5 Tips & Insights to Help You Work With Your Spirit Guides
Posted in Developing Psychic Abilities / The Spirit World on 05. Oct, 2009
One month ago, I launched my 6 week Spirit Guides Coaching Program, where I coach people to connect to their spirit guides and hear their intuition.
Nine people enrolled on this course and I am having such a blast teaching them. Well, actually I am not teaching them. For this course, I am channelling the lessons and homework from their spirit guides and passing it on to the students.
First of all, it is so interesting to see how everyone’s spirit guides teach differently. They just know where everyone’s strengths and blockages lie, so the lessons seem to get to the heart of the matter quite quickly.
And often, it has required a lot of trust and non-attachment on my part channelling lessons and homework from other people’s spirit guides – because sometimes I don’t see how the homework is going to help the student until AFTER they’ve done it.
So this program has been a big growth process so far for both me and the students, and I must say how fun it is to work with people one-on-one continuously – I love it!
What I’ve Learned so far…
I thought I knew quite a bit about psychic development before I started this program. (I’ve been reading about psychic development and experimenting with it for more than ten years.) But this program has really expanded my understanding of how our spirit guides and higher selves communicate with us.
So, in this blog post, I will share several insights that I’ve heard repeatedly from everyone’s spirit guides over the last few weeks. I figured that if different spirit guides keep banging on about the same things to different people it’s worth repeating on my blog.
I hope this article gives you some useful ideas to enlist the help of your guides if you haven’t already. If you’re new to working with your spirit guides, you might also want to read this article which is an introduction: ‘How to Work with your Spirit Guides.’
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Insight #1: Your spirit guides are as good as unemployed if you don’t know what you want help with.
Your Spirit Guides can help you get from A to B, in alignment with your soul’s highest path and purpose – that’s their job. On the other hand, it’s YOUR job to decide what you want from your life, set the intentions, and ask for help, guidance and impulses.
Spirit Guides keep saying to me that their help regularly goes unused because people often don’t know what they want in their life, or they’re not admitting it to themselves.
So they go around with hazy, wishy-washy, half-formed intentions and expect their guides to sort of help and intervene in some way. But how can your spirit guides intervene when you aren’t even clear on what you want help with?
No spirit guide on this program so far has told anyone what they want (or done anything they weren’t asked to do) even though I’m sure it would be easier for us if we were just told what we want out of life. The thing is, the spirit guides need you to work out that bit for yourself by trying things on for size, energetically. They may also help you with hints and shoves in the right direction, but ultimately you have to figure out experientially, what you want.
So, it definitely seems that most Spirit Guides like clear intentions and even goals to work with. Tell them what you want. Write it down, write them a letter; ask for help.
You don’t need to know how you are going to get or have what you want. That’s not even your job. Your job, according to them, is to allow yourself to want what you really want in your heart and focus on the WHAT, not on the HOW.
They will help with the how if you put out the clear intention for the what. But if you don’t get clear on the what, the how won’t ever come about.
How you can get clear on what you want
One of my students was told to design his ideal life – including his career, relationships, and the details of his daily life. His guides told him to make a chart with three columns – things he’d like to discard and get rid of altogether about his current life, things he’d like to introduce and things he’d like to keep. I don’t know if this person is necessarily going to transform his life overnight (or maybe he will, who knows!), but I’m sure this exercise has given him some clarity on what he wants his spirit guides to help him transform – including what he’s moving away from and what he wants to move towards.
This exercise is a good one to use for getting clear on what you want, if you can come to it with an element of playfulness and fun. After all, if you change your mind, it’s no big deal.
Insight #2: You will be getting guidance – it’s just that some of your intuitive insights might be going unnoticed because they come as thoughts.
Kind of unhelpful, huh?
One thing that spirit guides keep saying is that intuitive guidance, insights and impulses get missed often and so it helps to become more observant and perceptive when it comes to your own thoughts. Intuitive guidance can be really subtle. That’s fair enough. I mean, if it knocked us over the head really hard once every two minutes then that’d be no fun and we’d feel obliged to follow it. You’d be like a slave to your spirit guides. And then you’d have a get-outta-my-head-and-stop-trying-to-control-me revolution where you rebel against it and everything would go to hell.
RIP, Greenie…
I had a moment this weekend when I had intuitive guidance that I didn’t realize was intuitive guidance. My mum accidentally killed our budgie and I could have prevented it but I didn’t recognize my intuition for what it was.
On Saturday afternoon, we still had two live budgies – Whitey and Greenie – and my mum was in the habit of feeding them dandelion leaves and eucalyptus leaves because apparently it makes them want to have baby budgies. (She likes breeding things for some reason…maybe because she grew up on a farm!) But on Saturday, she also threw in some other weed in for good measure and the male budgie ate some and within a few hours was staggering around on the floor of the cage, and then died.
Actually, she killed the last one that way too without realizing what it was that killed it. (So, if you have a budgie and you want it to breed, please overcome the urge to feed your budgie weeds – take it from me, most weeds are not a budgie aphrodisiac.)
Anyway, just as I saw her pull up the weed, the words formed in my head ‘you’re going to poison them!’ but I didn’t say it and it felt more like a joke than a warning, probably because me and my mum are always joking anyway. I failed to save the budgie, because I didn’t pay attention to my thought, which I thought was just a throwaway joke!
So that Whitey doesn’t get lonely, we got a new budgie we called Bertie who doesn’t make any noise, probably because the other budgie has terrified him by telling him what happened to her last two mates. Check him out. He’s the green one.
He hasn’t really got the hang of mirrors 
Speaking of which…
Insight #3: Intuitive feedback doesn’t just come from Spirit Guides, it’s in everything…
Peoples’ Spirit Guides are frequently pointing out to them that the whole world is just a big (yes, you guessed it!) MIRROR that reflects your inner being back to you. We can see a whole lot just by reading what is occurring around us – the people we’re attracting, the way our body feels, the physical clutter or space around us and how we feel emotionally are all intuitive feedback. Our desires are perhaps the most important intuitive feedback of all.
Look at the symbols which crop up in your life…
If your ears hurt, what hurts for you to hear right now? If your roof is leaking, what is leaking in your life? (maybe your emotions are suppressed and trying to get out.) If you lost something, why did it happen? Do you even need it? If your mum accidentally kills two male budgies in a row, what the heck does that mean?
Basically, what is everything showing you? If you can approach life with an attitude of ‘everything happens for a reason and in perfect timing’, then you can live an intuitive life that flows and you can see intuitive feedback in everything.
Insight #4: Feel free to get it wrong once in a while
Many of the people on this program worry about ‘getting it wrong’ and imagining things.
How do we tell intuiton from imagination?
In my experience, the most powerful indicator of real intuition is a ‘feeling’ – an energetic signature – that accompanies real intuition. It’s like a feeling of certainty and excitement that tells you that your insight or impulse is ‘spot on’. What if you don’t get that? The spirit guides tell me that in the beginning, while you’re learning, that energetic signature is not very strong. You develop it by getting things right and getting things wrong.
That’s right – you might need to get it wrong once in a while.
Some people’s spirit guides have even given them exercises to read people and asked the student to come up with wrong answers. They want the student to see what it feels like to be totally, utterly “off” and wrong. And then sometimes the student gets insightful stuff that accompanies the ‘wrong’ information and she can feel the difference clearly between information is totally, way “off” and information that’s actually true.
The guides told me that if you never get wrong information as a psychic, you’d never improve your level of accuracy.
Insight #5: Invite your spirit guides into your dream and ask specific questions.
Contacting your spirit guides is easy in a dream because you are in a non-physical state while you’re in the astrals, dreaming. And if you want to try receiving intuitive guidance through dreams, the spirit guides have given this tip to one student:
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- Write a question on a post it note and leave it next to your bed.
- Ask your spirit guides to send you a dream that answers the question just before you wake up.
- When you wake, make sure you explore the metaphors and messages within the dream by journaling about it soon after – this is one half of the process. The guides say that many messages can only be revealed upon reflection and journaling, or by discussing it with a friend and getting their interpretation on the dream.
The interesting thing with this exercise is that instead of answering your question, the spirit guides may instead give you information they think is more important than your question! They do that, the gits.
If you’re working on communicating with your spirit guides, I hope you found some of these tips useful.
Got any comments or questions about what I wrote here? Talk to me
Great post Anna, I like the way you describe things in a practical way.
I have been finding recently my dreams have been getting alot clearer, normally within half an hour of waking up I’ve figured the message (I’m finding the first or second thought of what it ‘means’ usually feels right). Spirit guide wise, I don’t feel confident that i am ‘connecting’ with them but have wondered if messages come though our thoughts as you describe and as you say trial and error, will strengthen this.
Thanks for another interesting post Anna.
Jen
PS – Love to Greenie x
Jen´s last blog ..The ebb and flow of life
(Love the little budgie pic.
Gorgeous birds, by the way, I have two cockatiels of my own.)
It’s funny you should mention the “reality mirror” thing – until this year, I had an immune system of steel. In spite of major depression and anxiety, I had not been sick for years (with exceptions for anxiety-induced sickness – for instance, have you ever felt so worried you almost threw up? I’m talking about that kind of “sick”). But then this year that all changed – I’ve been sick three times since January (the first time rather violently with a nasty virus that took down a couple of other students, too) and less than a month after the last time, I just developed a bit of a nasty cough.
Every time I’ve been sick it’s involved a cold/cough or, er, things to that effect.
At the same time, I’ve begun to emotionally reject what’s around me. I long to get out from under my parents’ roof and yet I often feel trapped by what I view as “out there”. I should probably be wondering why I see society in itself as a cage more than anything else.
Thank you for number 4 – I’m terrified of getting things wrong. My belief is often very shaky and while I don’t doubt /other/ peoples’ experiences or beliefs, for some reason I wonder if /I’m/ insane or something. Knowing I can get it wrong is relieving.
I wish I could say I wasn’t afraid of my guides still – truth is, I am. I’m scared of asking them for something, and never getting it (or worse: actually getting it and relearning “be careful what you wish for”. That’s actually happened a couple of times, minorly) and then being afraid of being wrong – not about small things, but about my entire beliefs. Or I’m scared of getting what I want but being too afraid to meet them halfway and then making their help in vain. Because these beliefs mean a lot to me and gave me comfort and heck, helped me at my darkest hours, and I always feel afraid that one day I’ll stop believing, or find reason to. I know it doesn’t work that way, though – that I have to believe and allow first.
Thank you, so much, for your posts. They give me a lot of clarity and guidance when I need them most.
(And, bah, sorry for the long comment. One day I won’t be so depressing, I swear!)
Hi Anna,
I think I know what you mean when you talk about this feeling of certainty and excitement, but I actually was afraid of it until now! When dowsing confirmed my feeling, I thought my subconscious must be just conforming to my wild guess, so I always got doubts and tended to discard the answer when having this excited feeling of knowing. ’cause, how would I know, huh? :þ
So, thank you very, very much for your post.
Love,
Rose.
Rose´s last blog ..Anti-Manipulation Mindset
Wow Anna, this was a great article. I skimmed it, but I’ll be getting back deeper into it. I think this article bears rereading
I like the look of your course. I might do it in two months… or maybe later. I’m going to start a book by Andrea Hess soon (when I get a moment to breathe!) and might be doing some courses with a guy in Barcelona called Carmelo. Really cool guy, he did an energy healing in a house of a friend, and a day later when I visited the energy of the place was like mountain air… it was as if he had nuked the entire house with light. Like, WTF.
If you meet my spirit guides in the ether somewhere give them my regards
Andrew
Andrew Gubb´s last blog ..Question everything
Fantastic post Anna,
I love the insights that you shared. The message I keep being given on Spirit Guides is that because they are so close to you, and have been for so much of your life, it can be very difficult at first to separate out your voice from your guides’ voices.
I think the advice on having very clear intentions is spot on. I used to meditate and then ask my guides to ‘tell me what I needed to know’. Talk about woolly intentions! Now if I set a clear intention and ask for guidance I either get a clear thought or someone phones me or emails me on just that subject. The message comes through somehow.
Great post
Nicci Redfearn´s last blog ..Self-Confidence – Your Style.
I love this article! Over the past week I’ve been learning to look out for those little signs and it’s amazing how much has been shown to me since I’ve been open to it.
I’m still not getting too much in my dreams when I’ve been asking my guides on the post it note, but I haven’t been asking them to show me in the dream JUST before I wake up so I’ll change it to that. The one night that it did work, I got a very clear message that answered what I’d asked beautifully.
Oh, and poor little Greenie!!
Fran´s last blog ..Finding The Good In The Bad Is Easier Than You Think
Whoa, Anna — Thanks for THIS post! I’ve been feeling for several months now that I really want to connect with my spirit guides. I know they’re there, I refer to them often, and here you are helping me understand so much about them. Like Andrew, this bears re-reading and maybe even copying/pasting onto a document so I can refer to it often.
Sorry about Greenie, but as you say, all things happen for purpose; I ‘m guessing Greenie’s saying to himself, “Mission Accomplished” — the lesson about listening to your thoughts.
Jeanne´s last blog ..Just Another Day in Paradise
Hi Jen, thanks for your comment!
Yes, trial and error really is the key and like you, I find that your first or second thought is usually the one that’s spot on.
Hi Zora, yeah, they are cute. Interesting about your cough. I used to get a lot of coughs when I was working in jobs I didn’t like. I noticed that I got them at times when I was really pissed off about it. I used to call them ‘protest coughs’ and then when I bought Louise Hay’s book You can heal your life, in there it said that a cough is a desire to be heard and listened to. Which is sort of related to the protest thing.
I noticed in this course that the guides encourage us to be playful and light-hearted in intuitive development – you don’t need to be scared of getting it wrong or worried about them helping you in vain. They’re pretty patient and non-attached
Hi Rose – glad that tip was helpful for you!
Hi Andrew! I’d so love to have you on my course in the future. It sounds like you are having a lot of fun exploring at the moment.
Thanks Nicci!
Love your new site and pics- v.nice!
Hi Fran, Thanks for your comment. That’s cool you are having some success with the dream method.
Hi Jeanne – I’m really glad you found this helpful. Yes, I think you might be right about Greenie and that lesson. You know, what’s interesting is that the last budgie died the day I split up with my boyfriend. I think animals come in to teach us things and often I see them mirroring things.
Ok, I gotta admit. I went into this article thinking I wouldn’t get anything out of it. I’m not quite sure where ‘spirit guides’ fit in my experience of life.
But, and that’s a big BUT, you hit me over the head with a few home truths that I really needed to read right now.
And in the course of that, it also helped me to understand that the word spirit guide is just another way to explain tuning into our internal wisdom.
Different language, same experience.
So thanks, you rock
KL
Kara-Leah´s last blog ..How yoga has the power to transform and release avidya (self-ignorance)
Hi KL, Yeah that is a good point. I was hung up on spirit guides for a while when I first started tuning in to spiritual guidance. I thought what’s the point of consulting spirit guides when I can consult my higher self. Although I still think it’s best to tune into the higher self first, I have noticed the spirit guides have their own unique vantage points too on our ‘stuff’ and our lives. Thanks for your comment!
“If you never get wrong information as a psychic, you’d never improve your level of accuracy” — ‘The Guides’ definitely wanted me to see this. It can be discouraging to find you’ve misinformed yourself.. but those moments of accuracy make up for everything!
Jessica ‘Eleven’ Daniel- Consciously Birthing´s last blog ..Hiatus Hi-schmatus!
Hi Anna,
Thank you for all of the information and guidance in this article. I’ve started to realise the importance of tuning in to my guides, and some of the tips you’ve given in this article helped me clarify things. Very much appreciate you sharing this.
Thanks,
Rosh.
Roshni´s last blog ..Attitudes, values and beliefs
Re: your guidance regarding Greenie, I had a simialr experience yesterday (quite to my surprise!). I was driving in to uni to meet with my supervisor, and as I parked I heard a voice inside myself saying ‘if you park here, you’ll get a parking fine!’. Having parked in that spot for months without getting a fine, I dismissed the thought, and instead went on my way… and then when i got back to my car, there it was! I almost felt bad, then realised that I had asked for guidance from my guides, and here it was, and so I laughed instead.
Roshni´s last blog ..Childhood – a poem
Wow, funny (well, not the bit about the fine!)
I do stuff like that too. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an inconvenient warning, ignored it and then been sorry