Nowhere can man find a quieter or more
untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
marcus aurelius
Taming the Chaos
Before you dive into the five-step process outlined in Part 2 of this book, there is an essential piece of the puzzle that needs to be addressed: the chaos in your life. By incorporating easy spiritual tools and practices into your daily life, you can start taming the chaos around you and be more present to noticing the signs and synchronicities coming to you.Whether you are a busy working mom juggling a career and family, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or dreaming of retirement in a few years, we all have chaos. The world we live in is full of it, and this impacts our lives whether we realize it or not. We have chaos in our minds and bodies from our own thoughts and emotions, that we take on from the people and situations around us, and even from the media we watch and listen to each day. This chaos serves as a distraction, and when we get caught up in it, noticing signs and synchronicities around us becomes nearly impossible. We must learn to quiet it down in small ways so the messages from the universe and our guides, angels, and loved ones can make it through to us.
As Carl Jung said, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”9 This chapter will help you tune into the cosmos by turning the dial down on chaos so you can find the order in the disorder—and ultimately discover the signs and synchronicities guiding your way.
The Causes of Chaos
Chaos is contagious, and most of us are walking around with a severe case of it. Oftentimes we don’t even realize it, and when we do, we have no idea how to escape it—or the disastrous effects it’s having on our mind, body, and spirit. It’s not until we come down with a physical condition or clinical diagnosis of anxiety or depression that we suddenly realize the stress and chaos consuming our lives. Many people are chaotic from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until their head hits the pillow at night, and it’s become such a habit and way of operating that it seems normal to them. They live every day perpetually stressed, outside the present moment, and taking on the role of firefighter as the flames ignite and spread around them. I know this because it’s how I lived my life for years. I would always tell people I didn’t feel stressed, and meanwhile I was late to work all the time, running for the train that took me into New York City (and sometimes missing it), and moving a million miles an hour all day long. Then, in my early thirties I was diagnosed with shingles, which is said to be brought on by chronic stress, and I was truly baffled as to why I had it because I didn’t feel stressed. My doctor couldn’t believe it either and said I was too young to have it, but there it was on the right side of my torso. I didn’t recognize the chaos and stress going on inside, so my body decided to push it out to get my attention.
Chaos comes from inside of us—our emotions, thoughts, and beliefs—but we can also absorb negativity and drama from the people, places, and situations around us. Have you ever heard of emotional contagion? Scientific research shows both positive and negative emotions can be passed on from one person to another without either person realizing it’s happening. When someone is in a chaotic state, they are often anxious, on alert, overwhelmed, frustrated, and stressed out, and because of emotional contagion, they can transfer this energy onto those around them. This means the people around us on a daily basis—our children, spouse, family members, friends, and coworkers—can and do contribute to the chaos we experience each day. And thanks to today’s technology and our connected world, we can now take on chaos just from scrolling through social media or turning on the news, giving us access to chaos on a global scale.
In addition to the world outside of us, our minds are a huge contributor to the chaos we experience. When filled with thoughts of regret from the past and worry about the future, our minds create stress and fear, which is a breeding ground for chaos. Plus, what we think about and focus on is what we attract more of in our lives, so focusing on chaos only brings us more, and it becomes an endless cycle. We start to expect chaos because that’s just the way life is, and when it arrives, we think, “Of course, here it is again—I wonder what is coming next?” We share our chaos and drama with others and commiserate about it—which not only perpetuates more of it, but it opens us up to absorbing one another’s chaos in the process. How are we going to notice signs from the universe in the midst of all this insanity?
Chaos and Signs
Let’s look at a typical day for a working mom. She oversleeps from exhaustion, jumps out of bed, and races to get herself and the kids ready for the day. She is always running late, so after she drops the kids at school, she rushes to get to work. Driving there, her mother calls needing help with a health insurance issue, and when she gets to her desk, she discovers the boss is expecting a report from her the next morning. Just as she settles in, she gets a call from her children’s school that one of her kids is sick and needs to be picked up. She has to drop everything to find someone who can pick up her child, then battles through her workday so she can rush home and cook dinner. After cleaning up and getting the kids to sleep, she barely has time to wash her face before flinging her body into bed to do it all over again the next day. In the midst of all this chaos, do you think she will notice the sign her father sent to her during her lunch break?
What about the person who wakes up in the morning, grabs her phone, and immediately starts scrolling through social media newsfeeds filled with other people’s lives and problems, including friends fighting over politics and the latest negative news stories circulating the globe? She gets out of bed and turns on the morning news to hear about the same thing—politics, tragedies, the latest food recalls and other stories that provide a double dose of chaos and negativity before she’s even brushed her teeth. In the middle of the news reports about a tragic accident and war in another country, do you think she notices a sign from her grandmother on the way to work or the mention of a book title she heard about once before earlier that week?
If you can relate to any of this or even a portion of it, chaos is likely an issue in your life. And if you want to start noticing the signs from the universe and your loved ones, it’s time to start taming the chaos—and it’s actually easier to do than you might think. I’ve found and created quick and easy spiritual tools and practices that can be applied even if you are a working mom with five kids and zero time to spare.
The Power of Retreat
Have you ever gone on a weekend retreat to relax, renew, and get away from it all? Have you taken a spa day for self-care and pampering with friends or a relaxing vacation with family and felt happy and rejuvenated afterward? Maybe you even attended a spiritual retreat with inspiring teachings or yoga. If you’ve experienced any of these, you know how powerful taking a retreat from everyday life and the chaos around you feels…and you also know the dread of returning back to normal routine once it’s over.
The meaning of the word retreat is to move back or withdraw, and that is exactly what we do when we take a vacation from our normal daily lives, even if it’s just for one day. However, once we return to our regular routines, the positive effects we achieved often start to disappear. The chaos begins to take hold again, and we find ourselves annoyed when our children don’t listen, honking at the person driving too slow in front of us on the road, and caught up in the drama around us. We get anxious about situations in the future or depressed about current circumstances. We start to lose that boost we received from that retreat until the retreat eventually becomes a distant memory.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can find quick and easy ways to retreat in our daily lives to silence the drama and chaos and return to the present moment—which is where the signs and synchronicities are unfolding. We can reconnect with the Spirit inside of us, find more joy, and learn to be less reactive to life, without adding to an already packed schedule or overwhelmed mind. Now, before you tune out, thinking I’m going to talk to you about meditating for twenty or forty minutes at a time, stick with me here because that is not the case. No matter how busy you are, the techniques I’m about to share with you can be incorporated into your day and will make a difference for you. You also don’t have to do every one of them to gain the benefits they offer, which is less chaos and more connection. Just try them out and choose one or two to add to your routine and as go-to options during the moments you feel overwhelmed, stressed, or chaotic. It will bring you back to the present moment more often, which is where all the signs are occurring.
Outside-the-Box Meditation Options
I’m sure you have heard about the many benefits of meditation. Emotionally it helps to lower anxiety and depression, and it will make you less reactive to the situations and people around you. Physically, research shows it can lower the stress hormone cortisol, decrease your heart rate and blood pressure, improve the immune system, and even strengthen memory. Spiritually, it connects you to Spirit, your higher self, and your intuition. Also, neuroscience shows the practice of meditation and mindfulness can rewire the brain, creating new neural pathways to change our habitual thought patterns and reactions. But despite these benefits, a lot of people struggle with meditation. They worry they can’t stop their thoughts, sit still for that long, don’t have the time, or that they are not doing it right.
Well, what if you could achieve the same benefits of longer periods of meditation in shorter bursts of time—like sixty seconds? In their best-selling book How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman share how several brain-scan studies show as little as one to three minutes of meditation alters neurological functioning. There have also been studies showing as little as ten minutes of meditation or mindfulness exercises can produce benefits. For those of you who struggle with time or longer forms of meditation, this is life-changing news.
One of the techniques Waldman recommends is taking a 60-second mindfulness break once every hour, either by setting a timer or downloading a mindfulness bell app. I find this is beneficial whether someone already sits for twenty minutes or more of meditation each day or has never meditated before in their life because it offers an opportunity to reconnect with Spirit and boost our energetic vibration throughout the day. It’s also training us to stay connected and in the flow with a higher vibration all day long, which is key to recognizing signs and synchronicities, manifesting what we want, and just feeling good throughout the day.
Another option is retreating for three minutes at a time and spreading this out throughout the day. In Madly Chasing Peace: How I Went from Hell to Happy in Nine Minutes a Day, author Dina Proctor shares how, when climbing her way out of depression and addiction, she struggled to meditate for long periods of time. She could only manage three minutes, so she started doing three-minute meditations. This led her to develop her 3x3 meditation method, and she was surprised at how she was able to receive the benefits promised by longer forms of meditation in only these short bursts.
Whether you try the one-minute or three-minute breaks throughout your day, you will be taming the chaos around you and opening yourself up to more signs from the universe. Here is an exercise to get you started.
9. Jung, Collected Works, 32.