Ideals, Synchronicity and Guidance

Ideals, Synchronicity, and Guidance is a mentored e-course with Dr. Mark Thurston, author of the book Synchronicity As Spiritual Guidance. It explores what is perhaps THE most important topic in transformational psychology:  how we make practical life decisions, guided by a Spiritual Ideal.  This online course will provide a chance to clarify your personal Spiritual Ideal and to see how that Ideal helps you connect to guidance and Synchronicity in your daily life.

Summary of the Four-Week Experience

In the first week each participant will conduct an inner exploration to see more clearly the exact nature of his or her Spiritual Ideal – one’s central value and guiding principle.  The Spiritual Ideal is the most soul-aligned motivation that resides within ourselves.  A lesson to read online and a guided meditation experience about the Spiritual Ideal will help lead you through this important process of setting your Spiritual Ideal.    If you wish, you will have a chance to share with other members about your experiences in clarifying your own Spiritual Ideal.  In fact, we can often gain inspiration about our own Spiritual Ideal by learning about the experiences of others who are also searching for his or her own.

The second week will be a guided life-review in which each participant in the e-course will identify one or more practical life issues that are “ripe” for guidance.  Such an issue is a kind of “growing edge” for soul development.  The weekly lesson and the application exercises for this second week will help each course member to see how challenges, frustrations, and dilemmas are all potential areas in life where spiritual guidance can play a role.  Some of those situations are ones in which we feel a certain “openness” and “willingness” to see things in a new way.  Ultimately, each participant will select one such “growing edge” to focus upon for spiritual guidance in the coming two weeks.  Group interactions and sharing during week #2 will help each member to start seeing their own challenging situations in a new light.

The third week initiates the direct search for guidance about the life challenge or “growing edge” that has been personally chosen.  In essence, we will now become a “Spiritual Guidance Community” – praying for each other as a group, going through similar Synchronicity exercises, and sharing experiences (at whatever level of detail each person feels comfortable in doing so).   The lesson for the week will examine the nature of guidance, and particularly the role that “meaningful coincidence” or Synchronicity can play in the guidance process. In this third week we will follow exercises to alert ourselves to how Synchronicity guides us towards a new “way to be” in the midst of the challenge.  The online lesson for this third week will explain this approach to guidance, which is not the most familiar approach for most people.  This way of working with Synchronicity is indirect and yet subtly just as powerful as the more direct approach to Synchronicity for guidance that we will explore together in the fourth week. Again, the online postings and sharing by members will be a source of creative ideas and inspiration for one’s own guidance process.

The final week is a continuation of our exploration together as a “Spiritual Guidance Community” but now our relationship to the occurrence of Synchronicity will alter, although it will still be rooted in a sense of the Spiritual Ideal chosen in the first week.  Instead of looking for the ways in which Synchronicity can provide hints about a “way to be” in the difficult situation, this week’s application exercises and online sharing will focus upon how Synchronicity can help us arrive at specific and direct guidance – feedback from the Soul on “what to do” in regard to the challenging problem.

In the end, there will be the chance to share with other group members about how these two ways of working with Synchronicity can integrate to help you see how to best move forward in the challenging life situation you have chosen to work on during this e-course experience.

Learning Methods during the e-course:

• Online lessons.  Each week there will be a lesson written by Dr. Thurston about the concepts and principles to be explored during those seven days.
• Audio presentations:  Some of the weeks will also have short audio-streamed experiences, such as guided meditation experiences.
• Worksheets:  Some of the weeks will include specific written exercises, best done by simply down-loading the worksheet from the Internet, printing it out, and then writing about your personal experiences during that week on the printed worksheet.
• Other web sites to visit and learn from.  There will be several instances during the e-course in which you will be directed to specific Internet web sites for additional reading or for practical exercises to do online.
• Postings about your own experiences:  You can decide each week how much you would like to share about how you are doing with your search for guidance about a real life issue.  You can also post questions that you would like Mark Thurston to respond to or that you would like to pose to the entire e-course community.