Words by Puja Shah
Puja is a writer and certified yoga instructor for adults and children. A good coincidence is her favorite thing.
It was like the Twilight Zone. In a moment, I couldn’t believe what had happened, how connected the occurrence had been to what I had just felt a week prior. It was an odd coincidence to say the least.
All I could think was, had I created it?
My husband and I went to a music healing session with a local shaman we were friends with. During the session, the shaman played a song I had never heard, but felt immediately connected to. Later, I realized I had heard the melody before, but couldn’t place it in that moment.
When we went home, I woke up the following evening and told my husband that I had dreamt that song many moons ago, which is where I realized, I had heard it before the healing session.
A few months later, I went into an interview to apply for my yoga teacher training. It was something I felt I had wanted to do for some time, but wanted to find the right match for my spiritual quest. During the end of the session, we went through a flow of poses and the instructor turned on some music. She played the same song that the shaman had played.
I ended up doing the training, of course, and the whole time felt inclined to teach children yoga.
Then, a month later, we saw the shaman again, and he introduced me to a friend of his who owned a children’s yoga company, saying he just knew we would find the connection.
It’s as if everything had fallen into place over the melody of a beautiful song. Literally.
Was it a coincidence… or something more?
I can give you a whole list of other examples, and really, in the end, they would be all the synchronicities that got me to romancing my pen in this article today.
There was that time, that dream, that moment of meaningful coincidence.
We’ve all felt these, you know what I’m talking about. It’s like when what you envisioned and felt you were part of… all merge to this single linear moment in your life.
But it’s not so linear. Synchronicities occur when our internal state somehow appears and bleeds into the weave of an outer dimension, our so-called reality. It is transcendental. It is magical.
Carl Gustav Jung, the swiss psychologist, first wrote about this concept in the ‘20s. He called it an act of “creation of time.”
In a synchronicity, two separate worlds – the causal and acausal – interlock for a moment in time, which is an expression of creation, perhaps even regarded as manifestation.
In modern day, we often say, “It was meant to be.”
When I met my friend with the children’s yoga company, this is exactly what we had said.
This notion, of meaningful circumstance, is the heart of a synchronicity.
“But what does it all mean?!?”
As the oracle says to Neo in the movie The Matrix, “We are all here to do what we are all here to do.”
Is that enough?
In terms of synchronicities, perhaps, we can find what our purpose is in these happenings.
Since I had always worked with children in my healthcare profession, when I pursued my passion for yoga, it was the synchronicities that arose to allow me to combine these worlds as I searched for my dharma.
In his book “The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives”, Ray Grasse states that instead of a synchronicity being a rare occurrence, it’s more likely to be all pervasive. That when something “big” happens, we notice it. We call it a synchronicity. We think about it.
But really, this is just the tip of a larger iceberg of truth and meaning that underlies our lives.
Jung believed that these happenings are not random events. He saw them as holding a deeper framework, and that when a person realizes this, it goes far beyond intellect. It is a spiritual awakening, as meaningful as a subconscious dream, a happening where an egocentric consciousness shifts to thoughts of a higher self.
I feel myself living through that awakening, as all those events unfolded, as I teach children yogic philosophy and know that it feels right. As if had always been destined to be on that yoga mat.
Open your eyes, there are synchronicities everywhere!
So this all doesn’t mean that we live in the future, searching for synchronicities. They happen as they happen, they unfold, like life’s vinyasa.
Let it flow.
Perhaps even after reading this article, you’ll open an email from someone you had thought of this morning. You’ll see a butterfly resting on your window that had appeared in a dream last night about love. Whatever it is, allow yourself to be more conscious of these subtle connections in your everyday.
As Deepak Chopra wrote in Synchrodestiny: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence to Create Miracles: “According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light-hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.”
So how does one allow for these synchronicities to become accelerated to the point where you literally feel as if you are manifesting EVERYTHING that comes your way? How can you experience the miraculous?
Here are 5 easy tips for creating your own synchronicities:
1. Know your purpose:
If you are already on this path, you know how strongly the universe supports you with it.
How does someone know if they are heading down the wrong path? There will always be signs.
When I was in dental school, as much as I learned a lot about the human body and enjoyed healing people, it was clearly the wrong path for me. There were signs. Some of my relationships with family and friends suffered, normally I was in the top of my class for academics especially writing/language, but there, I was just average. Even with my health, I had to have a skin lesion biopsied, and was relieved that it was negative, but overall, it felt as if something was wrong.
But I was young, in my early 20’s and not ready to accept the truth that I was not meant to be what my family had wanted me to be.
If you are stuck in a job, for instance, that you hate, this doesn’t mean you have to give up everything you have known overnight. Find what you are passionate about and even start with 5 to 10 minutes every single day of focus on it. Whether it’s researching, meeting people in that field, making a plan. Any action. The key is- TAKE ACTION and be consistent.
It is, like I mentioned before, what got me to romance my pen here, in this very article.
2. Open your eyes:
This is obvious. With your eyes shut to your outer and inner world, you will never see the meaningful coincidences or signs that occur. You may, as you would in a dark room, get used to it all. But life is not about getting used to your surroundings. It’s about truly living. Bringing awareness to your self, meaning your feelings and thoughts as well as behavior, to even your environment and those who surround you is how these subtle and even large synchronicities will happen more and more.
The easiest way, I have found, is to meditate. Whatever that means to you. The beauty of inner reflection is that there is no wrong way. Whether you practice faith, bhakti yoga, in a higher being or God, or Transcendental Meditation, or even movement meditation, you will allow your mind-body-soul connection to deepen. You will allow for your eyes, and heart, to truly be open to receive.
If you do not have a practice, or are unsure of how, just start with your breath and your prana (a.k.a. your life force). Close your eyes and just concentrate on it moving in and out of your body.
3. Just let it go:
There is a quote I used to love as a young girl, “If you love something, let it go, if it comes back it was meant to be.”
This isn’t so much a test of patience as it is a release, letting go not only of what you “want” or desire, but letting go of the idea of the future outcome of this desire.
It is an intention to live in the present.
So then where does the idea of “live, breathe, eat your goals” come into play?
You can still have a dream, a vision, an idea, a desire. This is your dharma, your purpose.
Let it out into the world. My husband often writes it all in his journal. He has had a little notebook by his bedside for years and lately, it seems, whatever he writes down has been coming true in real time.
The key is to think of that purpose with positive light, rather than negative. Any time you send a vibration out as something you lack, rather than gratitude, you will not be in line with your truth. This leads me into the next tip.
4. Be thankful:
Tony Robbins once said, “Trade your expectation for appreciation and your world changes instantly.”
I can’t begin to emphasize this enough. Often, because of the way society has conditioned us, we lose sight of what we have. The fruits we have in our lives look sour at the idea of bigger, better, more. The shinier apple on the other tree starts to look better. We expect our own tree to bear fruit forever, and when it stops, when its branches wither with age, we are devastated. Rather than feeling gratitude for the fruit it always gave us, for the strength in its years and smile at the changing earth for new beginnings, we balk at its inability to meet our expectations.
Start to cherish your life’s own fruits, take a bite of your apple and taste its sweetness, let it nourish your soul and body. You will start to see the difference almost immediately, and synchronicity will follow.
5. Believe:
Go with your gut, trust your instincts and believe in your inner guide or voice. So often we hear people say, “I knew that was going to happen, I should have listened to myself.”
Start embodying that belief, and those meaningful coincidences will start popping up around you like mushrooms after a rain shower.
That’s when you’ll say, “I’m so glad I followed my instinct.”
Trust is the pillar of any relationship, even one with yourself.
Apart from this, there are also other advanced ways to create your own synchronicities…
