5 Things You Should Know About Spirit Guides

February 17th, 2020

If you’re remotely interested in psychic development, sooner or later someone will mention spirit guides. A friend might talk about being told or “given” something by their guide, or those developing their psychic gifts will excitedly tell you about having met their guide. Which leaves you feeling let down or anxious because, well, you don’t have a guy called White Cloud directing your every move. Should you have? Not necessarily. Here are five things you should know about spirit guides.

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1 You Won’t Necessarily Ever “Meet” Your Guides

As far as we can possibly tell, most people have a number of spirit guides, whether they are aware of them or not. But, crucially, many successful mediums and psychics don’t know who their guides are, and have not “met” them, if by meeting them we mean having a mental conversation or seeing a vision. Many people do, and many more people convince themselves they have, but not everyone does. And that’s OK. You’ll know that your guides are around you and working with you if your psychic development progresses.

2 Your Guides Don’t Necessarily Have Names

Following on from the above point, if you do meet or sense your guides in a meditation or a dream, they may not tell you their names. Often this seems to be because, as spirit energy, their earthly names are no longer important to them. Sometimes it can be because it is not in your interests to know a name, because telling you a name may bring alive certain preconceptions in your mind which would hinder your psychic work. If your guide tells you a name, then by all means use it when you connect with him or her, or when talking about him or her, but if a name is not given, this doesn’t make your guide any less real. You’re perfectly free to give him or her any name you choose, for ease of reference.

3 Not All Guides Have Exotic or Spiritually Advanced Backgrounds

Contrary to popular belief, not all spirit guides are Native Americans, shamans, nuns or ancient Chinese monks. That we often perceive them as such may well say more about us than it does about the actual spirit energy we’re dealing with. Spirit guides can be anyone, from any walk of life or culture, from hundreds of years ago or recently deceased. Often guides are family members or friends who have passed to spirit; sometimes they might be associated with your profession or the part of the world you come from; at other times the guide might choose to work with you because of similar personalities. Sometimes, guides are not even human – you may have an affinity with an animal guide, or a being not from earth. It’s not all about the great and the good and the spiritually advanced, so don’t fret if your guide has no such claim to fame.

4 Your Guides Will Change Over Time

While it seems likely that at least one spirit guide stays with us throughout our lives, most of the others seem to pop in and out, or to stay with us during a particular time in our lives, before moving on, to be replaced by a new guide with new work for us to do. It can be disconcerting for those developing their psychic abilities if they think they have connected with “their” guide, only to find that a few months later that connection no longer seems to exist and instead they find themselves dealing with a different entity all together. We don’t understand and cannot understand how it works, but it appears that the guides around you at any time are those you need the most; those you no longer need so much are probably busy working with someone else.

5 Your Guides Will Not – Ever – Tell You What to Do

If you hear someone saying that Blue Elk has told them to ditch their boyfriend or move to a new city, they’re mistaking their own intuition for spirit intervention. Guides are there to guide us – the clue is in the name – not to boss us around. We all retain free will, and spirit guides do not attempt to intervene in that. Their role is to help engineer life circumstances and insight which will gently prod us in the right direction, but they do not give orders or instructions.

The whole area of spirit guides is a controversial one. After all, nobody can prove that they actually exist, and some psychics and mediums do not believe in guides at all, preferring to believe that the guidance the receive is from their own higher consciousness. Nobody can say who is right and who is wrong, but it’s very important not to be discouraged in your psychic development by playing “compare the guides”.

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About the author:

Nikki Harper is a spiritualist writer, astrologer, and editor for Wake Up World. She writes about divination, astrology, mediumship and spirituality at Questionology: Astrology and Divination For the Modern World where you can also find out more about her work as a freelance astrologer and her mind-body-spirit writing and editing services. Nikki also runs a spiritualist centre in North Lincs, UK, hosting weekly mediumship demonstrations and a wide range of spiritual development courses and workshops.