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yoga studio in Costa Rica

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About once a week I take a yoga class at a studio about ten minutes away. It’s a studio where I teach a 6-week meditation course 3 or 4 times a year. Often times, the teacher begins the class by suggesting that we set an intention for the class.

Sometimes my intention is just to make it through the class without too much trouble. I usually take advanced vinyasa flow classes and typically the other students are 20-25 years younger than me. Other times, I focus on a project I’m working on and getting through a block. But on one recent morning–the morning after I’d paid a bunch of holiday bills –I said to myself ‘Bring in money, bring it in soon.’ Not exactly a spiritual intention, by any means, but a practical one.

The class with this particular teacher was as challenging as usual with a lot of tricky arm balance poses and twisting postures that require a flexible spine. When the class was over, I reminded everyone of my upcoming meditation course and headed for the door.

As I put on my shoes, one of the students tapped me on the shoulder and handed me an envelope with my name on it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a Christmas card from some of the students. I noticed you hadn’t picked it up.” I thanked her and walked out my car with my mid-January Christmas card. I slid behind the wheel and opened the envelope to find $30 in cash, a total surprise.

Then I remembered the intention I’d set for the class and laughed. That certainly was a quick response from the Universe. Cash handed to me before I’d even left the studio. Not quite the quantity I was thinking of, but I decided  to look at it as symbolic. After all, it had seemingly manifested out of thin air.

Sometimes the synchronicities are like dreams. If you don’t write them down immediately, they drift away. For me, that often happens after I’ve said or thought that I’m definitely not going to forget that one.

I wrote the above comment because I had just experienced that very thing. I remember clearly telling Trish about the synchro and Megan, who was visiting, heard it, too. We were all somewhat baffled and impressed at the same time by it. Then we all forgot it.

Possibly, the forgetting was related to what happened next. Megan was watching television and a character in a movie uttered this line: “Who sleeps standing up?”

That caught our attention because less than hour earlier Trish had mentioned how she had come out of the bathroom during the middle of the night and found me standing near the end of the bed facing the wall. I was sound asleep. I had no memory of that, but figured I’d gotten up shortly after Trish and realized she was in the bathroom. So, as I waited, I dozed off. Perhaps, because of my yoga and meditation practice, I’m actually able to sleep standing up.

So Megan answered the guy on TV by saying, “My dad does.”

Several days passed and as we were driving past a restaurant near our house called the Welli Deli, I suddenly remembered the initial synchronicity that set off this post. Here’s what happened.

An Australian man, who Megan had met in Orlando, texted her and told her he was in Greenwich Village with his traveling buddy and they were looking for a good bar. Megan mentioned it to me and I said: “Tell them to go to the White Horse Tavern.” It’s an historical 19th century bar with a lot of character, a place where some famous writers have hung out, including Dylan Thomas, Norman Mailer, and Anais Nin.

Megan asked where it was so I Googled the name. I was stunned to see that the first thing that came up was White Horse Tavern Wellington, FL. That’s here. But I’d never heard of it. Where was it?

I clicked onto it. That’s it in the photo above. I realized that I did know about the restaurant, but not by that name. It’s actually only about a mile from our house as the crow flies, but located on a road that we rarely turn onto, unless we’re going to one of the winter equestrian events, which we don’t do very often since Megan took her chaps and riding boots and moved to Orlando.

Megan and Trish were as surprised as I was that my search had turned up a White Horse Tavern so close to home. I never did hear whether or not the Aussies found the one on Hudson Street in NYC. Because, for some reason, we all promptly forgot about the whole thing. As if it were a dream.

The Hindu goddess Durga destroyed a demon. She can also make you hallucinate as you can see if you watch this video in an eyes-open meditative state. The whole sequence is beautiful.

When we lived in Venezuela, most of the TV we watched was in Spanish. We watched One Step Beyond, Twilight Zone, Highway Patrol, Rin Tin Tin and Tales of the South Pacific in Spanish. Those were the family favorites – although, frankly, I never understood why Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford fell in the lineup. It was my dad’s choice. But every Saturday morning the local channels showed a movie in English. It was usually a John Wayne film, wild west shot ‘em up, with Wayne riding off into the proverbial sunset.

It was somewhat synchronous that years later, Rob connected with Ed Smart, an iconoclastic adventurer from Aspen, Colorado and Utah who was one of Wayne’s closest friends. We spent a couple of vacations with Ed at his home in Utah, when Rob tried to pull together Ed’s voluminous notes about his and Wayne’s various adventures. The project never panned out.

This evening we watched The Mists of Avalon , based on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s bestselling novel.  We saw it years ago, but decided to watch it again and onto the Netflix it went. For some reason, it reminded me of Ed Smart and John Wayne. Wayne’s movies and Bradley’s novels – like the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, like Body Heat and Harry Potter- deal with large archetypal themes. These movies enter Joseph Campbell territory, the hero’s journey, the quest rejected and then embarked upon.  In fact,  screenwriter Robert McKee wrote a book called Story  about how the hero’s journey is integrated into every bestselling script/movie /novel.

Mists of Avalon is a three-hour film. We planned to watch it over the course of two nights, but it takes the Camelot and Avalon myth and humanizes it so well that we watched the entire three hours. The fundamental struggle in this film is that the magical world of Avalon can’t exist unless there are people who believe in paganism – its magic and beauty, its sacred honor of the natural world. The opposing worldview is Christianity.

What makes this story work on so many levels, even when it’s emotionally cheesy, is the Shakespearean stuff, the emotional interactions among the characters. There’s  Arthur and his half-sister Morgana, Lancelot and Guinevere, Arthur and Lancelot,  Arthur and Guinevere, Arthur and Mordred, his incestuous son, and Morgana’s magical apprenticeship to become the lady of the lake who guards Avalon. In a time when women were publicly marginalized, they actually ruled behind the scenes.

So, here’s another weird little synchro. Years ago at a writer’s conference, we sat on a panel with Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was at that time one of the grand dames of sci-fi/fantasy. The panel moderator had cancelled at the last minute and the people in charge of the conference asked Rob to moderate. He mistakenly introduced Marion as Marion Zimmerman Bradley, and she got quite huffy about the mistake.

“It’s Zimmer,” she snapped.

But we had recently spoken with our friend RD Zimmerman  so the mistake was innocent. But Marion refused to speak to us for the rest of the night. Too bad. I had a lot of questions for her about how she’d written her novel, whether she felt it had been channeled.

The movie was  made in 2001, so there’s a video quality about it that you don’t find with more recent films. But the emotional resonance remains genuine and true.  And the way Avalon is depicted – as a magical world separated from the “real” world by a mist that only the guardians of Avalon can part – is brilliant.  The movie was certainly worth three hours of our time!

Every new year’s eve for years, Rob and I have brainstormed about our joint new year’s resolutions, goals, hops and dreams. He transcribes them by hand ( and probably still has them stashed away somewhere). And most new years, we look back to see which goals, dreams, and resolutions have been  achieved and which have fallen by the side of the road and which are still unfolding.

Resolutions prompt us to focus, if only for a few moments, on how we can improve ourselves, our lives, the difference we make in the world. We are all diamonds in the rough who dream big dreams and have expansive visions. I believe we all have the capacity for optimism and laughter. Yes, life sometimes get in the way, but really, at the end of the day, what is most important?

The money in your bank account? Well, okay, the higher the amount, the more freedom you have. What you do with that freedom is what counts.

Your prestige? In comparison to who or what? By whose measurement?

Your achievements? Well, yes, but relative to what?

You see what I mean?

The best resolution I ever kept probably didn’t have anything to do with new year’s. It occurred after I read Carl Jung’s introduction to the I Ching, the Chinese Books of Changes. Jung wrote the forward for the Richard Wilhelm edition of this book in 1949 and in it, first spoke about his theory of synchronicity. I had one of those aha! moments when I recognized that Jung was referring to stuff in my life for which I’d never had any explanation. My resolution was to research this thing, this weirdness, this whatever it was – in any way I could.

In fact, when Rob and I first met, I remember asking him if he’d ever heard of synchronicity. He had and I thought, Okay, this guy may be a keeper.

I have a few more answers than I did when I made this resolution, but not by much. As the world continues to change and humanity evolves, synchronicity reflects that.

New archetypes and experiences emerge. Until the advent of blogging, for instance, I’d never heard of white feathers as symbolic of contact with a deceased loved one – which I first read about on Mike Perry’s blog.

I learned how synchronicity manifests itself through music, as it did for Darren when he was burying his cat Sylvester  and Peter Gabriel’s song “Digging in the Dirt” came on the radio.

I have discovered how powerfully a single synchronicity can shake up someone’s worldview, as it did for Gabe Carlson with his teapot synchro.

I have discovered how powerful dreaming can be, that we can all dream a better world, as our friend Adelita says.

Through blogging and connecting with people whose interests in synchronicity parallel my own, I have realized we are all both teachers and students. Our personal lives and worldviews vary, our goals and dreams are different, but all of us seem to acknowledge the essential mystery of the world in which we live. And since synchronicity is an equal opportunity phenomenon, no one is excluded. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, whether you’re male or female, young, old or middle aged, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or a blue skinned alien from Pluto.  Anyone can experience this phenomenon simply by recognizing coincidence as personally meaningful.

So as the sun sets on 2012 and it passes into history, the MacGregors thank you all for increasing our knowledge and understanding of synchronicity and all things that go bump in the night. We wish everyone a happy, prosperous, and healthy 2013 filled with many… well, synchros, of course!