My coaches training included an exercise called Cosmic Flirts — being open to the notion that the universe may be sending you messages. How do we explain coincidence? You’re thinking about a friend, and suddenly she calls. Is there a connection? Our mind certainly wants to believe there is, and yet, there’s no scientific proof…
Carl Jung said that his idea of synchronicity really came together while dining with Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity includes the notion that the whole universe exists simultaneously, that seeming separations of events & things are only due to our perspective, our relative location in the field.
For Jung, this was support for his idea of the collective unconscious, a connection that does not have to travel like an email or phone message or envelope does. Events can be connected, without conforming to temporal-dependent cause/effect. And we can be connected without our minds acknowledging or understanding the connection.
In coaching, a client and I might keep a peripheral eye/ear open for flirts — small shouts out from the universe of coincidence — and we ask: What is that trying to tell you? What wisdom is here for you?
Its been said that real change happens in small ways, on ordinary days, at seemingly insignificant moments that perhaps only later we might label as a Turning Point. Jung believed that flirts (or winks, as he called them) are most potent at boundary events — moments of great life transition, where turning seemingly randomly left rather than right may make all the difference in the world.
The most important question of our over-mediated age is — To what are we paying attention? The thinking mind is one channel of information, like channel 7 on your TV. And there are others: the emotional channel, the flirt/wink channel, the body channel, the intuition channel, the ‘What your partner is really trying to say’ channel. Yoga and meditation are ways to switch the channel of attention, away from the mind to breath, to sensation. Just focusing on the Now seems to be useful.
So everyday, give your thinking mind some time off, and practice paying attention to something else — the sounds of silence, your breath, ask your body what it wants for lunch today. Really listen to your intuition for 5 minutes straight, without judgement or disagreement about what’s practical. What choices become available when we give attention to the parts of us that we don’t believe we control?
Why even ask these questions? Basic research and exploration, on the road to growth and innovation…