is especially helpful as a way to express the notion that our lives are connected from beginning to end. To use the metaphor of a river, the flow of health, healing, and wholeness cannot take place unless there is a channel in which the river flows. As the channel of our flow of development and maturity over the whole of life, spirit gives us a way to understand the unity of life. 

It is helpful to consider, for example, that long into adulthood, the memory of an early childhood experience can have a tremendous impact. That we can reach across time through memories, from feeling to thought or thought to feeling, involves the unifying spirit. It is a sense, belief, assumption, orientation, or perspective, among other things, that our lives have congruity and meaning to them. We are drawn by the power of the spirit to continue all our lives to tell the story of our lives. In the more reductive form, spirit might be described as the neurological integration of the brain’s content over time. In a less reductive form, spirit might be described as the flow of energy from which consciousness of ourselves as a life emerges and persists over time and even beyond time.

Shadow 

Acknowledge and respect the

shadow.

Developmentally, it is impossible to escape trauma. When we experience trauma, whether great or small, a self-state emerges that is dissociated from the larger community of our self-states. The pain it embodies is sealed away so that it does not enter back into the larger community of self-states that compose our greater Self. To be integrated, it is necessary to call to the shadow. Health allows us to call to dissociated self-states and gently urge them to come into awareness. For this to happen, you must respect the shadow self-states and acknowledge them patiently and without judgment. Then they can come forward on their own accord.

No one is without a shadow. Denial of the shadow is common, however. This is understandable since most of the shadow is not within the scope of awareness. The shadow influences every moment of our lives because it evokes feelings that shape us, calling on us to respond to them without knowing we are doing so. 

Therapeutic dialogue provides a context in which the shadow can be brought into view. The reason for this is that the therapist is obligated to sustain a space in which there is no judgment and no forced programs. Rather, in the therapeutic moment, there is openness in which those who participate in the therapeutic session are open to each other in a manner that is accepting and compassionate. This state is as state of safety, one in which the brain is not provoked by fears to sustain fear or anxieties. The hormones and neurotransmitters that sustain fluidity of thought and feeling prevail, so the two models of the brain are able to enter into effortless communication for all parties in the therapy session.

The shadow will always be there, but for each moment of safety, some aspects of it are brought into the light and allowed to become integrated into the conscious mind in a manner that allows their stories to be told with comfort and understanding. Such stories can be told only because there is awareness that the shadow is within us, making it necessary, throughout life, to revisit what we have experienced and to bring it into awareness. In this way, the hidden influences are diminished, and the cycle of health, healing, and wholeness can continue to flow.

Author

John P. Flynt, 2025