Miracle or coincidence?

Synchronicity in a chaotic world

The beginning of 2024 found me Googling “psychedelic retreat”, which tells you what you need to know about my emotional state at that time. My career was hanging on by a thread that I was honestly tempted to cut, and I coped with three years of intense anxiety by numbing myself behind a gauzy alcoholic veil.

Recognising how unwell I’d become, and with my supervisor’s encouragement, I’d blocked off all of March to go home to the US. My thoughts were spiralling and I knew that continuing to follow their twisting turning path would lead me to even more dreadful destinations, so an alternate trip to the bosom of family and big sky felt not only preferable but imperative.

They say desperation is a gift.

A month later I woke up groggy on the back seat of a van rattling down the gravel driveway into Awake, a retreat deep in the Costa Rican jungle that promised rest, connection and deep healing via plant medicine and other integrative practices.

The flight from Phoenix to San Juan had been eventful. I’d had a few margaritas on an empty stomach prior to travelling, and one sip into my customary cruising altitude Bloody Mary I started to feel real bad. I stood to get some air and fainted flambouyantly into the arms of an alarmed flight attendant. The doctor they summoned to check me out looked all of 14 - she couldn’t have been out of med school - and after she took my blood pressure and medical history, she asked me gently if I thought my ailment was alcohol related. My humiliation was complete.

There was no booze at Awake which was fine by me. I knew my body and soul needed a break, and the jungle environment was novel enough that I didn’t really miss it. Despite the psychedelic component of the retreat, the vibe was wholesome. Early to bed and to rise, vegan offerings heavy on raw veg and curries. Not that alcohol wasn’t allowed, exactly, but the strongest drink on offer was ceremonial cacao. I threw myself into ecstatic dance, art therapy, breath work, and naked into the crystal clear river running through the property. I found monkeys near the beach.

I started to feel parts of myself start to come back to life.

When I returned to Phoenix a week later I was tanned, sober, and glimmers of optimism were peeking through the clouds. I liked the feeling of returning acuity and decided I wanted to maintain my sobriety because it seemed so inexorably linked to my mental well-being.

My return to AA was inauspicious. We were eight people in a cement structure squatting in a gravel lot in the Arizona desert. Old school fluorescent tubes lit wood-panelled walls and linoleum flooring. The woman next to me nodded off and spilt her coffee on the table. I sat and watched as it spread while others grabbed paper towels. She shared with the group that she’d been doing really well in the methadone program, and she spoke so earnestly that I believed her despite my own shitty judgments about her home job bleached hair and her crude angel wings neck tattoo*. At the end of the meeting we held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer. It was extremely American. I felt nothing much.

The next night was the opening game of the Arizona Diamondbacks season. A massive crowd, including my brother and I, turned out in downtown Phoenix to welcome the returning National League Champions. The vibe was electric. It’d been years since I’d been to a ball game, and as we walked in amongst the celebrating masses I thought, you know what? I’m going to have a beer at the baseball! That’s what we do, right? Fuck it!

I took two jaunty steps with the decision made, then noticed someone sitting on a bench watching me intently. I did a full cartoonish double-take as I saw the bluish smear of angel wings across her neck, disappearing into a mop of shaggy bleached hair. It was the woman from the meeting, and she clearly clocked me too.

What were the chances that the very woman whose hand I’d held the day before in an AA meeting in the middle of nowhere would show up 50 miles away and find me amongst 50,000 people at the very moment I decided that I needed a beer? She was God in a skin suit, She was the Universe, She was Mother Nature, She was magic, and She was making eye contact.

No beer for me.

The reason I’ve chosen to write about this is not because it’s a cool story (it is) or because I want to flex my sobriety (I don’t). I’ve been unpacking it since it happened because it speaks to a belief that I thought I’d lost in University, where psychology academics were so desperate to be given the same credibility as their “hard” science colleagues that they snuffed out any whiff of the paranormal or spiritual in their students.

We studied Karl Jung, but not the bit where he said that synchronicities are evidence of a unifying consciousness at play in the Universe, manifesting in the physical world what's occurring in our psyche. Not evidence-based I guess, but then isn’t My Lady with the Angel Wings Tattoo evidence?

Maybe it was a simple coincidence, our paths recrossing a rip in the fabric of a matrix that I only noticed due to a confirmation bias which privileges sobriety, but I don’t think so. What I do know for sure is that because of Her, I’ve been happily full of spit and vinegar for the past two months. Our split-second reunion was joyous synchronicity in the midst of utter chaos, and it was exactly what I needed to continue healing and get on with my life.

I don’t know anything really but I believe we are all immersed in a conscious Universe that will guide us if we simply allow ourselves to be open to it. The more signposts you see, the more you’ll see. I’ve learned over and over again that when I resist and ignore those signs. I take myself into complication, duplicity, and despair. When I behave in a way that feels good simply because it feeds my ego, I am destructive. In other words, I fuck it all up.

When I willingly surrender to the flow, weird stuff happens and I am taken to beautiful places. Interesting people cross my path. I feel inspired and loving and funny and curious. Now that I think about it, it’s from one of those places that I am writing this, or even writing at all.

PS. If you’ve made it this far, I’ve embedded below a guided visualisation that was inspired by writing this post. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

*I’m sorry but there was no angel wings neck tattoo. I’ve changed some things about Her, and that meeting, in the spirit of anonymity.