Synchronicity

“Synchronicities are soulful. It is the soul that knows something is meaningful, that is moved by poetry and music, that recognizes what it loves and that it is loved, that is nourished by what we do when what we do comes from our own depths. If virtually nothing that we do in daily life is soul satisfying, which is the situation out of which nightmares of depersonalization arise, we become increasingly unreal to ourselves.” — pgs 172-173, Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Pilgrimage by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., 1994.

I’m currently reading this book, which I got as a gift from Morgaine last xmas, and I’m finding it very interesting and thought-provoking. Much of what she says relates to things I’ve already gone through and experienced for myself in my life, although she makes some points about things that I hadn’t even thought of. Often when we are in the midst of some life crisis, there isn’t time to reflect on what is truly happening to us on a purely personal basis, instead we react to how the crisis is affecting those that we care for and are responsible for. We bury our own feelings, our own emotional reactions, and hold them inside our psyche and inside our own physical body. This is true of both men and women, it’s not exclusive to women. If we bury these feelings and our reactions to crises long enough, we become numb and unreal even to ourselves. We lose any sense of self-identity.

Modern life and society and even the world in which we live tend to encourage this form of masking our true feelings. We keep it all bottled up and it eats away at our souls. People don’t want to hear about others’ problems or feelings and we are often made to feel like there is something wrong with us for wanting to share these stories with others, or have them bear witness to what is happening to us. We get our news in sound bites, thirty seconds of commercially produced drama broadcast on the nightly news. Is it any wonder that dehumanization and demonization of people half a world away is so easy for people to assimilate into their worldview? People who are already half numb to their own feelings, and have no sense of real self-identity.

The world of work is often spent in jobs we hate, but we think we are supposed to enjoy what we are doing, and so we pretend that what we are doing is important and meaningful, even when it is actually just the opposite. We wear layers upon layers of masks, pretending to be this person that others expect us to be, for fear that if we were to reveal who we really are, it would mean confronting and coming to terms with some things on the inside of ourselves that we don’t want to face because it would be really difficult to do that. Indeed, I’ve found in my own life that even with all of the really horrible things I’ve had to go through, the inner journey, the one where I meet myself in that place where I cannot pretend or hide from who and what I really am, is really the hardest and most difficult thing I’ve ever experienced. And yet, such a journey is necessary if we are ever to be authentic to our true selves.

Synchronicities are not coincidences. They are like alarm bells and signposts along the road of life, trying to get a message to our inner selves.