Anda Vintila is a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) and Somatic Psychotherapist. She is devoted to supporting people in processing and healing their trauma through Soul-Led Inner Work which often consists of gentle nervous system rewiring, dream exploration, fostering relational and emotional safety, and re-aligning with one’s personal Truth.
Robert Moss (known dream analyst), in an interview regarding dreamwork, quoted Jung and said “Jung, in an interview with Mircea Eliade for a French Magazine in the 1950s described synchronicity as a brief rupture in time”.
Synchronicities carry messages in a similar way that dreams do – in fact, when I notice meaningful and acausal coincidences, I feel similar sensations and a state of consciousness that I experience within dreams. This topic is very close to my heart, in fact, I feel most connected to myself and to those around me when I notice synchronicities on a frequent basis. I read somewhere long ago that synchronicities can feel like a nod from the universe telling you that you are on the right path or that perhaps the path you are taking is not for you – do you relate?
I am so deeply drawn to tracking synchronous moments in my life and letting them teach me new perspectives and guide me closer to my Soul path. Noticing synchronicity provides me an opportunity to immerse myself within life. I was aware of synchronicity and thoroughly enchanted by this phenomenon since I was young and to tell you the truth, my plan was to write my Masters of Counselling capstone on the healing effect of synchronicity within life and therapy. But, such a topic was difficult to find enough resources for as you can imagine. Thankfully, I have an opportunity here to write about one of my favourite topics and one which will hopefully interest you.
Before diving into this topic, I will begin by introducing a quote from one of Jung’s client sessions that completely and accurately portrays the different layers of synchronous experiences:
“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeoid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words "Here is your scarab." This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
A really strange dream I had last year and perhaps synchronous to this quote, was of a scarab beetle, and within this dream a sudden urge to wake up brought me out of sleep fearing there would be a beetle on my bed. Suddenly, I open my eyes and pull off my duvet to be looking straight at the beetle from my dream. How did I know there would be a beetle under my duvet and that it would be on the far-right corner of the bed? Some part of me knew.
As you can imagine, this was a profound rupture in time and space for me. A moment where my dream life and my waking world were in some sort of a conversation that my frontal cortex, responsible for decision-making and other cognitive skills, was delayed in response and could be said to have barely contributed to the conversation. In fact, it feels like that whole experience was experienced through the instinct and intuition (right-brain dominant functions). Personally, I consider this experience to be beyond the human three-dimensional (3D) reality and touched into my favourite territory; the limbo state where you have one foot in ordinary reality and the other in the numinous.
I believe both dreams and synchronous moments can invoke a person into this in-between state. I also believe that any form of full immersion into an activity, a deep presence, can also activate this state within all of us. When I am connected to the vastness of this state (of consciousness), I often feel more grounded, less enmeshed with negative beliefs about myself and our world, significantly less fear or discomfort in my body regarding the future, and more capacity to put my creativity and ideas into action. This in-between state really supports me to be my best self in this life.
To finish off this article, you may be wondering, how can we really discern what meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) are from just regular coincidences? As you can imagine, the answer to this will be highly personal and subjective to you. Your body will very likely alert you through different sensations and inner experiences – such as goosebumps, sudden clear focus and presence, expansiveness in the heart space and mind, fluttering in the belly, shivers, tearing up etc. – when something meaningful seems to be happening. And simply put, I believe most encounters and what we refer to as coincidences are meaningful, but some we can feel are more meaningful than others.
I invite you to explore and play with your awareness – for example, did you think of someone and then see them or hear from them the next day? Or you think of a song and then you hear that song over and over again in different contexts? Or you have a gut feeling and intuitive hunch about something and it either comes true or you hear about another situation that is similar? There are infinite examples of synchronicity and I often find that there can be many links between synchronous moments. I encourage you to write down these moments and return back to them when life is feeling extra difficult; there is so much life within these moments that you may be surprised at their impact in bringing you back to a sense of awe and meaning.
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Anda Vintila, Clinical Counsellor & Somatic Psychotherapist
Anda Vintila is a Registered Clinical Counsellor. She owns a private practice in Vancouver, BC where she regularly sees clients who seek a deeper way to heal from their trauma, patterns, and conditionings. Anda weaves different body-centered modalities that focus on supporting the nervous system and body to have greater capacity in moving through difficult emotions and sensations in order to feel safer in one’s self and within relationships. Anda believes the inner work is ultimately led by the Soul. She is passionate about shining awareness on aspects of the self that obstruct one’s access to flow and life-force energy and creating room for newer perspectives to emerge.
