Finding Your Spirit Guides

Spirit guides have many identifications: animal spirit guides, gods and goddesses, angels, loved ones that have passed on, ancestors, nature spirits, and so on. Guides are all around us and available if we choose to be open to them.  Some guides are temporary; some are with us our entire lifetime. Certain guides may feel very familiar while others do not connect at all. This article will look at how you can find your spirit guides and how they can help you in your day-to-day life, not just when you are in crisis.

What is a Spirit Guide?

A spirit guide is an entity connected to our lives that we sense, accept, believe in, and find through muscle testing, dream communication, meditation, or synchronicity observation.  Spirit guides help us in large and small ways depending on our openness to such help and to such energy.  They help us by providing messages when we need guidance to face difficult situations or just a nudge to keep us moving in the best direction for our life journey.

Finding Your Spirit Guides

Muscle Testing

In 2015, a couple of years after I started my professional practice, I developed an intuitive checklist that I work on with new and existing clients.  The checklist is done using muscle testing to help clients identify their general types of intuition, meditation pathways, psychic abilities, spirit guides, and the best spiritual tools for them to use (tarot cards, runes, palmistry, and so on). For each item on the list we muscle test to determine if something is connected for them or not.  The testing can be done in person or at a distance.

For the spirit guide section, we start with animals and work our way through to ancestors.  Some people end up having guides in multiple categories, like an angel or two, maybe two or three spirit animals, an ancestor, a nature spirit, and someone who passed in their current lifetime.  I had one client who had a single animal spirit guide, a donkey, and that was it!  She was hoping for one of the “cool” animals but quickly admitted that the donkey was spot on.

Dream Communication

The dream realm is probably one of the easiest places for spirits to connect and communicate with us.  I actually connected with my prime spirit animal in a dream when I was 16 years old, a black unicorn. For many people, myself especially, I have found various aspects of my life did not make sense until I started digging deeper into my spiritual path.  The first poster I hung in my room was not Farrah Fawcett, though it could have easily been; I was a huge Charlie’s Angels fan. My first poster was a unicorn running across an open field at dawn.

The dream with the black unicorn was very unusual because I was dreaming about being in my bed asleep in my actual home and my actual bed.  In the dream, I woke up and went out into the backyard.  It was night, a new moon (somehow, I knew the moon phase), and a black unicorn with a silver horn approached me.  I almost touched the animal, but held back.  He shed a single tear as he backed into the darkness.  I went back to bed – in the dream – woke up the next morning – still in the dream, walked outside and found a black rose where the tear had fallen.  When I touched the rose, it became a tear, and then I finally, really woke up.

• Read about Dream Interpretation

Meditation

Meditation is perhaps the most conscious and direct way to find your spirit guides. If you have trained yourself to enter meditative states, then you can choose an intention for your meditation.  During meditation, you can ask for spirit guides to reveal themselves to you, directly.  They can present visually or audibly, perhaps even both.  Meditating can be achieved through specific practice or you may have stumbled upon a way to enter a meditative state by doing something that so relaxes your mind that you have found it is actually a form of meditation.

An odd way for me to enter the meditative state is by folding a large pile of laundry.  A more practiced way for me to achieve the meditative state, and the common action I take when I want to connect with my guides, is by walking the labyrinth on my property.  It is 352 steps to the center and 352 steps back out, for a total of 704 steps, which reduces to the master number 11.  I walk in to receive my message and I walk out to bring the message back with me into my day.

• 10 Tips to Elevate Your Meditation Practice

Synchronicity Observation

Spirit guides will often send messages that we must attune ourselves to notice and understand.  Carl Jung famously wrote about synchronicity, noting that three synchronized events (connected in someway content-wise), mark spiritual messages.  If I left for work and saw a turtle on the road, that I stopped to help across, that would be a singular event.  If at lunch, a young boy walked by wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, that would be a coincidence.

But, if, while out shopping that evening, I passed a jewelry display with a pair of turtle earrings prominently displayed, then I would be experiencing a synchronistic event that was trying to tell me to pay attention to turtle energy. I would do well to listen to the message that “master” turtle is trying to send me.  If synchronistic events persist around a certain spirit guide, then it is safe to acknowledge that the guide is a permanent guide.

My own very personal example involves my maternal grandmother; her name was Ruby.  She was the wisest person I know and she was very good at saving money.  When I was very young, she taught me a lesson about finding pennies.  She told me that if you find a penny on the ground and it is heads-up, it is yours to take.  If it is tails up, then you should turn it over and leave it for someone else to find.

I have moments when I get rather worried about money since I am no longer working for an institution.  When I get especially concerned, she will nudge me to see a penny that is nearby.  Sometimes it is face-up, sometimes face down. Regardless, not too soon after I find the penny, my money concerns get alleviated with a new or returning client contacting me in short order.

• Understanding and Opening up to Synchronicity in Your Life

Trusting Your Spirit Guides

Whether you have one or several consistent spirit guides, or you get temporary guidance just when you need it.  Being open to spiritual guidance from spirit guides is a wonderful and comforting way to move through life.  I have a core council of guides consisting of several Greek goddesses, my grandparents, two cats that lived the longest with me, and the black unicorn.  In certain situations, special guides will make themselves known and I do my best to understand the guidance they offer when they reveal themselves in my dreams or through synchronicities.