Engaging with Your Spirit Guides
“Guides Above” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Transformation happens when our learning is infused with intentional processes of becoming.
Each week, following an ICN article, we share invitations into deeper becoming. These may be spiritual practices, ways of deeper engagement, and opportunities for life integration. Our becoming happens personally, communally, and globally as we cultivate transformation through the I, the We, and the All.
Our intention with this rhythm is to foster an intensification of our mystical practice, deepen our embodied engagement, and support the enactment of life integration for the transformation of ourselves, our neighbors, and the world.
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST WEEK, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO FIRST READ THE ARTICLE INFORMING THESE PROCESSES: “WeSpace with Spiritual Guides”
We invite you to consciously and intentionally engage in the following processes for your personal lives, WeSpace groups or other spiritual communities, and global participation.
Seven Steps to Connecting with Your Spirit Companions
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An Introductory Practice of Meeting Our Spirit Guides
Sometimes we may be open to experiencing spirit guides in our lives but don’t always know how to. Usually, we can’t see them with our physical eyes and it can take time to recognize their voice. Learning to sense their presence is a mystical experience we can all open up to.
Here are seven sequential avenues for initially connecting with your spirit friends:
1. Become aware of your breathing to help move your mind away from thinking. Feel your breath entering your body.
2. Drop your awareness from your head down to your heart. To help with this, you can tap down from your head to your heart, place your hands on your heart space, or also think of someone you love. Then release them to focus on your heart space when the love is beginning to flow. Feeling love flowing from your heart is the most accessible way to enter this mystical, relational state.
3. Sense God’s presence in this intensified consciousness of love. God is with you to support and surround your experience. The love you feel in your heart is both your love and God’s love. God is love — and this is the Inner Face of God Being You. This is how God’s presence feels in the language of your mystical heart space.
4. Reflect on who you would like to meet and talk with. You may be drawn to a spiritual master such as Jesus or Mary, a spirit companion, a deceased friend or relative, or other beings of light and love.
5. If you are not drawn to any spiritual being in particular, you can do this: See yourself in your favorite resting place in nature. See a path leading up to where you are and notice someone coming up the path, too far away to identify. As they get closer, you recognize them as the guide you have been waiting for. Seeing in the eye of your mind and with the feelings of your heart isn’t just playful fantasy. Instead, it creates a space for non-physical beings to enter and participate in the conversation with you. The key is to let this picturing process happen spontaneously so that new information comes through.
“Place our Trust” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
6. Now begin the conversation. Assume your guide is present. Greet your spirit friend. Call them by name or ask their name if you don’t know it already. You might say why you want to meet. Ask how the other feels about it.
Learn about your spirit friend by asking them questions. Trust the first image, words, or feeling that come to you when you seek your spirit companion and talk with them. The first response is nearly always the most relevant. The more you know about your guide, the easier it is to feel close. When I feel any distance with Jesus, I think about his life and what he taught and did. I immediately feel heart-to-heart with him.
Bring up whatever you like with your guides.
7. When the conversation feels finished or has given you all you can handle, feel free to end the encounter. Say what it meant to you, thank the other, and say goodbye for the time being. Continue to sit quietly. Reflect on the encounter or review what you have journaled. What did you learn? When you feel complete, return to everyday consciousness, and resume the rest of your day in the glow of your luminous conversation.
Those who don’t see a vision of their spirit friend or hear an audible voice sometimes think they are not connecting with a guide. However, visionary experiences are the exceptions. Instead, this is usually a more internal knowing. We call it “spiritual knowing.” Spiritual knowing is not based on what we already know but on what we are about to know. Let go of any preconceived notions of what this should feel like or precisely who you need to meet as a spirit teacher, healer, and guide.
Our spirit teachers don’t always appear fully formed and coherent in our life. Treat your guide just as you would a new friend in the physical world. It takes time to get acquainted. Sometimes this begins less with conversation and just a receptivity of presence. If you don’t hear your guide speak, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there!
You may find it helpful to practice this introduction meditation several times.
You can also follow along a guided, audio version of this experience, choosing one of these two options:
8-minute meditation
17-minute meditation with more silence
“Love at Every Level” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Welcoming our Guides in WeSpace
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Choosing to Engage
To whatever degree we are familiar with our Spirit Guides, we can enter into our WeSpace groups with a welcoming posture. We tend to focus on thinking about who is present in our group as the people we can see—but we are always supported and encouraged by the cloud of witnesses. They are always available.
Perhaps we have a posture that is open to guides, but there is room for growth in actively cultivating and seeking to sense the Guides with us and one another at any time.
Hanging around those who see or sense other people’s spirit companions can help in our own journey. Those in WeSpace groups can develop that awareness and introduce others to their guides.
Paul Smith had the gift of seeing guides for others. He introduced many to their spirit guides. Or, for many, he simply affirmed the presence they had already felt and knew was there, affirming their own knowing.
As Paul is now a presence on the other side himself, perhaps we are invited to further embrace our own seeing, our own recognition, and the gift of welcoming our guides actively into our lives and in our WeSpace groups.
We don’t want to force it, but if you feel the pull and inclination to develop in this area in your life or as a group, consider one of the following:
1. Set an intention to more directly and consciously look for spirit guides in your life and for others.
2. In your next WeSpace group (or spiritual group setting), choose collectively to practice together in sensing and engaging with the Guides who are present. You can use one of the ICN meditations specific to Guides to assist.
3. In addition to personal spirit guides, you might try to sense as a group who is present with you for this specific time. They may come to you as a group and have something for you in this particular moment, if we’re open to it!
“Angelic Presence with the Earth” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
Integrating Guides into Everyday Life Experience
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Divine Inquiry with God-Beside-Us in Any Moment
At any moment in our lives, fortunately, we don’t have to be alone.
In the midst of our day-to-day reality, we don’t always know what to do, how to respond, where to go in our inner and outer experience. We never have all of the answers, all of the direction, all of the understanding. We have blockages and shadows that limit our knowing. We always have the gift of our unique perspective—and the limitations of it as well. And, we also still have the humility to accept we won’t find it all within.
We are not left to fend for ourselves in the inner realms of spirit, only able to discern by ourselves and apart from spirit in its fuller form, the perichoresis/divine dance of communal participation. We have one another, the great gift of community and spiritual support.
We have the capacity and opportunity to tune into the guidance and wisdom from beyond, drawing upon the personal presence and forms of the intimate face of God-Beside-Us. Our spirit guides. They are here with us. They have insight and understanding far beyond our limited capacities. Often, they are just waiting for us to ask them.
“Portals of Presence” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
For they can speak to our divine inquiries. They can guide us, as they are a great source of spiritual knowing in the form of divine spirit meeting us relationally.
Receiving guidance from them will be a similar process, feeling into what is offered and sensing for resonance with our whole-being. It takes practice as well, and like any relationship, develops more in trust and understanding over time.
Often, what we receive isn’t an answer or an insight. It’s simply a sense of their presence of attentive care and loving support. They often just want to give loving support and affirmation of who we are in our being, as we are. It is about acceptance and walking alongside through the thick of it—not just knowing the answer of which way to go.
It’s about presence. And their loving presence gives us the comfort, strength, encouragement, and support to be who we fully are in our wholeness.
“Jesus Seeking Wisdom and Comfort” – image by Dalmo
In-the-moment Inquiry – Spiritual Knowing from a Guide
We can attune to divine inquiry with our spirit guides at any moment in our day. When a situation arises that calls forth a question, you can take the following steps to begin:
Pause – Engage with whole-being presence with your guide.
Ask – Bring forth the inquiry, question, or choice in loving awareness, asking for their guidance or wisdom.
Open – Welcome spiritual knowing from your guide, in whatever form it comes.
Discern – Sense the resonance or dissonance from what is arising in your whole body. If the first response is not in resonance, release it, and then return to being open and receptive.
Accept – If an answer comes, we accept in trust. If not, we accept in trust that we are enough and our presence is the answer for now.
It’s important to engage in this process with a degree of mental relaxation and ease. We are not searching with our mind for past knowledge or trying to remember something we’ve learned before. Rather, our head center serves in this process by being open and receptive. It is not shut off or ignored but rests in the relief of not having to totally run the show and figure it all out. It has its place, and we can receive from our mind as well, in harmony with all of our centers of spiritual knowing and sources beyond ourselves (like our guides).
Other Guided Meditations to help experience our Spirit Guides
Sitting with Jesus – A guided experience of being with Jesus from Paul Smith
Meeting Your Spirit Guides – an introductory practice from Paul Smith
Into the Cloud of Witness – meeting guides through each of our four centers from Luke Healy
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN