How to connect with your spirit guides

Did you know we all have spirit guides? Not the scary af ones, but friendly spirits who have your best interest at heart. They’re here to help us and guide us through the ups and downs of life. There’s way to connect and speak to them too, so we spoke to spiritual healer, Alex Edgar, who broke it down for us:

Connecting with your spirit guides is definitely a milestone that many of us aspire to in our path as intuitive, healers and psychics.  For some people, this happens naturally, while for others it can take some time and effort to establish a conscious connection and working relationship with our guides.

Do I need to connect with my guides?

No. Your guides will help you even if you do not know their names or anything about them. However, it is lovely to know who your guides are and what they are here to help you with.

How many guides do we have?

Most people have a small handful of guides - some are with us to deal with particular issues. For example, if you are a healer, you may have a guide who is contracted to help you with this particular work.  Everyone has at least one guide who is with them from early childhood until death, who watches over and accompanies us throughout our lives.

Is it safe to connect with my spirit guides?

Yes, with discernment. You don’t want to be like the baby bird in “Are you my mother?” So innocent you can’t see who is your guide and who isn’t. Your guides are not your spiritual superiors. They are usually people who were your friends in past lives, and their relationship with you is one of a peer who can see things from a different and more elevated vantage point. 

Your guides will often prefer you to figure things out without help and watch you making mistakes again and again without intervening. My friend and I often say we feel like they are laughing at us as we stumble along exploring mystical worlds and practices. And sometimes like we are in a complicated game of charades, trying to figure what they have come through to help us with and how.

Your guide will always feel warm and loving and will never try to manipulate or deceive you.

How do I know I have connected with my guide?

You will feel a warm loving human presence that feels safe, trustworthy and wise, and that does not in any way try to steal your thunder or tell you what to do (unless you are standing with your back to a speeding train of course.) Usually, your guide feels familiar somehow. This is because you already know one another and have been together on the other side as friends and colleagues.

Alright then, how do I connect with my guides?

Ask. Ask them to connect with you. No you don’t need to meditate first. Just give them permission to get in touch and ask for help with specific issues. And be patient. They know when the time is right better than you because they have a better vantage point in the spirit world than you do. 

I asked and nothing happened. How else can I do it?

1. Spiritual growth

Yes. I asked for about 25 years and nothing happened. Then one day I said disparagingly to a friend just as she was about to do a healing on me: “Yes, it used to be very fashionable to connect with your spirit guides at one point.” Ha! and as soon as I had stepped out of that state of reverence for my guides, they started coming through. Much to my friend’s shock, because my primary guide took great delight in surprising us with an amazingly strong presence and actually send healing through her hands, which was a very powerful experience.

So the first step is to clear the obstacles that are standing in the way of communication by working on your spiritual growth and healing. You may need stronger personal boundaries before your guides are ready to connect with you consciously.

2. Visit a medium

Some very talented people can see and hear your guides as clear as day, and can tell you their names, earth histories, appearances and what they are here to help you with.

3. Guided meditation

There are many guided meditations that you can do to help you get in touch with your guides on a conscious level. They involve certain universal steps:

1. Get calm - usually by focussing on relaxing and breathing

2. Get centred - usually by feeling bodily sensations and a connection to the earth

3. Set up protection - Say with strong determination: “Only beings in service to Divine will contact me during this meditation. I am specifically reaching out to my personal guides, and not to any old riff-raff that is passing by.” or words to that effect. 

4. Alter your state of consciousness - there are many steps and techniques you can use. Such as travelling to an imaginary safe place in your mind’s eye, or focussing on your third eye while sitting very straight. Or practising self-hypnosis: “With every out-breath, I will enter deeper into a state of trance from which I will be able to hear and see my guides.”

5. See what happens - Suspend judgement, allow your mind free reign and let your imagination soar. You can decide later what is true and so on. See if you can create a connection, see a face, ask for a name to come up or the first letter for your guide’s name. You can always try again, so relax and let things flow.

6. Get help - communicating consciously with Spirit takes energy for you and for the beings on the other side, so they like to use the opportunity to do something worthwhile, having made all that effort. So see if you can figure out what your guide would like you to know or to do - for example, you may need to visit someone who needs your help or stop being too hard on yourself. Your guides may also be more open to communicating with you if they have a goal to accomplish at the same time…

7. Say thank you and goodbye - Work with boundaries - just like with other people in your life. Especially at first, you need a definite ending to your meeting and meditation.

8. Send out some goodwill - end your session with gratitude to the world and compassion for yourself and others. This keeps your practice and learning process positive, fun and happy. Good vibes make it easier for light beings to make contact with you and keeps the riff-raff away too.
by Alex Edgar at allalignedhealing.com