Why Nothing In Your Life Is Actually Random

What if every "coincidence" you've ever had wasn't actually a coincidence?

What if the chance encounter, the wrong turn that turned out to be the right one, the person you ran into three times in one week — what if all of it was part of something? Something you agreed to before you were even born?

In this episode, Brent sits down with Catherine Crestani — a channeler, intuitive, and former speech pathologist who now helps people read the language of their own lives. Through her stories — including the time she broke the same toe three times in three months before she finally got the message — we explore the possibility that nothing in your life is actually random.

We dig into Carl Jung's idea of synchronicity, the 2,500-year-old wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, and the Buddhist concept of "hidden potential" — the idea that events themselves are neutral, and we're the ones who decide what they mean.

The question we sit with: Can we truly direct our lives in the direction we want them to go? Or are we doing our best to navigate the inevitable flow of life on life's terms?

By the end, you might start paying attention a little differently.

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Music Credits:

"The Tides" by Tom Meria Armony

"Teo" by Lu Sciccareddu

"Parallel Dimension" by Onyx Music

"Above The Clouds" by Theater of Delays

"Writing On The Wall" by Rachel Gonzalez

"Lift" by Starlux

"Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

We like to believe we're in control, that the life we're living, the job we took, the person we married, or the street we live on. We like to believe all of that is a result of our own decisions. We planned it, we picked it, and we earned it. And then when something weird happens, we explain it away. The phone rings, the exact moment you were thinking about the person on the other end. Or you open a book to a random page and it says the exact thing you needed to hear. Or you look at the clock and it's 222 again. Coincidence is the word we use for that, and it's a safe word because it keeps the world making sense. But what if it's not? What if none of it is? What if every quote-unquote coincidence you've ever had, every chance encounter, or every wrong turn that turned out to be the right one, was actually part of something. Something you agreed to before you were even born. That's the question we're going to sit with today, because if life is random, then we're the authors. We get to write whatever we want because we're in charge. But if life is planned, then we're not the authors. We're the readers. And the best we can do is turn the page.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

And it's up to you if you decide to follow those nudges or ignore them. That's always your choice no matter what.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

That's Catherine Cristani. She's a channeler, an intuitive, a former speech pathologist who sold her company and now helps people read the language of their own lives. Through her story, we're going to look at the possibility that what we call coincidence might actually be something carefully orchestrated by a force we don't fully understand. Welcome to better beliefs. What if the only thing standing in your way is what you believe about yourself, your life, or what's possible? Thousands of people have faced that same question and discovered the power to shift reality itself. I'm Brent Kokel, and on Better Beliefs, I tell the stories of real people who changed everything by first changing their minds. I want to start this episode by telling you a quick story about Catherine. Actually, her left big toe. It hurts. It's not injured, and she didn't stub it, and she didn't drop anything on it. It just hurts. Like it's jammed. Maybe like it needed to crack, but it won't. She goes to her husband who massages it and nothing. And so she puts it to the side and just moves on with her life. Then a few weeks later, she's outside wearing thick flip-flops and she's walking on bark. And a piece of bark pierces through the rubber sole and it stabs her in the same left big toe. Weird, but she just brushes it off. Fast forward a few more weeks, and she's at the store buying shelves for her house. And she's walking out with them in a shopping cart when she has a thought. She literally thinks to herself, I need to move these or the cart's gonna tip. But she doesn't get to quite finish the thought in her own mind.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

The basket flipped and the shelves fell and landed on my big left toe and it broke it. So I'm there in the middle of the center, trying not to pass out, trying not to scream, hobble my waist or go by the shelves because I still really wanted them. Hobble to the car, look down, there's blood, it's bruised, it's black.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

It was broken. Same toe. For third time in her life. And she gets home and she finally asks the question she probably should have asked a month ago. Why? Why this toe? Why three times? And why now? When she finally digs into it, which she did talking to a practitioner who reads the body the same way some people read tarot cards, the answer comes back.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

The big left toe was to do with um expressing your role in a fine this is what they're just reminding me now, expressing your roles in a financial position. And because it was on your left side, left is more to do with the feminine aspect. So how am I showing up in my female capacity to that? Because so often in my like in my marriage, I've often taken the masculine role of controlling the finances, and I didn't want to do it anymore. I was like, no, I want it to be a partnership.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Catherine was in a fight with herself. She'd been playing a role in her marriage she no longer wanted to play, but she hadn't said it out loud, not to her husband and not to herself. So her body said it for her. First in a whisper with her toe hurting, and then a little louder with that piece of bark stabbing her, and then breaking a bone in a parking lot to prove it. Let me pause here because that story only makes sense if you believe something really specific. You have to believe that the events in your life, even the weird, physical, random ones, are all carrying information. That there's something underneath the noise. Let's call it a signal. And that idea, it's not new. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who built half the framework modern therapy still runs on, he coined a term about this synchronicity. He defined it as a meaningful coincidence that can't be explained by cause and effect. So when two things happen at the same time, they might not be connected logically, but they are connected meaningfully. Here's the thing: Jung wasn't a mystic. He was a scientist. And he couldn't make sense of what he was watching in his own patience. People were dreaming of things before they happened. Others bumped into the exact person they needed to meet. And still others, they got answers to questions they hadn't even asked out loud. He gave all these strange occurrences a name because naming it was the most honest thing he could do. But even if you accept that synchronicity exists, it doesn't answer the bigger question, who's running the show? Because if nothing is random, then something or someone is doing the planning. Maybe it's you. And maybe it's something beyond you.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

It's a little bit of both. So what people forget is that we have free will. We have divine will, and no one can take that away. It doesn't matter where you come from, what level if you're an angel or not, we always have free will. So even your guides, your spirit team, they cannot help you unless you give them permission to.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

What she's saying here is that the events of our lives are both planned and chosen. And if that feels like a contradiction, you're not wrong. It is one. But it's a contradiction humans have been trying to hold for a long time. The Bhagavad Gita, one of my favorite spiritual texts, it's roughly 2,500 years old. It's one of the oldest spiritual texts we have. And if you're not familiar with it, the center of it is the soldier named Arjuna, and he's standing on a battlefield completely frozen because he doesn't want to fight the war he's been born into. He respects his enemies too much, and he doesn't want to kill them. And his advisor, Krishna, who's basically God in human form, he doesn't tell him the outcome is predetermined, but he doesn't tell him it's all up to him either. Krishna tells him something weirder. He tells him to fight because it's the divine role he's been set up for. And once the first arrow is let loose, he's gotta let go of the outcome. The message here is that you have the right to the actions you take. You get to pick those, but not the right to the results of those actions. Those aren't up to you. Now that's a line from that book that gets quoted a lot in a lot of different forms, but I think most people don't really hear it. You get to choose what to do, you don't get to choose what it means, and you certainly don't get to choose what comes of it. That part, that's not yours. That's both free will and something else. You and something bigger than you are building the thing together.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

I find too, if you don't pay attention to the signs and symbols they put in front of you, the universe will just keep turning up the volume until you actually do pay attention. So it might be really subtle and start as your 2-2-2, which is about finding balance in all our areas of your life.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Okay, so let's say you're on board with this, at least a little bit. And let's say you entertain the idea that things in your life, the ones you notice and the ones you don't, those are all trying to tell you something. Here's where it gets uncomfortable though, because it's one thing to accept that hitting all green lights on your way to work has meaning, that's nice, that feels good. But what about the other stuff? The diagnosis, or one of those phone calls at 3 a.m. nobody wants, or a business that failed. If nothing is random, then that stuff isn't random either. And that's a harder pill to swallow. Our spoonful of sugar to help that medicine go down is a concept in Buddhist philosophy that's roughly translated as hidden potential. And the idea goes something like this events by themselves, they're all neutral. They don't arrive with a label and they don't come with a score. We're the ones who assign the label. We decide this was a good event, and we decide this was a bad event, and we usually decide really fast, usually within five seconds of something happening. But the ancient teachers would tell you, slow down. You don't have the whole picture yet. You actually can't have it yet because the story isn't over. And what looks like a loss today might be what builds the person you need to become for the thing you can't even see yet. That's not toxic positivity. That's not a bumper sticker that says everything happens for a reason. That's something slower and a lot harder. It's the willingness to hold the story open and not call it yet. Let me give you an example of this from my own life. Back in college, I started dating a girl I met at a party three weeks into the spring semester of my sophomore year. She was gorgeous, like late 90s Jenny McCarthy level hot. And we dated for a couple of months and then she dumped me. I was devastated. Like not leaving my apartment for a week, kind of devastated. And sitting there in my apartment with my five-day beard and a cup of top ramen, I had convinced myself that I was gonna end up alone and that this was the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. Looking back on it, of course, it was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me, because if it never did, I would have never met my wife, who I've been married to for almost 20 years, happily, I might add, and we wouldn't have our kids who've added so much depth to our lives. In that story, that brings me back to the question: can we truly direct our lives in the direction we want them to go? Or are we just doing our best to navigate the inevitable flow of life on life's terms? Here's Catherine living it in real time as she gets offered a path to become a YouTube creator with serious firepower behind her to build an audience.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

And then I sat there and I went, I don't want to do that. Like what like why am I even contemplating that? But it was there as a temptation to see if that was something, a path they wanted to explore. Because again, we always have free will. I was like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to focus on my speaking and my writing and supporting people in relationships with themselves.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Lots of people would take that in a heartbeat. But instead, she sits with it and she notices that her body, it's not lighting up. There isn't a clear hell yes type of feeling. So she passes. But check this out the opportunity doesn't stop happening to her. People keep reaching out. The door keeps opening, which is what both free will and divine order look like when they're happening at the same time. The path is there because something is offering it. And the decision to go down the path is hers because nobody else can do it. Catherine told me another story I can't stop thinking about. She's been offered a spot in a program to learn about angels of all things. And every signal she's getting is a very clear yes, but there's a catch. She can't afford it. Like, not even close. So she's confused. Why would she be pulled towards something she can't do? So she talks to her husband about it and he suggests to go meditate, and she does, but she decides during the meditation to actually test the messages she thinks she's been getting.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

I said, okay, if it's definitely a yes, show me three black cockatoos flying over. Now, black cockatoos aren't very popular, like they're rare. If you psych them in First Nation culture, they say it's a sign you're on the right spiritual path. So I asked for them for big guns, right? So I get home, step out of the car, three black cockatoos fly over.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Exactly three of a bird that's rare to see where she lived, exactly when she asked to see them. But check out what happens next, because this is the part that changes the whole story. Even though she got the sign she was looking for, she still is upset. Because the answer was a very clear hell yes, but the math, it still didn't work. She couldn't afford it. So her husband asks her one more question. Did you ask if you have to do it now? And she hadn't. She'd just asked, should I do this? She hadn't asked, should I do this now? And when she finally asked the better question, the answer comes back that she can do it whenever she wants. Then a week later, in meditation, she's told she's going to learn directly, not from the program, but from the source itself. Whatever you make of that, I want you to hold on to the lesson underneath it. The first question she asked, that got her a yes she couldn't use. The better question, when she asked it, got her what she actually needed. Which makes you wonder how much of your life has been shaped by the quality of the questions you're asking. Let me come back to where we started. We wanted to know: is life random or is it planned? Are we the author or the reader? But this episode has got me wondering if that's even the right question. Through Catherine's story and my own research, what I'm taking away is there is a path to our lives, but it's not a script. And there's a plan, but you're not watching it. You're inside of it. And your job isn't to figure out the whole thing. Your job is just to pay attention. Pay attention to the patterns that keep showing up in your life. Pay attention to the people around you. Pay attention to the opportunities that feel like a full-body hell yes, and the ones that make you want to throw up. Because even if you don't believe any of what I've talked about in this episode, the information is still there. Your life is still trying to tell you something. You just have to trust that it's doing it.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

So this is where sometimes we try and explain away the signs as well. But you know, ask for something really random. So for me, you know, the three black cockatoos, that's incredibly specific, right? But even asking your questions and if if you're like, but it doesn't feel right, what what am I missing? Try changing how you ask the question or say, can I talk to someone? Is there someone I can get guidance from and see who pops into your head, you know, and not dismissing that. And it really comes back to trusting yourself because you have the answers within you, but so often we dismiss it and want to put it onto outside things. So even um, I got a message not very long ago, which is stop looking for the signs. Maybe you are the sign. You know, maybe you showing up to that event and it feeling amazing is the sign that you needed that that's in alignment. You don't need anything else. Sometimes you just trusting yourself and that it feels right for you is enough without looking for those external validations and coming back to what's right within you.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Maybe the fact that you're here, listening to this, asking these type of questions, wondering if there's more to all of it, maybe that itself is the evidence you've been looking for. And maybe that's the whole thing. You can't direct your life the way you direct a movie. You're not the director. But you're not an extra either. You're the one reading the room, asking the question, listening for what's trying to reach you, and then choosing the next step. And when something lands, a feather, a number, a name you heard three times this week, maybe don't explain it away this time. Just notice it and ask a better question. Thank you so much for investing your time and listening to today's episode. As always, it is a joy to put these things together. I'm really passionate about it, and I'm just grateful for you listening, and I'm grateful for you being open to a new pattern of belief and maybe something that you didn't think was there before. One of my favorite things to say is that the most dangerous thing any of us have is a made-up mind. And the more open we can be about the possibilities for our lives and what goes beyond our lives, the more perspective we have. And that's a beautiful thing. And you're one of the people that are looking for that perspective. So I'm very grateful to you. I'm also grateful to Catherine for being on this episode. She was absolutely a wonderful guest, super interesting, and just really plugged into what's going on bigger than us. If you're interested in checking Catherine out, uh, she does some virtual sessions, and you can check those out at willowhealing.org. And she is quite the person to talk to. So thanks again to her for doing that. Thank you for listening. If you have not rated this show yet on whatever platform you're listening to it on, please rate the show. That does a great thing for the algorithm. Get more people to listen to it. Thank you for those of you who've done it, and thank you to those of you who are doing it right now. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by 6350 Ventures. It is written, edited, produced, and spoken by me, Brent Kokel. Yes, I do all of the things. Original cover art was by Jenny H designs, and the original music you hear at the opening of every Better Beliefs episode is by the Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes.