On the Trail of Synchronistic Events: What Does Your Heart Want?

I have a story to tell today. But before I do, you might be wondering: What is a synchronistic event?

Basically, a synchronistic event (or simply a synchronicity) is a coincidence that’s more than just a coincidence. In other words, you see a pattern in the coincidence and it has particular meaning to you, beyond a day-to-day occurrence.

Carl Jung, who coined the term synchronicity, suggested that coincidences are often more than just chance events. He proposed that they provide an opening to deeper insights, helping us move away from limiting beliefs and move toward a more generous sense of meaning, possibility, and purpose.

The other truth about synchronistic events is they can be hard to see or grasp.

Sometimes the synchronistic event is confusing or takes time to appear.

I encountered that last year when I stepped away from the online world for several weeks, and also paused writing both my blog and my newsletter. (I longed to carve out some inner peace in the midst of all the ongoing upheavals and tragedies that continue to be the order of the day.)

While stepping away helped a little, I also had in mind that I’d do a reset of sorts, cleaning out my studio and spending time preparing for a future writing project.

Yet I felt blocked, in spite of my good intentions and planning. While I wasn’t actively looking for synchronicity, I sure didn’t expect to feel so out of sorts.

Things began to shift on the day internet and phone service went down in my area.

I didn’t quite understand it then, but when it happened there was a moment, a tiny inkling, that I was on the trail of synchronistic events. (Little did I know it would be a series of them.)

When I woke up and learned the services weren’t expected to return until sometime the next day, I panicked because I had four clients scheduled. But thanks to a nearby WiFi hot spot everybody got rescheduled and all was good.

So I was given the gift of time stretching before me, fully free to get on with my clearing and prepping work.

You might know what I’m going to say next: no work materialized.

Instead, I found myself taking a walk on the beach, experimenting with a new recipe, and lingering on the deck with an audiobook (mesmerized by the narrator’s voice and the unfolding story).

At the end of the day, I gently put my hand on my heart, and had the first aha: I’d misjudged what I actually needed during my reset.

My heart was telling me that my deepest need was for some quiet play that felt restful, timeless, and unrestrained.

I certainly didn’t need to pile on more work. So I decided the work could wait. As it happened, the forced reset offered me a synchronistic event that I almost didn’t see.

I mean, it took a cable outage that affected thousands of people to wake me up to my need to take a real pause. And even then I didn’t grasp the meaning of it immediately.

That’s the thing about synchronicity though. These unpredictable moments of meaningful coincidence don’t always stick. In fact, Carl Jung said this about them:

…too often they pass unnoticed because the individual has not learned to watch for such coincidences and make them meaningful.

Not only that, but once we see them we have to hold onto them in some way. Otherwise, they can fade pretty quickly.

As my reset continued I experienced a series of synchronistic events, full of heart metaphors.

Without a doubt that helped me hold on to the deeper meaning of these synchronistic events.

It began in earnest a few mornings after the cable outage. My husband and I were drinking coffee and having one of those conversations that long-married couples have. It’s the kind of conversation where even though you know the other person so completely, at that moment you just can’t quite get what they’re saying.

Finally, I asked him: “What do you want?” He grasped at words but they weren’t coming easily.

And then, without thinking, I asked: “What does your heart want?”

His words came quickly now: “I want to be closer.” My words followed, just as quickly: “Then come sit by me.”

Was it that simple, I wondered? Just ask what your heart wants?

Does that keep the synchronistic events flowing?

Later, in the shower, my fingers rested loosely on my chest, warmed by soothing water and filtered sun streaming through the window. Right then I decided it was the perfect moment to get serious and directly ask my own heart what it wanted.

My heart answered pretty quickly: I want rest.

Actually, it had a lot to say: It’s more than sleeping and taking naps. It’s engaged rest that’s expansive, playful, and easy. It’s belonging to yourself. You know what I mean, Patty.

Yes, I did know what my heart meant.

In fact, it brought to mind these beautiful words from the book Anam Cara by John O’Donahue…

• There’s a wellspring of love within you at the root of your soul
• Invite the inner fountain to free itself
• Feel the refreshing waters as they start to flow
• Flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart
• Nourishing waters begin to infuse anything in your heart that feels hardened
• A lovely osmosis infuses and unsilts your heart bringing belonging, ease, peace, delight

I began to consider that there might be an actual practice unfolding that could keep the synchronicity alive: placing my hand on my heart, imagining the well at the root of my soul, and repeating aloud John O’Donahue’s words.

Then another synchronistic event took my breath away.

You see, I was in the middle of a course in somatic awareness. Basically, I’d been diving deep into therapy and coaching approaches that recognize how connected our minds, bodies, brains, and behavior are.

Not only do these approaches ground us and calm our nervous systems, but regularly practicing them over time helps us heal and move forward.

We did a lot of practicing in class. And one day the instructor introduced a practice to help us move toward a quality or behavior that was important to us. As an example, she said it could be something like patience. But it could be anything, really.

I knew exactly what quality I wanted to move toward because my heart had already told me: restful play.

What the teacher said next was amazing.

She began telling us about how she’d been working through this process herself recently. There was a quality she was seeking, was in need of, but it was hard for her to name.

She finally settled on the quality of…rest.

But she said it wasn’t exactly resting as we know it, it was more than sleeping and taking naps.

Do her words sound familiar?

You can bet at this point I was paying really close attention. And it certainly seemed like it might be more than mere coincidence that we were both seeking a certain quality of rest that was a little hard to name.

She went on to explain that the next part of the practice involved using our imaginations to anchor the quality we’d chosen with a metaphor of some sort.

Of course, I already knew exactly what my metaphor was: the well at the root of my soul, from the John O’Donahue book I mentioned earlier.

The teacher said she’d tried a lot of metaphors to anchor her quality of rest.

But the one that finally stuck was….a well.

All the heart-felt synchronicity of that moment was both moving and overwhelming.

Who knew that we would both be seeking rest and imagining it as a well within us?

But there’s more to this somatic awareness practice. There are also words of support that go with it.

Mine are from the John O’Donahue passage I quote above: I visit the wellspring of love at the root of my soul and invite the fountain to free itself, bringing belonging, ease, peace, delight, and rest.

My teacher’s words were similar but much simpler: I dip from the well of rest within me several times a day.

(By the way, if you’re doing this practice for yourself, which I highly recommend, you complete it by letting your body wisdom suggest a simple movement that anchors it further. My movement is hand to heart. I can’t tell you what the teacher’s movement was because by then I was too giddy with synchronicities to pay attention.)

Right then I knew I was solidly on the trail of synchronistic events.

In fact, I was primed for the other synchronicities that kept popping up.

Things like…

• Checking email and discovering four different people asking: How’s Your Heart?
• Receiving an unsolicited email from a well-known expert in neuroscience explaining that our hearts do indeed have brains of their own.
• Learning that the well that provides our water was doing much better than the year before.
• Listening to another teacher in the somatic awareness program sharing memories of his friendship with John O’Donahue. (I had no idea they knew each other.)
• Taking a walk and discovering three heart-shaped rocks…(Okay, I’m making that up, but it could happen!)

Synchronistic events tend to bring with them feelings of wonder, awe, joy, and delight.

No wonder they bolster mental health. When clients share experiences of synchronicity with me, I listen with great reverence because I know we’re having an in-the-moment experience of wisdom tending.

Additionally, synchronistic events thrive on other synchronistic events. Once you start paying attention you can more easily tap into unexpected experiences of mystery and meaning.

Consciously cultivating synchronicity can lead to:

• Release of dopamine and increase in motivation
• New approaches for interpreting events and viewing life challenges
• Feelings of being supported in ways you can’t fully explain but believe in
• Seeing the past through a larger lens that increases self-compassion and self-love
• Accessing and experiencing deeper meaning and deeper wisdom
• Connecting to yourself in a way that feels genuine and authentic

After all this you might be wondering: If synchronicity is so important why is it elusive?

It’s a good question, particularly because experiences of synchronicity are harder for most people to come by these days.

I’m pretty sure a large part of it is due to our attention being co-opted by the online world. If you go back to the beginning of this post, you’ll see that my run of synchronicities didn’t start until I had to put all my devices down for a full 36 hours due to a cable outage that affected thousands of people.

That’s what it took to get my attention. And in Jenny O’Dell’s book about the attention economy, How to Do Nothing, she suggests that it’s in our best interest to not only resist the algorithms that are trained on us, but understand these algorithmic versions of ourselves that are being manipulated.

We can do that by actively choosing time away from the sameness of what we see, whether it’s ideas, places, music, or something else.

Synchronistic events live outside the expected, and journaling may help you venture beyond it.

While they may be mercurial and fleeting, one sure way to increase their likelihood and enhance the experience is to take up a journaling practice.

Journaling helps us capture subtle signs and connections within and around us, and in a sense it bridges our internal worlds with external realties.

I’m not sure I would have been able to deeply experience last year’s trail of synchronistic events if I hadn’t been writing about them, encouraging them to come alive in my journal.

In fact, the writing anchored them in further, helping me both pay attention to the rest I was seeking as well as opening me up to other possibilities.

Journaling prompts to encourage synchronistic events

• What does my heart want?
• What do I know that I don’t know I know yet?
• Where in nature will I most likely discover synchronicity?
• Who in my life will most likely be a conduit for synchronicity?
• What is the symbol of my deepest wisdom?
• What meaning can I make from the synchronicities I experience?

Try to approach your journaling with a wide-open imagination. Let it roam and give it free rein. In fact, if you don’t know the answers to these questions just make them up! Don’t worry about getting them “right.”

Every time I have become aware of a synchronicity experience, I have had an accompanying feeling that some grace came along with it.

— Jean Shinoda Bolen