Especially newcomers to the Spiritual awakening process tend to go gung-ho on signs initially, thinking every little detail of their life is some magical message from the Divine. When sometimes a feather is just a feather, a number sequence is just a number or seeing something which they consider a sign in a certain place that is obvious is to be expected (for example seeing a Ganesha idol in an Indian shop – Indians have Ganesha in their house, their car and their place of business – nothing unexpected there).
I have this ongoing joke with my son. I want a Dacia Duster, I have wanted one since 2014 but had a car back then and then we started travelling and didn’t need a car until now that we have settled down again and I am back to doing daily school runs. It’s almost daily that we find ourselves driving behind a Dacia Duster in various different colors, apparently it’s the preferred drive in Ibiza and it’s surprising that on an island with less than 150.000 people living here, you see so many people driving this exact car. But I swear I see multiple Dacia Dusters daily.
So each time I do, I see it as a sign from the Universe that my Dacia Duster is on it’s way. My son being a teenager thinks that’s just way to woo-woo and then it starts…..
So, I will say ‘Hey look a Dacia Duster!’ and my son will launch right in with ‘Oh my God, mom! Look there ‘s a tree, a green tree mom! We have never seen a green tree before, It’s a sign from God. Oh wait, I can’t believe it, there’s another green tree. Wow! what a miracle…’ and by that time we are both laughing our heads off because, well he has got a point and I will be the first to admit that when I was fresh to my own spiritual awakening journey – I thought EVERYTHING was a f-ing sign from Heaven!
Which is why I thought it may be helpful to write a little teaching on what to look for in signs, how not to get lost in them and why we initially tend to cling to signs as if our lives depend on it.
It’s not always a sign with a deeper meaning
That’s not to say that I don’t still Google Angel numbers, metaphysical meanings and spirit animals because I do, I have just learned to distinguish between when it’s important and when it’s not. I wait for that inner prompting that says ‘hey look that up‘ and that inner prompting is rare and usually only when it’s extremely relevant.
Because the simple truth is that not everything is a sign, sometimes it’s simply a coincidence or a synchronicity that has no further deeper meaning.
In general this is especially true for Angel numbers that often appear randomly through the day, seeing them doesn’t really mean anything in the sense that something utterly amazing is going to happen.
For example in 2017, I kept seeing 222 which means to keep the faith. The man that I was in love with (my Twin Flame) had just gotten married to someone else and I was devastated. On the day that we reconnected after months and months of not talking I was inundated with the number 222, at some point I got the intuitive hit to call him – he picked up the phone and we talked for almost an hour.
On that call he made sure to let me know he wasn’t a happily married man, deeply in love with his wife (it was their three month wedding anniversary) and he told me that he didn’t know if he would ever leave her, but that if he did he would be on a plane the next day to come to me. It’s now 2021 and he actually never got on the plane to come to me, nor left her and so on.
Yes, I spoke to him that day after months of no-contact but already a month later he went MIA again and we didn’t speak to each other till I think late summer 2018. Actually that has been the pattern, we reconnected again in early 2019 and then late summer 2020 and the last time we spoke was earlier on in this year of 2021.
Seeing Angel number 222 has not changed anything in the dynamic with this person within those four years. This is because seeing those signs were not about him or us, they were about ME.
The same applies for numbers 11:11, 717 or 333 – I have seen them in overdrive but that hasn’t meant what they are “supposed” to mean. What I have learned over the past seven years of full-on spiritual awakening is that we get these signs and cosmic ‘hits’ to let us know that we are moving in the right direction. They are confirmation and encouragement, not a cosmic notification of upcoming rewards which many people new to the spiritual awakening process believe them to be.
This is of course because these signs and synchronicities are related to your own spiritual awakening process and not to someone or something outside of you.
Signs from the Universe checklist
To help you learn to discern what is a true sign and what is not I made a small checklist that you can use to check if this is really a sign from the Universe or that you are reading more into it than is actually there….
If you have to ask yourself “Does this have a deeper meaning?”, then it probably isn’t a sign. When the Universe gives you a sign, YOU KNOW it’s a sign deep down in your gut.
Signs are not ordinary, everyday things. And usually, the Universe doesn’t send you a sign unless you ask for it, or when you really need it. When you receive a sign, you’ll know immediately. Signs from above are typically unexpected. out of the ordinary and quite often make your jaw drop because they are so out of the blue, unusual or synchronistic.
They are the kind of things that make you stop and say “Huh?!”
#1 Is the sign relevant?
The first thing you need to ask yourself is if the sign is relevant? For example if it concerns an Angel number, does that number relate to what the sign is about? If not, it’s probably not a sign. I mean a shop can sell arsenic for $11.11 but does that really mean that you need to buy it? Yes, it’s a magical number but that may simply be the price that the shop arrived at after adding a profit and costs margin. 11:11 has absolutely nothing to do with arsenic and so despite it being a magical number it’s not a sign from the Universe to buy it.
Now granted of course, most people would not be inclined to buy arsenic to begin with, but you should also use this logic with the so-called positive stuff. Signs have to be relevant, otherwise they aren’t a sign – if you have to make it ‘make sense’ you are trying too hard to read something into it that is not there.
#2 Is the sign unexpected or out of the ordinary?
If you are in an arts and crafts store and you see Angel numbers everywhere, well what did you expect? If I wanted to get something with numbers on it, for example a sticker sheet of numbers I would probably go to an arts and craft store to find it and it would have all the same numbers in a row which would look like really long Angel numbers – no surprise there.
Same as the Ganesha example above, good luck finding a Hindu that does not own at least one Ganesha idol as having one is seen as auspicious and protection. I am not Hindu, but I do have one Ganesh on my altar, one beautiful print I bought in Rajasthan on a night stand and a statue when you enter the hall to my front door. In fact when I first travelled to India in 2015, my mother gave me a small wooden Ganesha statue to remove all the obstacles in my way.
It’s a completely different story if you are in a neighborhood that you don’t know and your car breaks down in front of the only shop that is open, which happens to be an Indian shop and THEN you see the Ganesh – then we are talking out of the ordinary.
Signs come when we least expect them in ways we can barely imagine possible, they are so synchronistic. They make you say ‘Whoa….!!! That’s awesome.’
A client of mine for example had a beetle walk into her house three times when it was freezing cold, with ice and snow outside. She put him outside two times and when he came back the third time she gave him a home in her ficus plant. That’s pretty extraordinary, to have an active and walking beetle in your house after you have put him out into sub-zero temperatures twice.
#3 Is the sign straightforward?
If you have to guess what the sign means then it’s likely not a sign….
Signs are straightforward and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand them. The Universe doesn’t talk to us in riddles, it’s usually crystal clear. Something can be completely extraordinary and unexpected and still not be a sign, if there is not a clear message in it for you.
I recently brought my boyfriend home and when I came back I watched a random YouTube video on a tiny house with a blond girl explaining why she didn’t live in her tiny house anymore. In the video she introduced her new husband who had the same name as my boyfriend and she announced being pregnant. The couple lived in the States and both my boyfriend and I have names that are more uncommon in the States, especially not something you would expect to hear in the tiny house scene.
Is this a sign? Is this the Universe showing me this man is my destiny? I could interpret it as such but why would the Universe give me an unsolicited heads-up around the future of this relationship? What it made me realize was that despite really liking this person and enjoying our time together, that this pictured future was not what I truly wanted. The reaction in my heart to such a possible future spoke volumes, it also showed me where I was still secretly wanting it to be someone else – despite the fact that my boyfriend is a great guy and that I am crazy about him.
The Universe (my soul) may have showed me the clip, but the message from my heart was pretty straight forward – it was a clear ‘No!’. That doesn’t make this connection less valuable though as it has really allowed me to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s in the inner union of my own Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine polarities. It has also created a safe container to face deep inner child wounds and break deep ancestral patterns in regards to not trusting the Divine Masculine on both my paternal and maternal side.
Remember the Universe or our soul never wants someone or something that we don’t want deep in our hearts. When we are with or stay with people we don’t actually want to be with, it’s easy to off-load your personal responsibility onto the Universe or Divine destiny claiming this is what you HAVE to do. But in reality it’s not for a higher purpose when we choose to do this, it’s because we are afraid, feel guilty, indebted, ashamed or are doing it for the love, approval or acceptance of someone else or people in general.
When we don’t want to own our true reasons, it is easier to tell ourselves that this is how it is meant to be or that we have more ‘karma’ that we need to work through with this person. This is all just throwing a spiritual blanket over the true issues that need to be dealt with.
#4 Is the sign complete?
If you need to help your sign to become a sign, it ain’t a sign.
If you need to add up 7+4 and 8+3 to have 11:11, you are playing games with yourself. Signs are complete within themselves and don’t need any help to become what they are.
There isn’t really much else to say about this, except maybe stop trying so hard. The good stuff comes when we let go and let the Universe do her thing!
The Divine doesn’t need our help when it wants to communicate something to us.
#5 Does the sign hold significance for you?
Lastly a sign has to actually apply to you or be significant to you.
You can see the same person crossing the street three times in a row at around the same time and that could actually be someone on their way home from work or on their way to the supermarket. Even if you keep bumping into the same person over and over again, it still may be a reoccurring seemingly coincidence that holds no significance to you and so there is no reason and often also no desire to make it mean more than it does.
This is often also where things go awry when we desire something deeply and then try and create meaning around everything to fit our own (sometimes even subconscious) agenda.
I met a guy in the gym in 2016 and there was an instant attraction between us. We went out on a date that lasted I think something like seven hours and we hit it off like crazy, however it turned out that he had a girlfriend or at least some sort of situationship and he smoked weed.
These are both relationship no-no’s for me.
Over the years even all the way up to 2020 I kept bumping into this guy in various unexpected places, to the extent that one time he actually made a U-turn in the middle of Amsterdam in order to be able to talk to me and ask me out again. I was the one that got away and that he had never gotten between the sheets, where he was dying to have me.
Every time he would ask me out I would ask how the girlfriend and the drugs were, over time the girlfriend disappeared but the smoking weed didn’t and so I kept saying no. I also said ‘no’ because it was very clear where such a date was heading considering the intensity of our mutual attraction and the fact that I had been celibate since forever. I knew what this guy had to offer me and it didn’t extend much further than a good time in bed, I had of course not become or remained celibate for all these years for nothing. I want more out of a relationship than sex, so I had no issue saying ‘No’ to anything less.
But yet here we were finding each other over and over again unexpectedly in a big and busy city such as Amsterdam. Was it a sign I was meant to be with this person? But then why would the Universe send me a potential partner who is initially involved with someone else and has addictions that I am not willing to put up with? Yet, many women (and men) would interpret this as a sign even when they know this person isn’t right for them – which is dishonoring to yourself.
Signs don’t always mean what we think they do
But even when we get amazing relevant and completely synchronistic signs, they don’t always have the meaning we attempt to assign to them…
Back in 2015 I had strongly felt this baby boy between my Twin Flame and I. It felt as if the baby urged me to become vegetarian at that time and start preparing for his conception and birth. I had even gotten through a name Rayan which means Heaven’s gates. My twin and I had just recently reconnected after the first time he ran and he was so attracted to all of this baby talk, my God he loved it – we had even talked about water births and he had researched it a bit.
By the end of that year I was in India quite unexpectedly and in his arms and he decided not to ‘go all the way’ because until he was sure that he could be with me, he didn’t want to risk getting me pregnant. His family had been pressuring him to agree to an arranged marriage, since even before we met and although he didn’t want an arranged marriage – he didn’t know how to get himself out of it.
He literally felt torn between his deep feelings for me and his utter loyalty to his family, something we Westerners will never be fully able to comprehend as we are not raised in the same family dynamics as people in the East.
Leading up to our time together and even one time after when I would have absolutely had it with his back and forth, hot and cold, yes and then no behavior.
When I was really ready to just call it quits….
I would run into my male midwife out of nowhere, the first time it happened I had not seen the man in 8 years! I ran into him in the supermarket right after I had deleted the Viber app on which my twin and I chatted at that time and was completely fed up with him.
Running into the midwife to me meant that this was a sign that my twin and I were meant to be and that we were meant to have this child together, why else would I run into my old midwife on the complete other end of town where he didn’t live and I had moved to six years before?
Then it happened again directly after another fallout with my twin and I thought see… we are meant to have this child together. This happened three times. Even after my twin pushed me out of his life in 2016, again in a moment of great despair around my connection with my twin – the midwife suddenly responded on a Facebook post which he had never done before.
My twin and I did not have a baby together in the physical, but now coming to where I have come into my spiritual awakening process I was shown recently that ‘the baby’ my twin and I had birthed was this ‘Heaven on Earth’ consciousness that I am currently entering. The babies name that I had intuitively been given meant Heaven’s gates and that is exactly where this journey has brought me.
Yes, this running into the midwife served to keep me hanging in there but it wasn’t to have my twin’s physical child. It was to birth a new consciousness within myself and teach this to others.
Why do we initially cling to signs the way we do?
Which brings up an interesting question: Why do we feel the need to cling to signs from the Universe the way we do, when we are new to the spiritual awakening process?
It’s because it gives us something to hold onto, a sense of control when our world has been turned upside down. Deep down we feel completely out of control and a victim of fate, assigning a deeper meaning to what is happening to us gives us a sense of safety when our whole external reality is in flux.
That is not to say that doing this is wrong, but it is a fear-based trauma reaction and a coping mechanism that allows us to leave the old paradigm reality that we were born and raised in, in order to venture into the unknown of the 4th dimension and the paradigm shift into the higher 5th dimensional reality that is currently en masse becoming attainable to the human race.
It is also a necessary step to learn to trust ourselves and our internal reality, something that we are not taught within our current society where we are programmed and conditioned from an early age to seek validation of our correct perception of ‘reality’ in our external experience.
Learning to trust the Divine (our own divinity externalized) helps us, when we continue healing the relationship with ourselves and our own divinity to learn to trust ourselves deeper which is a prerequisite for inner union. You cannot become ONE with something or someone that you don’t trust, which is in effect the basis of the state of separation – the ego believing it has been left to fend for it’s own. It all boils down to learning to trust.
If you have read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, you will recognize this theme in the protagonist’s journey. Santiago is brought from using divination tools (urim and thummim) and reading the signs from the Universe to in the end learning to listen and trust his heart to guide him through life.
That is the journey that as mankind we are all on and so instead of clinging to the external even when it is the Divine, to guide us through our lives we are in fact being invited to learn to trust the divinity within ourselves – our own soul to guide us the way.
What stands in our way is eons and eons of pre-programmed and conditioned beliefs, unresolved pain and trauma that is covering our true nature. The more we remove this layer by layer (I teach you how in the School of Soul Embodiment), the more we can settle into our hearts and hear the sweet messages from our soul.