Understanding Your Spirit Guide
You’re in the right place if you want to understand…
what a spirit guide is.
what they look like.
how it feels when they’re around.
ways they communicate with you.
Your Spirit and Your Guide
In this blog post I will do my best to answer the questions surrounding the concept of spirit guides based on how I understand the Universe. It may not be what you believe and that’s okay. You can take what I say and decide which parts fit in your worldview and which parts you reject. You may decide to adopt new beliefs based on what you read.
It’s even okay if you don’t believe any of this and are only here to observe a different perspective.
Spiritual and Physical Realms
In order to answer what a spirit guide is, let’s take a step back and look at the spiritual realm. I believe we are all spirits who have the ability to exist in the spirit realm and the physical realm.
As a spirit, we can choose to live many lifetimes in the physical realm as a way to learn and grow. Each time we choose a different lifetime to experience, we evolve spiritually based on what we experience on Earth. In order to experience this transformation, we need to forget everything we know about the Universe. This is called “spiritual amnesia.”
We forget about the spiritual tools we have access to, even though these tools work perfectly in the physical realm, too. Because of this spiritual amnesia, each time we decide to take up existence in the physical realm, we need guidance. Guidance comes to us in many forms including angels, plant and animal spirits, deities, and spirit guides.
What is a spirit guide?
Some people, and maybe you are one of these people, believe that the idea of a spirit guide is actually part of your unconscious mind or even your higher self that symbolically helps you find meaning and reveals itself in various shapes and forms.
I personally believe a spirit guide is a regular spirit, like you and like me, who has experienced life on Earth before. I believe any spirit can choose to become a guide for other spirits and they train to learn how to be a guide. I also believe we choose our own guide before we begin our incarnation.
Prepare for the Journey
In my belief system, your spirit and your guide mapped out a plan for the life you wanted to experience while on Earth. Then, when your spirit incarnates in the physical realm, and you experience the spiritual amnesia, your guide is there to help you stay on track and to look out for you.
The guide send messages of courage, strength, and insight based on what the map says.
Fate vs. Free Will
This idea of having a map of your life seemingly suppresses expressions of free will. I believe we are all spiritually guided in every moment, but if we are unaware of our access to a guide or willfully ignore them, the guide may seek to create a new path for us, aligned with where we are going now.
Free will is your greatest power in this incarnation. You can change your direction and even your purpose. Your guide is there to lead you back if you let them, request a course adjustment if necessary, and protect you all along the way.
I believe that we have many types of guides throughout our life.
Your main spirit guide starts their journey with you in the spiritual realm and will be with you until you return to the spiritual realm once more. Your main spirit guide could be, and is very likely, someone you were close to in another lifetime.
The main guide also recruits help from other guides (ancestors, angels, gods and goddesses, ascended masters, etc.) when necessary. These guides stay with you for shorter periods of time. Remember that your spirit guide and any supporting or specialized guides always come from a place of love and guidance, and always have your best interest at heart.
Seeing and Sensing your Guide
You may be wondering, “What does my spirit guide look like?” If you want to see what your guide looks like, most people can see their guides in dreams and meditations rather than in the physical realm. This is when you allow your mind to relax and your ego shuts down a bit.
For the most part, spirit guides look like regular people. They are diverse in shape, size, age, height, race, hair and eye color, and gender.
They tend to dress in the style of a time period they are fond of. Or they may wear clothes that will help you remember a past life experience.
But if you haven’t seen your spirit guide, it’s very likely you have felt their presence, especially when you were alone.
Spirit Guide Experiences
When you are alone you are less likely to be distracted or have your attention diverted. With other people you are expected to engage meaningfully with them in conversation or at least in companionship. When you are alone, you become more tuned in to your surroundings and sensitive to the energy.
If you’ve ever sensed someone standing behind you, and when you turned you found no one there, it was probably your spirit guide. It might have freaked you out to the point where you walk backward or press your back to the wall, or you may have just ignored it and promptly forgot. You may even have felt comfort.
Another time people commonly sense their spirit guide is when they are driving a car. I know on many occasions I’ve had to check the rearview mirror to make sure no one was sitting in the backseat.
Next time you have one of these sensations, you might take the opportunity to speak to them or tell them you are listening to their guidance. You also might want to record it in a journal or grimoire so you can reflect on the experience later.
Another time people often feel their spirit guides near is at night. The veil that separates the physical and spiritual realms thins during the nighttime hours. Spirits can travel more freely when the veil is thin than when it is thick. So we can sense them more easily.
If you ever feel uneasy, just remember that your guide is here to love, guide, and protect you.
Children and Spirit Guides
As children we are more in tune with our guides and can feel their presence easily.
Some people suspect that imaginary friends that most children have are actually their encounters with their spirit guide. If you remember having an imaginary friend as a child or you can ask your parents or siblings about it, it might be worth exploring. This can give you a visual to focus on if and when you decide to meet your spirit guide in meditation.
I was lucky enough to discover some drawings I did when I was cleaning out some boxes at my parents house. They featured someone I didn’t recognize with the name: Arabella. I didn’t remember anything about Arabella at the time, but I did a meditation to meet my guide and she appeared.
Unfortunately, children are often mocked or told their friend isn’t real. I remember a child I used to babysit had an incredible imagination and had developed an entire world that he loved to tell us about. His sisters made fun of him, which sisters are prone to do, but after a while, he stopped talking about it.
As we get older, most of us take that belief from the people around us and society or religion, into our worldview. We build a new belief system that doesn’t allow space for sensitivities to energy, and spiritual experiences. Eventually we learn to tune it out and ignore the presence of our guide.
But you can always open yourself up to these paraphysical sensitivities again.
Ways Spirit Guides Communicate
Spirits can communicate with us in a variety of ways, which may be surprising to some people. Some ways tend to be more common than others. It is important to know how your guide might be trying to communicate with you so that you can do something with the information. I’ve categorized the most common ways Spirit Guides communicate with you into four groups: Intuition, Coincidence, Messengers, and Events.
Intuition
The first category is intuition. Everyone has intuition; it is your inner sense about things, your gut feelings, your personal instincts and the spontaneous thoughts that pop into your mind. These things might seem random, but more than likely you are actually receiving information from your spirit guide.
Many people see repeating numbers or number patterns when they look at a receipt, clock, or somewhere else. Or you may see the same animal over and over again out of context. Or you see a certain shape or pattern appear to you. These can be taken as a message from your guide and it’s up to you to listen to your intuition about what the message means.
Telepathy is part of your intuition as well and this is a way for your guides to plant messages in your mind. Usually they are short bursts of words, pictures or sounds. On occasion people experience blocks of thought, called downloads. This is especially common for people who are in touch with their creative side like artists, musicians, and story tellers.
Another way you might experience an intuitive message from your guides is through a sense of knowing. This is sometimes called claircognizance, especially when fully developed as a psychic skill, but even someone who hasn’t developed their psychic abilities can experience this. It’s just a sense of knowing something to be true and feeling it in your body as fact. This sense of knowing is more often a confirmation from your guides.
Coincidence
The second category of spirit guide communication is coincidence. Coincidence is when two or more events occur that have no obvious relation to each other, but the result feels meaningful or creates a connection for you.
Some prefer to use words like divine coincidence or synchronicity because the word coincidence has become synonymous with luck, fluke, or chance. As humans, our scope of understanding is limited and when we can’t see the connection, we assume there is none. But the Principle of Cause and Effect tells us that everything that occurs has a cause.
An example of a coincidence is when three unrelated people bring up the same idea to you in completely different settings, or when you run into someone you haven’t seen for years three times in one week.
There are limitless possibilities about what the message in the coincidence is, but the most important thing is that you pay attention and take action in order to understand what the meaning is.
Messengers
The third category of communication from guides is messengers. Your guide might find a person, animal, or object that can deliver the message to you for them.
For me this is often through the words of songs. I often hear a line of a song a bit louder than the others as I’m walking through a store or listening to a playlist. I know that I need to pay attention when this happens and try to understand what the message is in the lyrics.
This also happens with advertisements, characters from TV, movies, or books, or overheard conversations.
Observing the behavior of animals can also lead you to a message from your spirit guide. Once I was walking a friend’s dog for her while she was out of town. We had gone on the same walk for three days in a row and on the fourth day, he refused to go the way I wanted. He lay down right on the sidewalk and wouldn’t move until I began walking in another direction. Later I found out that there was an armed robbery in the direction of our regular walk.
Events
The final category of communication from our guides is in the form of events. These are the things that happen to us or around us. In the moment, the event will seem completely out of the blue or random, but later you may recognize the significance of that event.
This can happen when you lose your job but then you find another job that you love more and pays better. Or maybe you go through a breakup and it leads you to someone more compatible. I attribute breaking my back with starting my business and diving into my spiritual and witchcraft practices more fully.
Of course the event doesn’t have to be negative. I out of the blue decided I needed to move to Portland when I graduated college, which was an exciting adventure all on it’s own. I met my husband one month later at a dance club, and looking back, I know the first event was necessary in order for the second to occur.
A Combination
Now it’s important to note that these categories are more like a four circle Venn diagram with lots of overlap because sometimes our spirit guides use two or more methods for communication and guidance.
Additionally, our spirit guides don’t just try once and give up. If you miss one opportunity to be guided, they continue trying until we get the message. This is one of the main ways you can tell the difference between your ego and your intuition. Ego will say something loudly one time and it usually fades. Your guides and your own intuition will say something softly many many times until you listen.
It helps if you stay aware of your intuitive feelings, the coincidences in your life, the messages brought to you by messengers, and the events that are attempting to lead you in new directions. If you do, you’ll be helping your spirit guides to guide you and you’ll be a whole lot better off for it.
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