Spirit Guides and receiving guidance

By: +David Herron; Date: Mon Jan 04 2021 13:13:44 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Before I begin, lets get one thing out of the way. People often worry "do I have spirit guides?" YES YOU DO.

Q: Why do we need guides if we can go directly to god?

This is another good question. The answer is that we are all "channels", even the spirits and spiritual guidance. Each entity, whether they are inhabiting a body or not, are on different "levels" of awareness or unity with all that is. The "levels" are often understood to be in an orderly progression from "low" to "high", with the higher levels being more filled with power, and more divine. To bring divine wisdom into presence in the material world requires translation, which is what a "channel" does. The job of a "channel" is to translate divine wisdom into the material world, and we all channel every moment of every day whether we know it or not.

The job of spiritual guidance is to, well, guide. The trick is that the guidance has to be in a form that allows free choice, as it would be a violation of spiritual law for the spirit guides to control our free will.

Simple exercise to access guidance

So let's first start with a simple exercise to access your guidance. The method will allow you to receive wisdom concerning yes-or-no questions you have. The question must be put in the form allowing a yes/no answer.

Step 1 Bring yourself into alignment and openness. The intentionality to be practiced is a willingness to hear and know the truth, whatever the truth is. Pray to receive divine truth. Your EGO (easing God out) may have decided something already that isn't in alignment with your higher truth, and it is the job of your spiritual guidance to help you learn this.

I align myself with God's will. I want to know the truth, whatever it is. I let go of my personal stake in the answer. In the name of God [or Christ, Buddha, Allah, or whatever spiritual figure is meaningful to you] I want to know.

Step 2 Sitting in a chair or other comfortable position, hold your arms out, palms upwards.

Step 3 With fullness of being, instruct the guides that you want them to put "energy" into the palm of each hand based on the answer to your questions. For a "Yes" answer, they are to make the right hand feel heavy, and for a "No" answer they are to make the left hand feel heavy.

Step 4 First test this saying "show me 'yes'" and "show me 'no'", and watching for changes. It is important to stay centered and open minded through the whole exercise.

Step 5 Ask your question(s), making sure to word it in a yes/no style. It would be simplest to run a tape recorder at the same time, rather than have a pad of paper. Or, better yet, if you have an assistant, have them hold the pad of paper writing down the answers. What we're trying to avoid is breaking your concentration by having you constantly going between asking questions and writing the answer.

As you ask questions, watch and experience what happens. I cannot stress enough, be centered and experience whatever happens. If you try to make this happen, the willpower involved is simply the activity of the EGO and will interfere with getting divine wisdom. It may happen that thoughts enter your mind, which may or may not be your guidance interacting with you more completely than simply putting energy in your hands.

"Should"

The wording of your questions directly impacts the type of answer you receive. Recall that to be in Divine Love and Acceptance, you have acceptance and love for the other person no matter what. Your spiritual guidance is "there" for you, no matter what you do, no matter how much pain you're causing yourself, their love and acceptance of you is eternal and complete.

Consider what it means when you phrase a question in this form:

Should I buy a lottery ticket tonight?

What are you asking here? Okay, obviously it's about a lottery ticket, but what else? Is the form of the asking one where you're with an "equal partner"? Or is it a subservient relationship?

Obviously this question is being asked by a subservient person of their superior, yes? Is that question in a form allowing a divinely loving and accepting answer? No it isn't, because if that question is answered then the answer is one of telling the questioner what to do, and the questioner is abdicating their own power of choice.

What does this mean to you, the student of this course? Why, a lot, because you are the questioner, aren't you? If your questions are worded to abdicates your power of choice, what kind of answer will you receive?

As you practice the activity of receiving guidance, ponder these thoughts. I am not going to try and tell you how to word the questions, and am just pointing out this common pitfall.

Exercise: writing for guidance

Step 1 Align, etc., just as with the yes/no form above.

Step 2 Sit in a chair with a pad of paper and pen/pencil.

Step 3 With fullness of being, write your question at the top of the page. Make it one relatively straightforward question.

Step 4 Wait for an answer. You are not practicing automatic writing, so do not expect your hand to move on its own accord. Write down whatever ideas come to mind, and you are telepathically listening. You may judge it stupid or wrong, but write it anyway.

Step 5 After the writing comes to a close, put the paper away for at least four hours. Do not try and analyze it right away, the time for that is "later".

As you analyze the writing as what you are making up with your own mind, versus true divine wisdom. There is no doubt you will make up some of the information, for your EGO is right there every step of the way. One thing we are learning is to recognize the work of the EGO, so that we may begin to weed the EGO out of our lives and live more fully in divine presence.

"True guidance is always loving, supportive, non-judgemental and truthful. It will not betray your integrity, your honesty, or your honor." - [amazon-item:0553345397|Barbara Brennan, Light Emerging]

Do we really need to connect with guidance? What's going on?

First off, we cannot definitively say what's happening with any of these spiritual practices, can we? In this section I will instead be explaining, to the best of my awareness, what I understand to be going on.

Consider the idea that everything is part of one wholeness. That wholeness is the Divine, or God. Every thing, every being, every event, is all part of that wholeness. In truth our real identity is that divine wholeness, and it is our EGO which makes it seem otherwise.

In that paradigm, the spiritual guidance is just a much that Divine Wholeness as you are, yes? By asking your spiritual guidance for wisdom, aren't you just talking to yourself? On the other hand, by reading the words I've written, aren't you talking to yourself also?

That last question contains the kernel of what's going on. Living as we do in a web of EGO, our perception of the world is of separate entities, and separate consciousness. Even though the spirit guides are not inhabiting a body, they still have some form of distinctness from the divine wholeness. Our spirit guides have their own lessons to learn, and are furthering their own souls development through acting as spiritual guidance for another.

In truth, then, we are all God talking to ourself. And, no, that doesn't make us, or God, crazy.

Our common goal, or task, is to bring the divine into expression in our every-day life. Put another way, that is to bring ourselves closer and closer to identifying with the divine wholeness, in unity with all that is. Connecting with spiritual guidance is a path to practicing that divine wholeness. In this view it doesn't matter whether the guidance is coming from distinct entities, or whether it is the voice of divine unity speaking, for the communication is really just divinity talking to divinity anyway.

By listening to the divine voice, who knows what will happen in your life?

Exercise: Interactive daily guidance

As you practice receiving guidance you may want it to be more interactive. Some people, for example, talk of directly hearing voices from their guides, or being able to see them visually. How you get there is up to you, and of course direct audio or visual contact requires cleansing of certain psychic channels in your energy system, to allow those channels to accept the levels of energy required to hear and see beyond the physical plane.

What I'm going to talk about here is an intermediate step. Divine guidance can be direct and interactive without audio or visual contact. It is an extension of the first exercise above, and the form it will take is up to your own experimentation.

Scenario: You're in a grocery store choosing food to eat. You want to get the best foods for you and your body. How do you choose? Maybe your guides have a good idea of which to choose? Or maybe you're in a bookstore wondering which book contains the teaching for you to learn?

You have a shelf full of products in front of you. Here's what I did many times: First ask something like "okay guides, which of these things are best for me" or whatever form of question is best for you. Then hold your hand out and move it based on which way your hand feels pushed or pulled.

Look for ways to experiment with this. How can you make it your own? How can you trust this? The more you can trust it, the larger the type of questions you can ask. How do you know you are communicating with your guide and distinguishing it from your own thoughts or EGO?

Find ways to get confirmation. Maybe you need to ask multiple times before being certain the answer you're getting is correct. Especially ask in multiple forms, like one time getting the answer with your hand (like above), or another time getting the answer based on which way your head and vision moves.

Exercise: "Random coincidence" messages

Ever have the experience of driving past a road sign hundreds of times, and then it suddenly stands out, but the message you get from that sign isn't what the author of the sign meant? That the meaning you're seeing is an "ah ha!" moment answering a question you have? Here's a way you can use this effect more directly.

The first step is increasing your energy level. There isn't room to give a lecture on how to do this, so refer to the page on alignment instead. By being in alignment your energy level will automagically increase as needed.

Focus on your question. Really feel, completely, your question and lack of answer. Look around the nooks and crannies of this question.

Let go of the question, forget your were asking it, and stop practicing the energy. Once you forget you were asking the question, that's when the answer will come.

What tends to happen is that shortly afterward random thoughts pop around, or you see the things around you in a different way. The shape of an orange may remind you of someone. A persons name my suddenly come to mind, someone you haven't thought of in years. Be open to anything.

By the way, this is the same process James Redfield talked of in the Celestine Prophecies.

Exercise: Rock divination

This exercise is taught by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in their Core Shamanism class. They don't talk of spirit guides with this exercise, but it is a method of gaining guidance, and it is similar to the random coincidence exercise just described.

Find a rock. Go out into nature and find a rock. The rock should be of good size, say the size of your fist or a bit larger. The rock you use should not be one you've used before, and do not study the rock or develop any relationship with it before beginning the divination. You want the rock to be a fresh clean slate on which to see information.

There are two sides to the rock, front and back. You'll be looking at the rock for intuitive hunches and images. And in the form we're using you'll be getting two sets of these hunches and images.

Have a helper person to take notes for you and help you stay focused on the question. Their duties are pretty simple, just having a pad of paper and helping you through the process. While getting the intuitive hunches and images, you may get into an altered state, wander from your question, etc. They are to be your designated driver, staying centered, grounded, and rational. The main skill the helper requires is centered and grounded questioning. Rather than interpret your answers for you, their job is to continually lead you to getting your own answer.

State your question. The question you state is what you'll be looking for in the intuitive hunches and images you get through looking at the rock. Your helper should always help you bring anything you get back to this question.

Look at the front of the rock, getting impressions based on features in the rock. You are looking first for four features that stand out on the rock. There might be a crease that reminds you of the grand canyon, or a bump that reminds you of someones nose, or a splotch that reminds you of death or despair or joy or hope. These features can be anything, and they can remind you of anything. What's important is the intuitive hit you get, and what it leads you to.

The first step is just the intuitive "hit" of "feature x" looks like "y". Assign a name to each feature as you find it, and your helper writes down the names.

After you've found the four features, go back to each one and describe how it connects with your question. This is, what piece of an answer does it give you in answering your question. Again, your helper writes these down. And, helper, remember, you are not to do anything other than write stuff down and ask questions that help clarify what it means. You are not to suggest anything to the questioner at all. It is the questioners journey of discovery, your job is to help them bring the information into linear reality. If what they're coming up is disconnected from the question, this is what you ask them about. Use the question as the grounding of all the information.

Look at the back of the rock, getting impressions based on features in the rock. Do the same thing, but for the back of the rock.

Turn all the impressions into a summary answer. Once you've gotten the pieces of answer, questioner, string them into a sentence that is the answer you've learned. Your helper should guide you (not tell you) in bringing the answer into linear reality. That's what this summary answer is about, is to bring those pieces of the answer together in a form you can remember in linear reality. You've gone through this process, and you want something to show for it.

Return the rock to where you found it. The rock belongs with nature, you just borrowed it for a moment. Thank the rock and all of nature for the gift this rock helped you find.

Discussion

Guides will encourage and help you to discover your own inner knowingness. As you continue to connect with your guides, you build a stronger, more open and refined, constant connection to the higher realms. You will have more frequent and reliable intuitive insights and experiences of inner guidance or knowledge as the higher vibration flows more directly into your mind.

Your guides goal is to stimulate, encourage, and support you, thus making you more powerful, independant and confident. They do this through the qualities of a perfect relationship; constant love, perfect understanding and unending compassion.

As you evolve, your sensitivity to the higher realms increases. Ideas seem to come to you from somewhere beyond yourself. You find yourself knowing things that you didn't know before. You may feel you are connecting to an energy that is higher than, or different from, your normal awareness. What is happening is that you are beginning to consciously experience the higher dimensions of self, and have made a link to the universal plane.

How can you tell if the guides you have are of a high level? It is by their fruits that you shall know them, and it is by your discernment that this shall be seen. Your own level of being will naturally attract like minded guidance (like attracts like). When you meet people you have an immediate sense of how wise and loving they are, and this applies to guidance as well.

High guides come to light your path. Their only wish is for your higher good. They are there to help you with such things as remembering who you are, letting go of fear, and learning to love yourself and others. They come to add to your joy and understanding, and to assist you with your personal growth and help you learn your lessons.

High level guides neither frighten you nor build up your ego. They do not flatter, but they will applaud your progress. They create a sense of expanded awareness and greater inner vision. They encourage you to use your own wisdom and insight rather than blindly following anything you are told. They never tell you that you have to do something or attempt to determine a direct outcome in your personal life. Remember, you are the master of your life, and no one as the right to interfere. Instead they support and encourage you to develop and use your inner strengths and deeper wisdom. Never should you give or turn over your power to them.

Lower guides love to give predictions of disastrous nature, and actually feed off of fearful emotions. A lower guide may give you false information with the intent to lead you towards pain and fear, so that it may feed from that. They just want to steal your energy and have fun at your expense. A lower entity does not care if they hurt you or not.

Think of the Son of Sam murders, where the perpetrator said voices were telling him to commit the murders. That is an extreme form of lower guidance.

To get your guides name can sometimes prove to be difficult. Guides are not so concerned about names, as that kind of identity system seems a thing of the physical realm, and in any case their purpose is more about the relationship necessary to guide you, and perhaps they will choose a name that will be comfortable to you. Some find the name changes over the first few days before settling down to a name that feels good and seems to fit. Some guides like to use symbols instead of a name.

It is very unlikely that your personal guides will also be Archangels or Ascended Masters or other forms of highly evolved spirits. Many sources discuss hierarchies of entities having varying levels of "evolution" and say that the Angels, Archangels, Ascended Masters and so forth are very high up the ladder of this evolution. These "highly evolved" spirits are most likely touching many people and activities all at once, not having the same direct level of interaction a personal guide has with you.

A Course in Metaphysics