Synchronicity, according to the great psychologist Carl Jung, is a “meaningful coincidence.” An event happens that is not directly related to the other event, but there’s a meaningful connection between the two.
Sometimes, things happen in our psyche, in our inner world, that are meaningfully related to something that happens outside.
Let me give an example from The Empath’s Journey. I relocated from India to the United States around seven years ago. In the first few years, I went through a period of change where my old identity shifted and morphed. During this time, I was also shedding other patterns. I stopped being as “nice” and people-pleasing and started affirming new boundaries.
This was a period when I was shedding my old skin and growing a new one. I often had dreams with snakes in them.
It was while all of this was happening in my inner life that I happened to visit an ancient Mayan temple in Mexico as part of a holiday trip. My husband and I had chosen to visit this place without doing too much research about its historical meaning.
That day, as we walked into the temple, suddenly, all around us were carved images of snakes. It turned out that the temple was dedicated to the Mayan feathered-serpent deity Kukulcan.
It was a moment of sheer delight for me. Of all the places in the world to come to, of all the historical sites we could have chosen, we had landed up in this one.
It was as if some line in my inner world coincided with the outer world.
Experiences like these make us feel like we are part of a bigger plan, or at the very least, part of a universe that’s deeply connected. We are stars in the fabric of time. We can almost dip our hands into an endless river that crisscrosses between the beings of our inner and outer worlds.
We are connected. We matter. We belong.
Something shifts in us then. Something comes home.
And that’s why synchronicities matter. They are the clues that lead us to the hidden treasures, the hidden portals in our world. Where there wasn’t a door before, a door suddenly appears and we can walk through it.
Ritu Kaushal is the award-winning author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which talks about Ritu’s experiments with channeling sensitivity instead of getting overwhelmed by it.
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