Soul Freedom Exercise (5): Better Than I Could Imagine

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Steps:

Have a conversation in which you help each other recall examples of synchronous events or meaningful coincidences in your life. In particular, identify the good things that both happened to you and in which you also actively participated. Scenarios of such events could unfold something like this:

• You were trying to accomplish something.
• Things didn’t go as you planned and you experienced what seemed like setback, defeat, or failure.
• Right around the corner, something came along that was even better than you could have imagined or have planned for. You received help from outside yourself, out of the mystery, from God or Goddess.

Here is an important example from Al and Pala’s lives.

By the mid-1990s, when the college where Al had been an economics professor for 23 years offered an early retirement package, he was also involved in what seemed to be a lucrative multi-level-marketing business. He accepted the buy-out and left the security of his college position.

For several years Pala, an economic development officer, had been toying with the idea of finding a more satisfying career but had taken no action. At the same time Al left teaching, Pala lost her job during a hostile take-over, and they began working the MLM business together. It failed miserably. The only successful aspect was a website they developed to sell the products online.

Theirs was one of the first small business entrepreneur websites on the Internet, and so they decided to offer Internet training to other small business owners. Although Al and Pala paid thousands of dollars to reserve workshop facilities they had no registrations. To avoid complete catastrophe, they chose, at the last minute, to offer relationship and sexuality training instead.

Despite having only a few paying customers, as soon as they did the workshop day dedicated to sacred sexuality they knew it was their calling—this was it. Sacred sex had been Pala and Al’s private hobby for years. It was their passion and their greatest source of joy, but they never imagined they could earn a living through it. They now teach and write about sacred sexuality and relationships full time. They discovered how they could follow their bliss and earn a living doing it, and it all came out of what seemed to be a series of failures.

Variation:

Keep a record of these important happenings in your lives. Refer back to them over the years. Is there a pattern in your series of synchronous events?

Comments:

Sometimes a sequence of events unfolds (one event leading to the next, or one happening making the next one possible) but not in any recognizable cause/effect relationship. Many people believe that synchronicity is just luck or chance. Synchronicity is actually a spiritual process in which our consciousness manifests results according to how we direct our attention and intention, and how we act to support our choices.

Both positive and negative stepping stones can lead to a happy final result. In other words, there can be value in having bad things happen to you. Many times, what seems like failure or defeat is really necessary to prevent you from going further down the wrong road. Some doors have to close so that others can open.

Excerpted from our new book Sensual Love Secrets for Couples: The Four Freedoms of Body, Mind, Heart and Soul, by Al Link and Pala Copeland, Llewellyn, 2007