Harnessing the Power of Synchronicity

By Nikki Harper

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Who doesn’t love a good coincidence? Bumping into someone you last saw at primary school and discovering that they’re also married to an astrophysicist called Theo? Chalk that one up as a smile-inducing cosmic win. Talking at work about a restaurant you want to go to only to moments later get a text from your friend saying she’s booked a table there for lunch? Yes please. Coincidences, from the enormous to the trivial, can make us laugh, help us out or have us wondering out loud about the odds of that.

Synchronicity, however, is so much more than just a coincidence. The term was coined in the 1920s by the psychiatrist Jung, who was interested in exploring the concept of meaningful coincidences. The Oxford Dictionary defines synchronicity as “the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection”. A coincidence may make you smile, but with a synchronicity, you’ll feel that it actually means something.

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Suppose you’re wondering whether to take up an opportunity or not and this has been bothering you for some time. You get up to leave the room but as you brush past a bookcase a book falls out and lands open but face down. You pick it up and staring you in the face is a passage about the heroine deciding to throw caution to the wind and do something daring. Clearly there is no causal link between the opportunity you’ve been offered and the book falling on the floor, but it feels meaningful. That’s a synchronicity.

What Causes Synchronicity?

Well, who knows? Many like to think that it’s to do with the interconnectedness of the world. If all things and people are linked, then it makes sense that sometimes you’ll see or hear or experience something which provides you with answers or guidance – like a song coming onto the radio with lyrics which are directly relevant to something you’ve been thinking.

Others think that synchronicity is the result of spirit guides arranging things behind the scenes. Yet others, including me, think it has to do with the power of your intent. If you need help with something, your intent to find that help may influence what you see or notice or how life events fall around you, putting you eventually in a position where you get that insight you need, through a synchronicity.

We often think that coincidences or synchronicities are so odd or so specific that the odds are stacked against them having happened purely by chance. That’s a natural human perception, but it’s not quite true. Say something has a one in a million chance of happening. That one specific thing is actually equally as likely to happen as any of the other 999,999 possibilities, each of which also has a one in a million chance of happening. So, any specific one of those possibilities is highly unlikely in itself, but each is equally unlikely, and one of them has to happen. When you look at it that way, very unlikely things are perhaps not quite so unlikely after all.

Nevertheless, the point and value of a synchronicity has nothing at all to do with how rare or unlikely it is statistically. Even a low key, fairly common synchronicity, like sharing your birthdate with someone, can be highly spiritually significant if you instinctively see a deeper meaning behind it or it somehow chimes with something you’ve had on your mind.

Ways to Encourage Synchronicity in Your Life

Once you discover the magical delights of synchronicity, you’ll want to work with these little cosmic moments of chance. In reality, synchronicities are probably all around us, all of the time, just unnoticed – so the key to working with synchronicity is to get yourself to a state where you will notice and understand.

Be open to the possibilities. Hush your natural sceptic and keep an open mind. Although nobody can explain exactly how or why synchronicity occurs and nobody but you can know how to interpret it, it does happen. So, let it happen.

Raise your vibration any way you can. You can do this through yoga, meditation, prayer, divination, mindfulness, mediumship or simply through being kind and trying to live a more spiritual life. The more you tune yourself into spiritual possibilities, the more synchronicities you will start to see.

Be observant. If you glaze over while driving (don’t do that) you won’t see that licence plate which has a message for you. Pay attention to the little things and start to notice the detail around you.

Be more spontaneous. If your life is planned down to the last minute, you don’t leave much opportunity for the unexpected to happen. Personally, I find that synchronicity happens more when I’m doing something I didn’t plan to do.

Ask for help – ask the universe, ask your guides if you believe in them, ask spirit, just ask. Ask out loud or in your head – whatever it takes to clearly set an intention that you want help with a particular issue or decision.

Be grateful when synchronicity happens. Add it to your journal so that you can see if a pattern starts to emerge.

Ways to Use Synchronicity for Practical Guidance

OK, so you’ve started to notice a few things, but what are you actually going to do with these signs and messages?

Make a decision. As scary as it may seem, use a synchronicity to decide about something. You will instinctively know what this cosmic chance is trying to tell you. It’s not really much different to using your gut instincts to choose, and if you weren’t stuck with the choices you wouldn’t need a synchronicity so – use it. See what happens.

Use synchronicity to enhance your intuitive skills. Zero in on synchronicities which involve, for example, numbers, or insects, or music. If you know numerology, you can decode numbers easily. If you choose to use a natural sign like seeing an insect, you’ll quickly start to discover what different types of insects mean to you symbolically. In this way, you can effectively specialise in a particular kind of synchronicity and the more you invite this in, and choose to use it, the more powerful this skill will get.

Actively participate by creating choices. When you have a decision to make, do a deal with yourself. Pick two things – for example two types of bird or two number sequences or two current songs. Assign a decision to each of these two things (eg blackbird means yes, I’ll do it, robin means no, I won’t). Then pay attention through your day and follow through on your promise.

By actively using and engaging with synchronicity in this way, you’ll strengthen your link with the cosmos, and you’ll strengthen the likelihood that synchronicity can become more than just a wow moment in your life.

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About the author:

Nikki Harper is a spiritualist writer, astrologer, and editor for Wake Up World. She writes about divination, astrology, mediumship and spirituality at Questionology: Astrology and Divination For the Modern World where you can also find out more about her work as a freelance astrologer and her mind-body-spirit writing and editing services. Nikki also runs a spiritualist centre in North Lincs, UK, hosting weekly mediumship demonstrations and a wide range of spiritual development courses and workshops.