... Episode 12 of What's Arising

Synchronicity and 'flow' states are among the most powerful, life affirming experiences we can have. They surprise us and delight us. They give us hope and demonstrate that we are truly not alone in this world. Through synchronicity we get a deep sense that there is a benevolent force guiding us into our best life - if we are willing let go of our attachments, open up to being surprised, trust, and follow the path revealed to us in these magical moments!

You cannot make synchronicity happen. It is out of your control. However, you can create conditions to increase their frequency. In this podcast, I share some personal stories of synchronicity and give you some tips and hints on how to create conditions where the miracle of synchronicity becomes your constant companion.

Links to help you find your flow:

• ⁠Refreshing Beliefs ⁠- Learn how to reprogram limiting subconscious beliefs

• ⁠Shadow Matters⁠ - Heal shadows and wounds that are keeping you stuck

• ⁠Contact Richard⁠

• ⁠The Celestine Prophecy Book

Transcript

Welcome once again to What’s Arising?

In this podcast, I want to talk about opening to synchronicity and flow.

Synchronicity is probably my most delightful ongoing experience in life, and I hope it is for you as well. If not, perhaps this reflection can help open the door to more of that experience.

Within synchronicity there is surprise, delight, and a sense that something bigger than us is present — something holding us, taking care of us, and guiding us. It helps us step out of the hamster wheel of life, out of struggle and suffering, and into a sense of hope.

When we are in touch with synchronicity, flow, and the insights that come through them, life becomes easier. We can navigate this complex world more effectively when we feel connected in this way.

So in this episode, I want to explore what synchronicity is, why it matters, and how we can create the conditions for more synchronicity and flow.

We cannot force synchronicity to happen. It happens when it happens. Sometimes it comes when we are not looking. Sometimes it comes when we are aware, open, and receptive. We cannot make it happen, but we can create the environment where it becomes more likely, and where we are able to notice it when it appears.

Let me begin by ringing my bowl, as I usually do, and then we will move into the topic.

[Music / Singing Bowl]

Have you ever experienced coincidences?

I assume you have. Maybe you even called them coincidences. Someone might say, “Oh, that was just a coincidence.”

For the first thirty years or so of my life, that is how I understood these moments. I would have an unusual experience and say, “Wow, that was a coincidence.” They did not seem to happen very often, but sometimes they were profound.

Maybe you have experienced something like this: you are traveling in a faraway place and run into someone you know. How is that possible?

Or you think about someone, and then they call.

Or, back in the days of landlines, you pick up the phone before it rings, and the person you were just about to call is already on the line. Somehow you both called each other at the exact same moment.

The other day, I was out walking and looking into the trees. I thought I saw a ruffed grouse sitting there. Then I realized it was not a grouse — but just then, a real ruffed grouse ran off right beside me. I had never seen one on that road before.

Coincidence?

Or is something else going on?

In our world today, I think many of us need some assurance and hope that everything is going to be all right. The world feels chaotic. Many people are running on hamster wheels just to survive, pay the bills, care for family, and get through the day.

Life can feel robotic. Complex. Overwhelming.

There is separation, polarization, powerlessness, and a lack of belonging. Sometimes that is true on the global level. Sometimes it is true in our families, relationships, or personal circumstances.

So how do we find our way through this?

How do we find more meaning?

I do not think the way out is distraction. At least in my experience, the way through is inner work.

But what if we were not alone in navigating the complexity and suffering of life?

What if there were a guiding force?

Many people might say, “Yes, there is God.” But many people also feel as though God has abandoned them, especially if life feels like struggle and there is little meaning, happiness, or joy.

Maybe there seems to be no evidence that God, life, spirit, or the universe is supporting you. Maybe the miracles you have been looking for have not come.

But what if there were many little miracles available all the time?

These little miracles are what I call synchronicities.

They can hold us and say:

You are not alone.
Everything is going to be all right.

What if there is a benevolent force we can see evidence of, listen to, and be guided by every day?

If you have not had those experiences, or if you have always thought of them as only coincidences, I invite you to play with this idea. Maybe, just maybe, it could change your life.

It changed mine, and it continues to guide and change my life. It helps me move with the river instead of fighting everything in reality.

A different reality unfolds when we begin to sense guidance.

For me, the shift from coincidence to synchronicity began in 1995. I was on a plane from Calgary to Houston, with a stop in Dallas. After a while, the man sitting beside me asked, “Do you like books?”

That was all he said.

I said, “Yes, I read all the time.”

He said, “Then you’ll like this book.”

He knew nothing about what genres I read, but when I asked him about the book, I felt interested. The book was The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.

When I stopped in Dallas, I went to the bookstore. I had never noticed this book before, even though I spent plenty of time in airport bookstores. But there it was, stacked high on a table as if it had been flying off the shelves.

So I bought it and began reading it on the way to Houston.

As I read the chapter about synchronicity, synchronicities began exploding all around me. I started meeting people on that trip that I should not have met, in ways that felt highly unlikely. It was not just once. It happened again and again.

I remember looking at the book and wondering if I was going crazy. It was a novel, and yet it seemed to be giving me signals about how to cultivate synchronicity.

For example, if I felt drawn to someone, maybe I should go talk to them. Maybe they had an answer for me. Maybe they were the next step on my path. Maybe I was meant to spend time in curiosity with them.

Eventually, I decided that if I was not going crazy, I would play with the idea and follow the guidance in the book. I stepped into curiosity and openness.

The next year, I was deeply caught in the hamster wheel. I was working twelve- and fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, trying to keep up with my work at IBM. I was burning out. I became angry with the conditions of the job and with what I was doing. I felt like I was failing, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to fix it.

Eventually, I quit.

I walked into my manager’s office, with tears in my eyes and anger running through me, and said, “I’m done here. I’m out of here.”

After leaving, I wondered how I was going to become positive again. The answer that came to me was travel.

So I made a plan to follow my knowing. I knew I had to go to India and Nepal, though I did not know why. I simply had this inner knowing.

That is part of how we open to synchronicity: we follow the knowing, the felt sense, the inner guidance that says, “I have to go there.”

But other things arose, and I realized I was not meant to go there first. I was meant to go to Europe, then Eastern Europe, then Egypt.

At one point, I almost gave up on the journey. I almost returned to Canada and never went to India and Nepal. But while I was in the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, a synchronicity happened. Two different people, at different times of the day, said to me:

“Richard, you need to go to India. You’re ready.”

So in January 1997, I went to India.

I followed the synchronicity, and it became a marvelous, miraculous journey full of guidance. It changed my whole outlook on life.

Since then, synchronicity has come and gone in waves. There have been periods of great synchronicity and guidance, and often those periods happened during travel.

In 2010, I decided to go to India again. I booked my ticket, but this time I had no plan for where I would go. I thought I might return to some of the places I had been before, but mostly I sensed there was something I needed to discover, though I did not know what or where it was.

A few days before I left, an old girlfriend I had not heard from in years sent me a text from the United States. She told me she was in an art museum in New York and had seen paintings by a Russian painter named Nicholas Roerich.

I thanked her and mentioned that I was going to India on Saturday.

She texted back, “Maybe that’s why I sent you the information on Roerich.”

The next morning, I looked him up and found his paintings of India. Nicholas Roerich was a mystic interested in finding Shambhala, the mystical place in the Himalayas where enlightened ones were said to live. He was also interested in the footsteps of Saint Issa in India.

Suddenly I had my first direction.

That was where I had to go.

I felt that perhaps I needed to follow the footsteps of Saint Issa or visit the places where Roerich had lived.

So I went.

The synchronicities on that trip were astounding. On the way from Varanasi to Bodhgaya, where Buddha was enlightened, I was sitting with some Russians on a train. We began talking, and they told me, “You have to buy this book: Jesus Lived in India.”

So I did.

The book explored the belief that Jesus had lived in India before and after the crucifixion, and that he was known there as Saint Issa. Again, everything began to fall together.

Another synchronicity happened later in Rishikesh. I saw a thick book on a table that everyone seemed to be talking about. I considered buying it, flipped through it, and decided not to because I already had too many books in my backpack.

A few weeks later, in another part of India, perhaps a thousand miles away, I met another traveller at a bed and breakfast. He had the same book on the table. It looked strangely familiar.

I asked where he had picked it up.

He said it was at the same hotel restaurant in Rishikesh where I had seen it earlier.

It was the identical book.

These are the kinds of magical, mysterious moments that can happen through synchronicity.

Another form of synchronicity many people experience is repeated numbers: 111, 222, 444, 11:11, and so on. These might appear on clocks, license plates, receipts, or in other unexpected ways. When I see these numbers, I often feel delight. I become present and feel gratitude.

A few years ago, I was driving to New Brunswick and stopping in Quebec City to visit a friend. I was using GPS on my phone. I noticed the clock in my car said 2:22 in the afternoon. That caught my attention.

Then I looked at my phone and saw that I was two hours and twenty-two minutes, and 222 kilometres, from my destination. I had also just passed an exit connected to 22.

That kind of thing happens often enough that I pay attention.

Another time, I was driving and wondering whether I should be taking a certain trip. The question was on my mind: “Is this the right thing to do?”

At that moment, I looked at the clock and saw 4:44. I wondered if there were any other fours around. Just then, a car passed me with 444 on the license plate.

These little moments delight me. They seem to confirm that something is guiding me, saying:

Everything is going to be all right.

That is especially helpful when doubt is present and hope is fading.

So what is it about travel that opens synchronicity for me?

Travel puts me in a certain state. Usually, when I travel, I travel slowly. I am not rushing from place to place. I am in curiosity. I have an open mind about where I might go. I have flexibility. I am not on a tight schedule.

I usually avoid tours where everything is planned and structured like another hamster wheel. Instead, I try to enter openness, reflection, awareness, and plenty of time.

I write. I reflect. I carry questions inside myself — questions about where I might go, what I might explore, and what is happening within me.

These are some of the keys to synchronicity.

We culture an open mind.
We slow down.
We become aware of what is happening around us.
We let go of trying to control life.
We become open to what wants to pop in through the moment, through a conversation, or through an unexpected attraction.

There is pausing, curiosity, wonder, gratitude, and acceptance for what is unfolding.

There is also a willingness to follow inner knowing.

For some reason, someone mentions a place, and I feel, “I have to go there.” Someone talks about a workshop, and I ask a few questions, and suddenly I know, “I need to go.” It might not even be the workshop I am meant to attend; it might be someone I will meet there.

Sometimes I feel drawn to someone in a restaurant, market, or gathering, and I need the courage to go talk to them.

When I follow that felt sense, often my next question gets answered. Or I receive the next clue. Or sometimes it is not about answering my question at all; it is about showing up to answer someone else’s question.

I become the instrument of the message for someone else, just as others have been the instruments of messages for me.

There is also a bit of rebellion in creating the conditions for synchronicity. You may have to step away from the rat race, from your conditioning, from the inherited idea of success, and become willing to follow life.

Follow the voice.
Follow the magic.
Let it guide you step by step.

Creating the conditions for synchronicity is not always easy, though sometimes it can be. For me, after reading The Celestine Prophecy, it felt like something wanted to happen. There was an opening, and synchronicity flooded in.

But to sustain synchronicity, inner work helps.

That means changing your beliefs about what is possible. It means opening to what is possible. It means letting go of inner baggage, doing shadow work, healing inner wounds, forgiving others, forgiving yourself, and surrendering into the flow of life.

There is some risk in that.

Following the flow may lead you somewhere that does not align with your current goals. Those goals may come from conditioning: what you “should” do to be successful, what your parents expected, what society told you mattered.

Your soul may want something different from what your ego wants.

It may still support your goals, and the law of attraction can work too, but the deeper flow may take you into places where you need to heal, surrender, and discover your full authentic power.

This larger force, this inner guidance system, has its own agenda for us. Resisting it is not entirely futile, but it can be painful.

If you follow synchronicity, if you follow the inner voice, if you let go of what holds you back from the journey, it becomes one of the most amazing journeys you can take.

It is filled with hope.
It is filled with joy.
It is filled with healing.
It is filled with service.

It attracts other people who also want to serve life and love in the world. It leads toward acceptance, trust, and the knowing that you and everyone else are going to be okay.

From that place, we can begin to say:

I love me.
I love all that is.

And from that love and acceptance, we may sense that the world is unfolding in a way beyond our understanding, held by something larger.

Whatever this force is that holds us is also holding the world.

May synchronicities and miracles follow you in the coming year.

May you know that you are held.

And if something in your own knowing guides you to me — whether to give a message, receive one, or explore something on my website — please reach out.

You can book a discovery session with me, come to a workshop, or explore the belief change course on my website, where you can learn how to change subconscious beliefs and get into more flow.

Shadow work is also powerful for letting go of the patterns that keep us in the old conditioned self. It includes working with the parts of us that resist the flow, getting in touch with the inner rebel, breaking out of the conditioned narrative of this world, and following a new path.

I will put links in the show notes.

If you feel someone else could receive inspiration or insight from this podcast, please share it. Like, comment, and help others perhaps find this through their own synchronicity.

May you open into synchronicity and flow.