I’m forever grateful to my dad for telling me about his deja-vu and synchronistic experiences. It was a kind of joke in our family; as he would repeat his experiences over and over again.
He’d begin telling the story of when he was longing to go home at the end of the war, and he saw a cloud in the shape of England, and when he got back to ship, he was informed that he was going home. He’d begin to tell it, and we would say, “oh we’ve heard it a million times.”
Over the years, I became more and more interested in his tales. He re-told them because he desperately wanted to understand how they were possible. As a very scientific and rational man, who was an engineer, who loved to understand how things worked; these experiences seemed to defy his rational way of thinking about the world.
As I grew older, I had my own experiences and was able to empathise with him and understand him more. For example, one day I had a dream that the sea had gone and suddenly a gigantic wave came in and killed many people. I had never heard of a tsunami before, and a few days later when news of that first famous tsunami hit, I was shocked and humbled.
Wanting to help my dad as he got older, one day I looked up “deja vu” on Google, and came across, what was then, the Field Center. It became an important part of my life for the next seven years, and transformed my experiences of being with my dad as he left his body, and going through the process of my husband leaving for another woman, and when the director of the Field Project and I fell out.
Now I look back at what my dad taught me, what I learnt about synchronicity and the “as above, so below” ideas from my Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy, and what I learnt from my years of Field training, and it all comes down to connection.
I got into the ‘New Age’ when I split up from my first love, at the age of 23. I read plenty of spiritual texts and loved the concept that we are all connected, that all is One….. but for many years it remained an abstract context.
However, synchronicities, body symptoms, and daily events are now for me are the tangible ways that I feel in relationship wit Life.
Connection with Life is no longer an abstract idea to strive towards, but a daily experience.
For example, a couple of years ago I was reading a romantic novel (yes, I’ve found that Life communicates in many ways, even in what appear to be mundane contexts. I’ve learnt to trust when a book jumps out at me in a library or a bookshop, to take it home with me!) The novel was all about a woman who was choosing between two men – one who acted in ways that she found caring, considerate, compassionate and empathic. The other one wasn’t any of those. At the end, she chose the first one! I wondered whether I still had more to learn about being willing to receive care, consideration, compassion and empathy…. and in the car half an hour later, the car numberplate had the name of the woman character in the book on it. Seeing the numberplate, I chuckled to myself that I could take the book as something for me to learn about what I am willing to receive from men.
Body symptoms, or even strange and sudden happenings, also appear as communication from me that I can listen to and respond to.
For example, once I was pondering on stepping into a new belief and a new way of being in the world as I was making myself a snack. As I took a bite, the food went down funnily and it was painful to swallow…. and I saw that the new way of seeing things was still “painful for me to swallow”.
I’ve learnt that I no longer enjoy ‘one-size-fits-all’ explanations eg. a sore back meaning no support… instead, it is the conversation that is important.
For example, a while ago, I was getting a sore ear. I noticed that it came each time that I was thinking a particular thing… and I saw that in each case, it was painful to not be listening to myself. For the next few days, each time the sore ear came, I asked myself what it was painful not to hear, and the pain would disappear immediately.
I see all of these examples as communications which reveal the deep interconnectedness of all things.
So, in looking back over all this, and to all those stories my dad told, I am deeply grateful to him. His retelling of his stories; his wanting to understand exactly how events could be connected across space and time; his love of learning; and his wonder about the mysteriousness of the universe… all these have been great gifts to me that have brought a deep sense of connection, wonder, trust, and appreciation of life.
How much do you allow your life to be a mystery unfolding? Are you willing to let life talk to you?