What’s Up with Spirit Guides?
Are you familiar with your spirit guides?
Who do you turn to for spiritual guidance? When? Why?
One constant throughout human history is our need and desire for spiritual guidance. Yes, we often turn to fellow humans for that, from friends to counselors and spiritual advisors, but we also yearn for the presumed authority, skill, and 24/7 protection of ethereal or nonphysical advisors, from guardian angels to modern spirituality’s spiritual team, or spirit guides.
Since we’re asking these beings for help, it’s a good thing they’re real, then, isn’t it? The problem is, many people know very little about their spiritual team, or, as I’ll call them from this point, spirit guides, so we can’t work well with them and don’t benefit from their support as much as we could.
What’s the solution? Like most things in life, being proactive. Instead of sitting around and waiting for our spirit guides to pop in and explain the universe to us, we should invite them in to work with us and treat them as respectfully as we would treat any guest.
Intuition and Spirit Guides
We can start to connect with our spirit guides by first learning how our intuition works. While everyone is eventually a combination of the four main “clairs” (intuitive seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing), most of us have a dominant intuitive ability. Experimenting with our intuition and documenting our findings will help fine-tune it. Many people think intuition alone solves a problem, but in fact, it needs to be combined with what our belief, intellect, emotions, and experience tell us. That includes believing in our spirit guides, learning what is known about them, understanding our emotional response to them, and experimenting until (eureka!) we connect.
What Spirit Guides Do
Does everyone have a spirit guide? Yes, every single one of us has at least one spirit guide to be with us and support us in our personal lives as we grow our souls, which is why we take bodies in the first place. However, we also do many things throughout the day and our lifetime, and that determines how many guides we have and their jobs. For example, writers and other creatives have guides who are also called muses; so when people say their muse inspired them, that’s literally true. Other spirit guides support health, relationships, self-esteem, and motivation. While some of these issues might be the job of our main guide, sometimes people can have a guide for a particular issue or special life circumstance; for example, the death of a loved one can result in a guide showing up to simply hold us in our grief.
We can also have different spirit guides for different times in our lives. For example, spirit guides “train up” to different jobs, so children often have less experienced guides who are “learning the ropes,” so to speak, because children don’t usually face the variety of issues that adults do. When they do, they’ll often require more seasoned guides.
Here’s an example: I’ve seen children as young as seven and eight who are what I call “mediums by default,” children who are talking with or seeing dead people who come to them for help, not realizing (or caring) how young they are. The children and their parents are rightfully perplexed, even frightened. Because the children’s spirit guides are clearly not up to mediumship, I have replaced them with more experienced ones who can actively protect the children and more directly interact with them. But please note: “firing” or replacing a guide is a sensitive issue, one best handled by an experienced professional intuitive who is also a healer.
Adults may also need new guides when our lives or careers dramatically change. Guides usually sort themselves out with little input from us, which is generally a good thing, since we aren’t always as aware of what we need as we should or could be. A guide’s help can be simple daily things like an intuitive nudge to try something different to deep contemplation that can give insights on new directions for personal or professional growth.
Beyond our personal spirit guides, there are specialist guides. These include gardening guides and advanced medical guides who can advise on health care and even step into a direct role in surgeries.
Working with Spirit Guides
The key to working with spirit guides is to actively engage them. We have to ask for help, we can’t be passive observers in the spirit guide experience. We also need to monitor them to make sure they are on the ball and doing the job they committed to, which is supporting us. We must be aware of what they are doing, ask for help when we need it, and actively work to create a useful and inspiring partnership.
Just like us, spirit guides can and do make mistakes, so the best partnership is a give-and-take one that allows both sides to learn and grow together. As in real life, sometimes the partnership needs to end, and the best person to know that is you. Being respectful, curious, open, thoughtful, and precise about our needs allows us to help our guides help us. Which is why we have them in the first place.
My webinar “What’s Up with Spirit Guides?” covers how they work and how to create the best partnership with them, including what to do when things go wrong. Participants will join in a guided meditation to meet the spirit guide who assists in their daily life and will leave having established a solid working relationship with their guide.
Originally published in OMTimes.com Magazine: What’s Up with Spirit Guides? – OMTimes Magazine
About the Author
Robyn M Fritz MA MBA CHt is a tested and certified intuitive and spiritual consultant and past life regression specialist with an international practice based in Seattle, Washington. An OM Times Expert and award-winning author, teacher, and speaker, she hosts “The Practical Intuitive: Mind Body Spirit for the Real World” each Monday at 2 pm PST/5 EST on OMTimes Radio.