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THE SIGNS

The new science of how to trust your instincts

DR TARA SWART

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First published by Ebury Publishing/Flight Books in 2025 1

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For Robin Bieber, the love of all my lifetimes.

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* The information in this book is, to the best of our knowledge, accurate, complete and up-to-date at the date of publication. This book is intended to be for adult educational purposes only. Please consult with an experienced healthcare provider before making any changes whatsoever to your existing health and medication regimen. The author and publisher disclaim responsibility for any liability, loss or risk that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the information in this book.

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PREFACE HOW I CAME TO SEE

LIFE IN TECHNICOLOUR

In the first few weeks after I lost my beautiful husband Robin to leukaemia, the strangest thing happened: I kept seeing robins in the garden. I had heard various stories in which people said that lost loved ones sometimes appeared soon after their deaths in the form of various birds, and there is even a saying, ‘robins appear when loved ones are near’, but I still thought it was strange. I’d never seen robins in the garden so often, yet, for a few weeks, every time I went to the French windows, a robin appeared. Then, one day, they stopped, and I never saw them so frequently again.

Despite growing up in a household in which spirituality was a daily presence, my parents always emphasised the importance of education, and science in particular. I was encouraged to become a doctor, which I did after studying preclinical medicine for two years, a BSc for one year, a PhD in neuroscience for three years and then clinical medicine for three years. I did the required year of medical and surgical jobs, then worked as a doctor specialising in psychiatry for six years before transitioning to become an executive adviser and a professor at the business school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). My professional world was one of science and logic, and everything I had been taught primed me to doubt that the robins in my garden could be anything but coincidence. A small part

of my mind wanted to believe that seeing them meant something, but the rational part could not. Over time, I have learnt to give that small part more respect. This book is informed by the journey I took: from dismissing the things I couldn’t explain to accepting and even embracing them, allowing the signs I notice to show me a way forward.

I felt terribly lost and was desperately searching for answers when Robin died. It was four excruciating months from diagnosis to death. Despite my resilience, and knowledge of neuroscience and psychology, I was not equipped to deal with the level of devastation when he actually passed away. I had believed that, with me, his loving wife and a medic, by his side, he would make it. This belief was based on his unconditional love for me, and my ability to utilise the powers of visualisation and manifestation, skills that I had spent years developing with much success, and which I wrote about in my previous book, The Source.* I never allowed any level of doubt to creep into this unwavering belief. But he didn’t make it. He could not. The leukaemia was too ravaging, and the treatment itself was brutal. I was left falling into a bottomless pit of grief and despair, and I didn’t know how I was going to make it out. I was a widow in my forties with a future ahead of me that would be nothing like what I had imagined. I found myself struggling, with no idea of how I would cope day to day, let alone heal over time, without him there and with my world view about love and abundance shattered.

Despite my scepticism, I kept thinking about the robins. Then, about six weeks after Robin died, I was woken by an almighty thump on my shoulder at around 4am. As my eyes

* In that book, I wrote about my conception of manifestation, as informed by my background as a neuroscientist, describing how you can visualise positive outcomes to keep your brain in a state of hope and abundance, and thereby create the real-world actions that are more likely to favour the outcomes you desire.

acclimatised to the darkness, I saw Robin standing right next to my bed. He was becoming more and more solid, as though he was pushing himself through treacle to make himself seen. I was shocked and transfixed, and could sense the level of effort he was making. As soon as he became so fully formed that I could see the outline of his hair and face, he started to dissolve from the top down, and the last thing I saw were his shins and feet before he was gone, and I gasped out loud.

As soon as I woke up again the next morning, I googled ‘Is it possible to see a deceased loved one?’ and the answer I found was that up to 60 per cent of older people in grief experience ‘visual hallucinations’. I remember thinking how sad it was that something that felt so profound was dismissed as being a hallucination rather than discussing whether it was actually possible or not. I knew that I was fully awake and not dreaming, and despite what my years of medical training and scientific thinking had taught me to believe, I was very sure of what I had seen. I started speaking to more people about what had happened and heard many similar stories in return. And when I googled the same thing again during the writing of this book, three years later, the answer I got was different: ‘Yes, it’s normal to see, hear or sense a deceased loved one . . . [and these experiences] are usually comforting and benign.’ Some people attribute these experiences to the brain expecting to see someone we are close to and filling in the gaps in response to relevant external cues.1 But I was certainly not expecting to see Robin at that time, as I had been fast asleep immediately before being jolted wide awake, and in my waking hours I was painfully aware of the fact that he was gone. One opinion piece I read on the back of this search speculated that gene variants or brain chemistry might allow people to perceive the deceased.2 Dr David Hamilton speculated that ancient people who could perceive the deceased, and therefore believed in an afterlife, would be less likely to fear death. As a result, they would take more risks that would potentially

mean that the genes that allow this type of spirit vision would eventually be lost from the human race. However, there would still be some ancient gene variants in the human race today, so there might be some people around now who are capable of seeing the spirits of dead people in the form that would be most recognisable to them. Although there is no scientific proof of this, as a brain scientist, the idea got me intrigued about the nature of consciousness and what we are actually capable of. It also made me question whether only things that can be proven scientifically are important as part of the human experience.

A few days after seeing Robin by my bed, I told my friend Alice about what had happened. A few weeks later when I received her Christmas card, she had written, ‘I’m so glad you saw Robin. I knew you would.’ In the new year, I was having dinner with her, and I asked her how she knew I was going to see him. Matter-of-factly, she replied, ‘He came to me in a dream and told me he was going to visit you.’

As my world fell apart and I attempted to navigate my way through my deepest loss, I came to the understanding that mainstream science can’t answer every question, and conversations like the one with Alice got me questioning not only what we can perceive but also whether we can remain connected to the spirits of those we have lost.

I began to realise that the solutions didn’t all reside within me. I had previously believed that I had the power to create the life I wanted, but the action boards,* visualisation, affirmation and manifestation techniques I had spent years perfecting had lost their lustre. It was clear that they were not going to appease my grief, and as such it was an extremely disheartening time. I needed to find something to guide me on a new path. Regardless

* These are like vision boards, but I believe you need to take action to make things happen, hence why I came up with the new name for them. Again, this is something that I discussed in more detail in The Source.

of my background as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, as well as a hugely supportive community – resources that I know not everyone has – I could no longer count on those skills that had served me so well in the past.

In particular, I felt as though I had lost access to the intuition that I had come to rely on so much that I called it my superpower. By this I mean that I had always had a strong sense of knowing the right way forward for me, and I had used years of journalling and reading back over entries to trust my instinctive decision-making and make it work for me. But I did not feel that I could trust myself in the state I was in, and I had no idea how to move forward. However, despite my devastation, I had a tiny glimmer of hope that I could adapt, find a new direction and reconnect to my intuition; in fact, I knew I had no other choice.

Out of desperation, a few months after Robin died, I decided to consult a medium, and I saw another one about six months later. Some of what they shared resonated with me, but I was sceptical. I felt that much of what they said to me could have been researched on the internet or social media, and a lot of it did not make sense at the time or later. Fuelled by my sense of self-reliance, along with a belief in my ability to optimise my brain, I remember thinking, ‘If it is possible to open channels of communication with those who have passed, and Robin was my husband, best friend and twin flame, then I should be able to do it myself.’

I had begun to get a glimpse of this kind of unexplained communication when Robin’s life was coming to an end. The day he died, he called to me before I had risen for the day, to help him sip some water because he could no longer raise a glass to his lips. I was exhausted, and he looked at me with concern and told me he loved me. As I returned to the sofa around the corner, where I slept each night to remain close to him if he needed me, and started to fall back to sleep, I saw a still image of his face in my mind looking healthy – he looked like he did in a picture I’d

taken of him on holiday a few years before. He then said to me one word: ‘celebrate’. I couldn’t make sense of it at the time, but I later took this to mean that I must celebrate the fact that I was still alive and live in a purposeful way, even though I had to do so without him. This spiritual experience of a person coming to say goodbye before they die is something that I have since heard other people describe. Robin passed away at lunchtime that day when I had just gone into the kitchen, where his hospital bed was, to get some soup and sit with him.

With these experiences in mind, I began to use my training as a neuroscientist to question how the brain is affected by grief and explore spiritual practices that address death but lie beyond the boundaries of known science. For example, I researched near-death experiences and terminal lucidity as ways to understand if consciousness can exist apart from the physical body (we’ll explore these in more detail in Chapter 1). When Robin passed away, I had an overwhelming sense of knowing that the body lying in the bed was not him and that the essence of who he was lay beyond this vessel. This, over time, allowed me to reframe my relationship with my own and others’ mortality in a way that gave me reassurance and a renewed sense of optimism for the future. It also made me increasingly certain that there’s more to consciousness than we can explain, and I want to share the evidence for this with you in this book.

As I opened my mind to what could be possible, more signs slowly but surely began to present themselves to me. I started to notice hearts all around, and then I began to see what I thought might be signs from Robin, such as certain songs of significance to us, more sightings of robins, either seen with or reported by other people, and people passing on messages to me that they had received from Robin in their dreams. At first, these appeared randomly and were few and far between, but eventually they appeared more often and were clearer. And not all of the signs I was receiving were from Robin. For example, in

December 2023, I wrote in my journal that because my father, who passed away three months after Robin, had once responded ‘over my dead body’ when I’d told him that my English teacher at school had suggested I could become an actress, if I now had his permission from the other side, I would bump into a famous actress. A couple of weeks later, I attended the Christmas carol service for the Lady Garden Foundation, a charity that I am a trustee of. I was standing near the entrance with my friend when a woman approached us. I tried to step out of her way, but we both moved in the same direction, and we literally bumped into one another. She said sorry and then walked on. I said to my friend, ‘Oh my goodness, that was Anna Friel – I love her.’ It was only when I next read back through my journal that I saw the entry about my father. It still shocks me every time a new thing like this happens. I sent Anna a message to thank her for doing a reading for our charity, and she responded a few days later to say that her brother, who is a doctor, had sent her a podcast to watch on YouTube and the episode of The Diary of a CEO that I appeared on popped up after it, so she’d watched it and had been telling all her friends and family about me before she had seen my message.

As things progressed, I got an inkling that Robin might be communicating with me through numbers, which made sense, as he had worked in finance and been obsessed with the Fibonacci series,* for example. So, I thought I would test out my theory by asking him in my mind to send me certain numbers on significant dates such as anniversaries. The first time I was really sure Robin had sent me a number sign was around the first anniversary of his passing. In the week beforehand, I’d started

* The Fibonacci series is a sequence of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before it: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. The sequence can often be seen in nature; for example, in the family trees of honeybees and the spiral arrangement of pine cones and shells.

to see the numbers 1, 11 and 100 everywhere I looked – for example, on my phone, registration plates, clocks and social media – and on the actual day of the anniversary, I received a significant message via the number 108, which is a very spiritual number. In Hinduism, it represents the wholeness of existence and divine connection, and it has associations to sacred texts and practices like mantra chanting, with verses repeated 108 times, and prayer bead necklaces, which have 108 beads. Things like this continued to happen in the most astonishing ways and became more timely and exact, such that on the second anniversary I asked for and received a sign of 200 just after midnight on Instagram that lasted for the whole day of the anniversary and had changed to 201 by the next day.

Also, on the day of the second anniversary of his passing, I was due to leave the Navajo Nation, where I’d been filming for a week, and fly direct to LA, but I found out at the last minute that I was going to have to make a transfer. I’d previously asked Robin to send me a sign of a phoenix on that trip, because I was beginning to feel like I was re-emerging as someone new after having burnt myself out, and it was unusual enough to not be put down to coincidence. Before going to the Navajo Nation, I’d spent a week in Oklahoma City, where the studio was. While there, I kept passing a Chinese restaurant called the Phoenix Garden on the way from my hotel, and, when my flight was booked from Flagstaff, Arizona, the transfer was through Phoenix. Some time later, back in London, a road was blocked off as I was walking home one day, so I had to take a diversion down a small and pretty side street. I remember feeling sure that I would get a sign – it was just a strong sense of knowing (sometimes people refer to this as claircognisance) – and, when I turned the corner, I came across a pub with a large sign that said The phoenix.

This and other significant signs continued to present themselves to me, including white feathers lying on my doorstep,

heart-shaped items, infinity symbols and repeated numbers that had significance for me and Robin, such as 21.09 (his birthday), which I would continually see on my phone, on receipts or as door numbers or licence plates. Whatever their source, these signs brought more than comfort. They allowed me to shake off fear. They showed me the way to navigate the most difficult time of my life. They reminded me why I am here and what I can bring to this world. They allowed me to live again and move forward in a way that would create a legacy for the person I loved so deeply, which is something I felt I had to do to carry on. They allowed me to see the wonder of life in all its technicolour glory beyond what science has already explained. And they also piqued my curiosity – what was this new clarity I had found, and could I help others to find it too? This is the purpose of the book: to share with you my newfound conviction that we all have much to gain by opening our minds to signs. This might be confirmation that you’re on the right path or a comforting sense that something or someone is guiding you. And with this new source of support and external validation, you can overcome any of life’s challenges and flourish like never before. xviii

For thousands of years, humans relied on their senses and intuition for survival. They couldn’t check a weather app on their phone, but they could look at the sky, hear the wind in the trees, feel the rain on their skin, rely on their instincts and understand whether they should take shelter from a storm. They could draw meaning from the things they observed, as demonstrated by their desire to make symbolic and decorative cave art and totems – not only about the world around them, but also about their purpose, the future and what is truly important. In the modern world, with its many distractions, I believe we have lost something crucial to our well-being and ability to flourish.

A lot of us feel adrift or as if something is missing. Do you, for example, feel as though life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour? Are you consumed by anxiety or the feeling that there should be more to life? Do you dismiss anything that can’t be explained rationally, even if it feels like ignoring something you know to be true in your gut? If this sounds familiar, rest assured, you are not alone. Modern life is full of stress, in large part caused by technological advancements driving us to live faster, work harder and stare at screens all day rather than looking around and seeing all that there is to guide and nourish us. As a consequence, many of us feel more lost and disconnected

than we ever have before, leading to a widespread lack of direction, loss of confidence and diminished sense of purpose. This is something that I have seen in my work as a psychiatrist, neuroscientist and executive adviser, and colleagues who remain in clinical practice have described to me sharp rises in anxiety, aggressive behaviour, impatience and poor emotional regulation in their patients.

The British mental health charity Mind reports that one in four people in England will experience a mental health condition each year,1 and the numbers of young people in particular who are facing mental health issues is on the rise, with one in six young people experiencing a mental health problem in 2020, up from one in nine in 2017.2 Some people have also made the link between this increase in mental health issues and the increased use of smartphones and the widespread use of social media among children, particularly girls.3 In his book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt eloquently lays out the case for this in young people, but there is increasing evidence that adults are adversely affected by social media use too.4 Smartphones are ubiquitous today, and the more time we spend staring at screens instead of looking up and noticing and engaging with the world, the more lost we will become.

It can sometimes feel as if we are stumbling from one crisis to another or perhaps not making the most of the precious time we have on this earth. There are a number of reasons for this: we live in a more material-focused world than ever before, one in which our lives are defined by consumerism, at least in the West, and the ‘perfect’ life is dictated to us by social media. Meanwhile, many of us have lost touch with nature in an increasingly urbanised, technological world, and thanks to individualism we have become disconnected from the idea that there is something bigger than ourselves. The increase in secularism and spirituality being downgraded by science has also left us without a source of meaning and direction that we have

relied on for millennia. These factors can make it feel as though we are going through life with blinkers on by shrinking our horizons and narrowing our perception of all that the world has to offer. As such, it is hard to keep a grasp on our sense of self, on our ability to trust ourselves, and on our communities and relationships – no wonder we have seen an increase in stress, anxiety and other physical and mental illnesses. If you remove the blinkers placed on your perception by the trials and tribulations of modern living, you too can find the signs that will direct you to that deeper connection with yourself and with life.

Often our response to all of this is to try to think our way out of the problems we face, putting too much emphasis and value on rationality. However, a rational approach is not always the answer because, as I described in The Source, we have other ways to make decisions at our disposal, in particular our intuition, which provides us with access to knowledge and wisdom held in the body beyond our rational minds – and we can use this to find creative solutions to seemingly insurmountable issues, such as who to commit to in the long term and what we should be doing with our lives. Unfortunately, many of us are too quick to dismiss the importance of this invaluable resource. Science provides us with landmarks, but intuition can show us the gradients in between them if we tap into it more and give it at least equal billing to rationality, allowing us to make more nuanced and holistic decisions for our life. This is not to say, however, that there is no scientific basis for intuition. In recent years, the neuroscientific evidence to support the validity of intuition has come on leaps and bounds, particularly with the advances made in brain-scanning technology (more on this in Chapter 2).

Intuition has a lot to teach us. If you listen to it, your intuition has the capacity to help you understand important knowledge held in your body and subconscious, and to interpret messages that you receive from other sources, to provide you with

information that could help you to see your way through challenges, look ahead with clarity and give you the understanding and strength you need to reach your goals. In particular, if you are tuned in to your intuition and able to trust what it tells you, you will be better able to notice and take advantage of your signs.

The signs that come to us are most often from unexplained sources, like the robins in my garden that I described in the Preface. Some people would call these paranormal, or make reference to the occult, but those words have pejorative connotations. I prefer to think of them as being esoteric or mystical and simply beyond our current understanding. Perhaps they come from some benevolent source that you might call God, angels or the universe, depending on your personal frame of reference, or perhaps they are from the spirits of lost loved ones who are sending us signs to help guide and comfort us. Wherever they come from, we can find many of the solutions we are seeking by looking to these signs – through having a better understanding of what our bodies and environments are telling us, and a willingness to consider the possibility of messages from powers outside of our current understanding. I will share with you the reasons why I have come to believe this and how you too can bring the benefits of signs into your life.

In the early twentieth century, psychologist Carl Jung coined the term ‘synchronicity’ as a way of describing what he called ‘meaningful coincidences’ – that is, two or more events that are seemingly connected in the absence of any causal link.5 Despite his scientific background, Jung was open to the possibility that these synchronicities might even point to some spiritual source, something that he considered in more depth in his theory of the collective unconscious (which I discuss in Chapter 8). But regardless of whether they are coincidences or synchronicities that have a deeper source and meaning, what really matters when it comes to signs is your interpretation of what they mean