Synchronicity

Synchronicity is coincidence that has a meaning. Why is synchronicity important and useful? Why should we think about synchronicity? It can be really useful in helping you determine your path, whether you’re on the path or whether you’re diverting from the path. It can be useful to help you in making decisions. Decisions about whether to do something or not.

From a Huna perspective, synchronicity is really important. There is this idea that, if things were going on in the outside world, the external, or low on one level, then that reflected something on the internal then, there was meaning to be had.

Lāʻau Kāhea

There was a whole discipline in Huna, the lāʻau kāhea. Lāʻau means medicine. It’s one of the meanings of lāʻau anyway. Kāhea means call. So, the lāʻau kāhea were faith healers. Actually, that’s the tradition that I teach, but we’re more psychological faith healers. We work with the higher self to bring about psychological and emotional healing.

The lāʻau kāhea also used Kilokilo which was the gift to prediction and divination. One of the things that Kilokilo uses are signs and symbols. It uses synchronicities to help with predicting and divining a particular path.

In the tradition that I teach, a good few generations back now, one of the people in the lineage, was the lāʻau kāhea. He was the adviser to the King and he advised King Kamehameha of the time when it was right to launch the ships that would bring the battles, that would bring the Hawaiian Islands together. It’s a very important piece in the Hawaiian tradition, and it’s a very important piece for us moving along our path.

Synchronicity as an Idea

Synchronicity as an idea comes from Carl Young. Carl Young thought it was really important. I think Carl Young is very cool. He was a psychologist, and a founding father of psychology. He worked with Freud and then trod his own path.

Young was interested in science. Wolfgang Pauli, the quantum physicist, was an extremely good friend of his. Einstein was a mate of his, and he hung around with some pretty high quality scientific dudes. Young was also interested in the occult and the metaphysical.

In the 1920s, he studied the I Ching, which is a Taoist text. From that, he developed his theory of synchronicity. This idea, that things happen either at the same time, or that have a very close relationship, may happen closely together and there is a meaning behind this. Then really it’s about what the meaning is that you make.

Trapped In Our Own Head

One of the examples Young gave was a story that I love. He had a client who was very, very rational, very very logically minded and almost trapped inside her own head. She was trapped inside her own head and not inclined to. She wanted to explore and develop things, but she was just in here.

She came to Young and she had a dream of a scarab beetle. A little greeny coloured, rather beautiful scarab beetle. While they’re in the session, Young was struggling to figure some way to get her to step out of her logical self, into her deeper self. There was a tapping at the window. Young went to the window and it was an insect. It was a beetle and it was a scarab looking. It was beautifully greeny coloured. He handed it to his client and said, “Here is your scarab.” It broke open her whole trapped-ness inside her logical self. For Young that was a great example of synchronicity. For me, it’s a great example of how we can use our dreams, which I talked about previously, “The Interpretation of Dreams”. It talks about how we can use dreams or dream interpretation to understand the synchronicities.

Let’s look back at synchronicity in a little bit more detail. Young talked about events that are related casually. There’s not an obvious reason for it. Say COVID, we know there’s an obvious reason why it emerged. We were told that it came from a bat with an insect bite or somebody has eaten that bat. It travelled, so on and so forth until it became a pandemic. By that, you can identify a causal path. ‘A’ happened and that meant ‘B’ happened, and that meant ‘C’ happened. With all that happening, that meant we were all in lockdown.

But there are things that happen that there is no obvious common cause to them. They would seem linked without an obvious common cause and that’s when synchronicity comes. You can interpret it as coincidence. Young was also perfectly open to the idea that you could interpret them. There are many things that seem like just coincidence, but are always worth looking for. Are they actually synchronicities?

Synchronicity and direction

I’ve had a couple recently. One great one was, there’s a lovely lady called Annie Stoker. I know some of you who watch this video know Annie. Annie was running a mindfulness retreat and it was supposed to happen in May. I couldn’t go, I had something else on that weekend. COVID came along, obviously she couldn’t run the retreat, so she had to delay it. It wasn’t really in my universe. Interested yes, I’ve done her mindfulness course. But to go to the retreat, not possible.

Anyway, come August, I had arranged to go down to Somerset with my partner. We visit his ex-business partner, who’s like one of his best mates on the planet. We’d seen him about a month before, we’d gone and saw him when they first released lockdown in the UK. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen him for ages, we’d seen him recently. We were going down and suddenly, Annie announces that she is gonna run the retreat. She’s gonna be running it the weekend that we’re going to Somerset.

My first reaction is, oh, I’m gonna be away. Then I notice that it’s going to be seven miles up the road from where I am going anyway in Somerset. I guess it’s on the right date. Seven miles up the road and it’s something that I wanted to do and I couldn’t do before. That for me is a really great example of synchronicity. It’s things coming together at the same time that somehow led us down a path or down a direction.

How can we really use these synchronicities?

How can we make the most of them? Well, one of the ways that we can make the most of them is to use dream interpretation. If you interpret and you want to find out how to do it, then do go and have a look at that video I previously posted. But if we have these experiences, a set of experiences that seem to have some relationship, we sometimes ask ourselves, where did that relationship come from?

Maybe do a dream interpretation on the synchronicity to get what the deeper meaning is for you. Is it something that you need to pay attention to, something that’s going on in the outside or seems to be going on outside you, but actually is mirroring something within you?

In this case, what was going on outside was this mindfulness retreat that was happening. But what was going on inside me was I wanted to develop my own ability in the direction of mindfulness. I wanted to be more mindful. I wanted to get to grips with this.

So, what was going on inside me was being reflected in what was going on outside. This was a really union thing. When what’s going on inside you is a real reflection of what’s going on outside you or when what’s going on outside you, really in some way, mirrors what’s going on inside you.

Synchronicity as real connection

For the Kahunas, for the Hawaiians, this was so important because synchronicity, as I say along with signs and symbols, was an important part of Kilokilo, of prediction and divination.

Looking out, if you saw one of the examples I use when I’m talking about signs and symbols is, I was driving along the road one day and I saw a red kite. This was in an area which previously has never ever seen a red kite. They have multiplied in England since they were reintroduced, but I’ve never seen a red kite in this particular area.

Red kite for me is a real connection to my dad, because when I was little we lived in Wales. It was about the only place you could see red kites and my dad loved red kites. We would go for a drive in the Backwoods of Wales, and I really do mean the Backwoods of Wales. Wales has some Backwoods, and you’d see a red kite and my father would exclaim, “Oh, it’s a red kite!”

So, for me the red kite really symbolised my father. Seeing that red kite on that piece of road which I never saw a red kite on before, was a sudden reminder to me. I wonder if there’s something about my dad or something that I haven’t yet learned from my dad that I need to tap into and sure enough there was.

Intuitive reaction to synchronicity

These signs and symbols and synchronicities they’re all wrapped up together. They’re incredibly important in this interpretation. There’s dream interpretation as well. There’s this, how does this reflect something that’s going on for me? Then, there’s just pure gut intuition.

I had a recent experience where in fact this last week. Two clients, quite separately, have been talking to me about eye challenges. I haven’t had a client come to me about eyes, I don’t think ever. Although, I’m very interested in eyes obviously, we all have them and hopefully we have reasonable vision.

But I was identified as very shortsighted when I was four or five. By the time I was six, I was wearing eyeglasses, spectacles full time. I didn’t like it, but I was kind of stuck with it. I’d been wearing spectacles for a long time and then contact lenses.

Then about 20 years ago, I started to investigate how I might improve my own vision. I did it for a while and then I got lazy because actually I have other challenges in life where I’m so used to wearing spectacles. It’s such a part of my identity that in the end it didn’t really seem that important. Haven’t really thought about it.

So, these quite independently, two different people talking to me about problems either they’ve got with their own eyes or that a child has got with their eyes. Suddenly, it took me back into this whole story that I had investigated about 20 years ago into natural vision healing and the work of people like Leo Angarat and Meir Schneider.

What was the intuition for me? Maybe it’s time for me to start redoing the eye exercises. Maybe it’s time for me to get back into that because in the current situation, I’m using my eyes a lot. I’m on the screen a lot. If I can then recapture some of that relaxation that the natural vision exercises bring to my eyes, I think that’s probably beginning to be quite good for me, and quite good for my eyes. That’s an intuitive reaction to synchronicity.

I think there’s three main ways, there are probably more, but these are the three main ways that I use to benefit from synchronicity. As I say, interpreting them like a dream, so dream interpretation. Asking the question. What does this trigger in me, or what does this mean to me? The third one then is just simply going with my gut, going with my intuition. Because it can really help you move along the path, identify possibilities along the path, and identify things that you wouldn’t otherwise think of.

If you’d like help, if it’s something about synchronicities or signs and symbols, if this is an area which you would like some help with, then do get in touch. You can book an appointment on secret@huna.com/diary and we can have a complimentary chat.

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