You hear it a lot, don’t you? “Everything happens for a reason” -- but doesn’t it often seem like random things are happening to you? Here’s another way to think about that. It feels a little like a shaggy dog story, but there is a point, or even two.

My official business address is a post office box in a town I used to live in, about 45 minutes from where I live today. One afternoon a few months ago, when I checked it, I found several items for “Debbie Smith” (obviously not her real name, which is much more unusual). A couple of these looked like they might be checks and a couple more looked like W-2s. The address was P.O. Box 265, and then a street address, and then the town. I guess Debbie has my box number at a private mailbox place, but somehow these said P.O.B. instead of P.M.B. By law, the post office must deliver anything that says P.O.B. to a post office box, even if it has an address following that, so they ended up in my box.

As it happens, Debbie used to work for me, many years ago, when she was in high school; her mother, “Karen” is a good friend of mine. So I did what any friend would do, and called Karen, and left a message saying that these items were in my mail, and should I drop them at her house before I went home (as I don’t know where Debbie lives)? I did a few other errands, and since I hadn’t heard back, I gave the items back to the post office, explaining what had probably happened, and asking them to deliver them correctly. Shortly thereafter, I heard back from Karen, who said she’d call Debbie, who had recently moved back to town, to let her know about the mail. Then Karen said she’d be meeting a mutual friend of ours shortly for an early dinner, and did  I want to come? Sure! I changed my plans and met Karen and my other friend for dinner at a Chinese restaurant a few doors from the post office.

While we were eating, Debbie walked into the restaurant and joined us, having just picked up her mail. Sure enough, there were 2 checks and 2 W-2s, and she was thrilled to have gotten them. Then she said, “You know, just today I was visualizing money coming in the mail to me. I was clear that I wanted it, and that I wanted it today!”

So here are the points of the story:

* Everything happens for a reason, but it may not be your reason. Everyone else out there has their own intentions. So enjoy being part of someone else’s synchronicity.
* Be clear what you want — and others will be enlisted, perhaps without your or their conscious awareness, to help you get it.

This is so cool, I just had to share!

One thing I did for my birthday was to go for a long walk on the beach. When I came home, I found a HUGE rat right in the middle of the “Welcome” on the door mat! My cat, Beast, who is a great hunter, but hadn’t brought me any ‘gifts’ for quite some time, brought me a birthday present!

My husband, whose birthday follows mine by 6 days, and I had a birthday party on the Saturday in between our two birthdays. Nothing fancy, just inviting lots of people for a pot luck, since no one seems to RSVP any more. The morning of the party, we were frantically cleaning, but had yet to put out any of the food or the utensils. We do clean occasionally, so this should not have set off alarm bells for Beast. Nevertheless, he showed up with yet another rat — his contribution to the pot luck!

After the party ended, Beast showed up with yet another rat, and headed for my husband’s favorite chair. Perhaps it was his gift to my husband?

Do you have a good animal story, a time when one of your pets “knew” something they couldn’t really have known?

In case you’re interested, there’s a great book, “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals”  by Rupert Sheldrake. I read it a long time ago, but if I remember correctly, he shows many instances of dogs (and birds?) who know psychically when their humans are returning.

Sometimes, context is everything. It’s how you understand the meaning of a given word, right? When I was a kid, we played a game where the words “coffee pot” were substituted for two versions of a homonym, and you had to guess what the words were. So my mom would say, “I coffee pot the ball” and “I drove coffee pot the tunnel” and I had to guess the words “threw” and through”.

And sometimes it’s how you recognize people. Bear with me, here.

My office is very private. It’s pretty separate from the house; it’s downstairs, behind the garage, with its own door to a private patio. The patio is accessible only by a gate to the front yard and stairs up to the main deck and yard, which I can see from both my desk and the sofa where I sit to “read”. No one ever comes in unless I invite them. Even my husband checks the phone line to see if I’m busy before he comes down, and he comes from the inside; there’s never anyone except the cable guy or the phone guy on the patio, and that’s because I’ve called them. When I work, the only other creature there, besides me, is my cat, Creature.  That is, my office is very private, and very safe -- which is important, because I need to be completely secure in the outer world so that I can focus on the inner world for/with my clients.

Last Wednesday morning, I was in my office, doing a reading/NLP session for a client. I had my eyes closed, paying close attention to the inner landscape, and was therefore not particularly aware of what was going on in my office. All was well. We had gotten to a place where my client was touching one of his big issues, which, frankly, he would rather have avoided. (This is how many issues get to be big issues — when they’re little issues, we avoid them because it’s easier or more comfortable to avoid them than to deal with them. That lets them grow unchecked, attracting other experiences like the one that caused the issue in the first place. But I digress.)
 
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Went the back of the patio door.

Oh, my God! I practically screamed into the telephone, and then apologized to my client for blistering his ear as I rushed to the back door. There was a man standing there! And all the possibilities of who this could be flashed through my mind (PG&E? PacBell? The cable company? But I haven’t called any of them. A new neighbor? But why would a new neighbor come to this obscure, protected door?)

“Who are you?”, I asked the stranger.

“Steve”, he answered, with a slightly shocked look, as if to say, “you idiot!” — and immediately his very ordinary features morphed into the unique ones of one of my best friends from decades ago, as if all my experience of him suddenly populated his face. (Actually, we’ve known each other since we were teenagers and have stayed in touch all these years. No, I haven’t seen him in 5 years, but he really doesn’t look different from how he looked then.) It’s just that I talked to him the evening before, on his home phone, in NC, to say “thank you” for the birthday present he sent, so I “knew” he was home in NC. Since I didn’t expect him, I didn’t “see” him. I explained that I was really “out there” from doing the reading, and he readily forgave me.

How do you prevent this from happening? How do you ensure you recognize someone? I’m not 100% sure you can, but I have a couple of ideas.

The first one comes from my late father, who was a doctor in a small town in NJ, with a huge practice which spanned the state. Almost everywhere we went, someone would say, “Hi, Doc!” and he’d look momentarily blank, and then greet whomever by their name, and ask them something relevant to their lives. Once I asked him about that blank look, and how he remembered everyone, and here’s what he said: “When someone says, “Hi, Doc!, I know it’s someone from my practice, so I “see” them in the office — and then I know just who they are, their name, what they do for a living, kids names, all that stuff.”

So the first trick is to widen the visual frame of your memory, to see someone in the context in which you met.

The second trick is from “memory experts” who tell us to envision someone’s name stamped across his or her forehead.

Put the two together, so you see the person’s name, stamped on his or her forehead, in the context in which you know each other, and you’ll be all set! 

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of helping a group of aspiring hypnotherapists develop their (already pretty advanced) intuitions. Before we started, several members of the group told me they’d been looking forward to this session, and afterwards, I perhaps understood why: they were natural psychics, and needed a little help understanding, and, in at least one case, coping with, what they were already doing.

After my usual explanation of intuition, we began the practice exercises. One exercise is designed to increase the students’ awareness of others’ emotions at an energy/intuitive level. It requires that one member of a small group fully experience some emotion, by recalling an instance of it, as in method acting, so that the others can notice how that emotion manifests, and what it brings up for them. This is critical to healers, because sensing what is going on for your client and managing your own emotions around that is necessary to your client’s healing.

As I told the students that the next emotion they were to experience was anger, one woman standing quite close to me jumped the gun, and remembered her anger immediately. I caught a glint of it in her eye, and before I was aware of what had happened, part of me thought, “Oh, s**t, she’s mad at me!” And this happened even though I knew I had just asked the students to “run anger”.

At another point, I asked the group to run fear, which they gamely did.  While I was not part of the exercise, just managing it, I found myself nauseated and desperate to leave the room, in the classic “freeze or flee” mechanism.

What was going on?

What was going on was that my neurology was working perfectly! Our brains apparently have certain neurons, called mirror neurons, which “reflect back an action we observe in someone else, making us have that emotion, or have the impulse to do so”, according to Daniel Goleman in his book, “Social Intelligence”. These mirror neurons are the mechanism of our understanding what someone else is experiencing. They create a sort of emotional contagion between people (and even among crowds), especially when they interact face to face, and particularly when they look each other in the eye. This happens completely outside our conscious awareness.

So when I caught the eye of the woman who was “angry”, I experienced her anger, and when several members of the group were “afraid”, I became afraid.

So if you are someone who “catches” others’ negative emotions quickly and easily, what do you do?

The first step to solving a problem is to recognize it. If you regularly have emotions that seem to come out of nowhere, for no reason, your mirror neurons are probably very sensitive (or you have more of them, or they’re working overtime, or something). So the first thing is to ask yourself, “is this my emotion?” If the answer is no, then find a neutral or positive thought which will bring you back to your own decoupled physiology. A few good neutral thoughts are:

I am balanced, centered and grounded. (And really feel your connection to the earth.)
I have a protective bubble around me (or my aura). (Again, take a moment to notice the protection.)
I’m me; you’re you; we’re different (or separate).

Not only will you feel better, but then, in a more resourceful state, you have the ability to shape the interaction, so that the other person “catches” your more positive state. 

Yesterday, I hade the privilege of spending an afternoon helping some aspiring hypnotherapists develop their intuition. They were awesome! A few of them are much more naturally talented psychics than I am.