City to City, A Case of Synchronicity

A brief but formative part of my life was spent with The Man in a small town in California, a town that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I worked through some healing and processed a past I thought long behind me. Lately, it came back around in a really surprising way and I thought it would make an interesting case study on how synchronicities appear.

In 2022 I enrolled my kids in horse riding lessons. At one visit, the owner asked me if I wanted to ride. Of course I did. To my great surprise, I burst into tears when I sat atop the horse. She looked at me and said, "You should check out [a retreat venue]."

I know how these things work, so I followed the clue. I booked a retreat there for an afternoon around Thanksgiving. It was incredible. I'd never been to something like that. We did sauna, hot tub, a craft, a meal. And I met a couple people, one of whom was Debra. Debra was about to begin enrollment for a specific yoga program. It had been written by another yoga practitioner and with permission, Debra was leading a cohort at the same retreat spot.

I've never done yoga, but I trust the calling, you see. So I enrolled. The book and teaching are based on Patanjali's 8-fold path and create a series of specific poses to attain that path. I don't know more, I have never researched it, but the poses all align with a chakra and we move up them sequentially in a many-week course.

That set me on the path of yoga years before the meaning started to wink out at me.

I'm currently studying Self Realization Fellowship lessons, the Yogananda lineage, with tantra arriving in a wholly unexpected sidetrack, and I remember The Man talking about spending time in an ashram as a kid, so I asked him about his experience. He mentioned where it was, it's the Muktananda tradition, so he had direct involvement in a similar lineage to what I'm embarking on now at 45.

I thought back to the yoga program from 2022 and wondered how it fit in. I Googled the author on 5/11/26, the day I was at a beach house seemingly transitioning into the active phase of my work. I don't know where it leads.

But the reason I made this note, and laughed out loud when I saw the Google results, is that the author of that yoga program, the program where it all started for me, lives in that same small California town.

I don’t think the point of synchronicities is to do anything with them. We’re just meant to notice them. The meaning comes after, or never at all. I like to think of it as the universe laughing alongside us in the journey.