How To Connect With Your Spirit Guide

"How can I connect with my spirit guide?"  If only I had a dollar for every time I'm asked that question.  The short answer is one you're probably not going to like to hear -- you already are.  Our spirit guide is with us from before we take our first breath until well after we take our last one.  We communicate with them in subtle ways every day.

Before we're born, we create a life plan for our soul growth.  We include in it all the people we need to work out karma with, all the triumphs and tragedies we need to experience to learn our life lessons, and all the people and events are put in place for us to teach and share our own gifts and talents.  Our main spirit guide, our life guide,  has a copy of this life plan at all times.  When we veer off path, we'll know it.  Our spirit guide will make sure of that. We'll feel lonely, isolated, disconnected.  We'll have a lot of second doubts and nothing, and I mean nothing, will go our way.  For example, I've rarely met a divorced person who didn't feel a strong pull to not get married on their wedding day.  That's their spirit guide talking to them.  We humans are really good at ignoring these subtle signs.  We'll choose to drink or eat too much or take drugs or hide behind work, stress and self-created drama to avoid looking at the plain truth -- we've gone off path.

When we're on our path, we'll know it too.  For one thing, things will go smoothly, we'll feel connected and even if times are hard, we'll have a solid sense of faith inside us to act as a compass through a difficult but necessary time.  Sometimes, we're on our right path even when we're experiencing the darkest times.  How can you know the difference?  It's a feeling, an inner knowing.  It's truth.  If you're lying to yourself, you're off your path.  Period.

Our spirit guide will speak to us through inner nudgings, ideas, inspired thoughts, repetitive messages that just pop into our head such as "call so and so" or "talk to this person."  Their language is one of synchronicity and coincidence.  Follow the signs and you'll receive your guide's presence more strongly each day.  Remain open, ask for help and keep seeking truth.

In order to more directly communicate with your guide, practice meditation.  Take 10 minutes a day to sit in silence and allow yourself to just be.  Any thoughts that come into your mind, attach a balloon to them and visualize them flying away.  If this is too difficult for you, try a guided meditation.  I have a CD called Meet Your Spirit Guide that uses a guided meditation to help you meet your guide.

Ask and you shall receive.  Ask for a deeper connection with your guide.  But, and here's the tricky part, let go of any expectation.  Put out the request and then "walk away."  The more we want something, the stronger we repel it.

Take some time each week to sit in nature.  Take a walk in the park or on the beach or sit in your back yard and talk to your guide.  This will create an energetic path which your guide can use to teach you how to effectively communicate with him or her in the future.

Pick a sign and ask your guide to show this to you.  Our guides and loved ones are allowed to communicate with us through:

1) Nature
2) Music
3) Electricity
4) Metal

So some easy signs to choose from would be a red bird, a dragonfly, a bee, a particular song, a penny or a dime.  State the sign and then set a deadline. For example, "Please show me a purple flower by Friday."  And then be open to seeing a purple flower in real life, or in a card someone mails to you or on a display sign at a store.  I'll give you some examples I've heard from clients.  One of my clients left my office and asked her guide to show her a turtle.  She drove to meet one of her clients and the street the woman lived on was called Turtle Hall.  After that meeting, she stopped at Starbucks and noticed an article in the newspaper on an upcoming turtle release.  Then she drove to meet her next client and in front of the building was a water fountain with a turtle in the middle.

Another client asked to see a frog and that weekend when she was out for her morning run, she tripped over a frog -- a real, live frog.  Then someone gave her son a stuffed frog as a birthday present the next week and later that week when she was flipping channels, she came across three shows on frogs.  Three.  What are the odds of that?

Communicating with your guide this way builds a strong relationship and can make following your life path a bit simpler.  Let's say your sign for your guide is a yellow flower.  You're trying to decide between two jobs and the decision is difficult because they're both good jobs.  So you ask your guide to show you a yellow flower at the site of the right job for you.  When you drive to the interview for the second job, the interviewer has yellow tulips on her desk.  Voila!  Your guide has answered your question and helped you stay on path.

It's not a question of how you communicate with your spirit guide as much as it is that you communicate with  your guide.  Put the intention out there, don't push it too much, be patient and soon you'll be on your way to "remembering" your guide and building a wonderful relationship.

What Do Our Guides Think Of Us?

I love hearing from people's spirit guides.  They have all sorts of different personalities.  Mine is strict and a bit serious.  But some of you have guides who are hilarious or maternal or sympathetic.  Some are a bit nagging and can even be pushy. Others are quiet and patient, preferring to remain firmly in the background.

The first guide I ever communicated with made me laugh out loud.  I was taking an intuitive development course, and the teacher instructed us to work with a partner and try to connect with his or her guide.  I was partnered up with a quiet, older woman who had never attended the class before.  I held her hands as instructed, closed my eyes and allowed the teacher to guide me on a meditation to meet her guide.  I have a place I go to when I meditate -- my crystal cave.  So I pictured my crystal cave with the crystal bridge to the other side and mentally asked my partner's guide to show up.  Almost instantly, I saw a tall, white, very thin man walk across the bridge.  He had a long, grayish white beard and sparkly blue eyes.  He was wearing an old, worn brown robe with a simple rope belt. He had shoulder length, thinning grayish white hair.  He smiled at me.  I asked him his name and he said, "Archibald."  I asked, "Archibald?"  He nodded, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yes, but she can call me Archie," and then he bowed to me and revealed his monk's tincture, a perfect circle of baldness, "Or Baldie."  I laughed out loud because it was such a funny joke and a joke I could never have "imagined" myself.

When I asked him if he had a message for my client, he said, "Yes, tell her it's time for her to go back to her gift, to doing this."  Wanting more validation, I asked what she did now, and he showed me a business card with the word "Weddings" written in calligraphy.  My partner said she was a wedding planner and that she used to give readings more than 30 years ago.

Archibald still remains for me the clearest and most accurate contact I've ever had with someone's spirit guide.  I felt as though I could have talked to him all night.  He gave me validation after validation after validation.   Sometimes, I've wished he were my guide instead of the stern, strict Native American man who always appears to me with his arms crossed in front and a slight frown on his face.  Oh well.

Yesterday, I met a lovely, joyful guide -- a little Indian yogi man -- who said the most wonderful thing about my client.  When people come to see me in person, I like to begin by doing Reiki on them.  These moments of silence are needed for me to communicate with the client's guide.  I always ask the guide for the same information each time -- my client's soul purpose and life lessons.  This time, the woman's spirit guide was a chatty one and he said, "Tell her that her strength of spirit inspires even us over here sometimes."

That really struck me.  Can our guides and angels be inspired by us? I asked myself.  Well, why not?  Sometimes humans do, experience and endure amazing things with great strength and love.  When I sat down to talk with my client it was revealed throughout the hour that she'd lost her husband and then her son had passed in a tragic car accident.  Yet, the woman before me had a beautiful smile and a wonderful, joyful energy.  I could see how her strength could inspire people everywhere -- even on the other side.

It's something to think about, isn't it? What does your guide think of you?