Your connection with your spirit team is one of the greatest life gifts you can have. I talk to my guides daily, and usually multiple times a day. Even when the going gets tough, it is hard to feel unloved or lonely when you always have your guides supporting you.
Photo by Ashley Batz
In this article, I’m going to show you how you can get in touch with your personal team. I will talk mostly about meeting your spirit guides, but the process works the same for contacting your higher self or angels. I talk to my higher self too, but I am much closer to my guides. As you work with these beings, you will have your own preferences on who you resonate most with, but how you connect with any and all of them will be the same.
Throw out any assumptions you may have
Your spirit guides won’t always be human, they could be animals, ETs, or plants. They won’t always be from this time period, they may be from the past or future. They also may not be anything you have seen before, not even in mythology. They may work individually or as a team. You may have just one or you may have many.
For me, my guides are all animals. None are animals found on earth, some are mythological creatures we know about, some are animals that aren’t found in any story on our planet. I don’t work with any of them individually, they work as a collective. This never gets confusing as even though they are each unique, they always respond as one voice and one mind.
Another assumption you need to release is what your relationship and communication with them will be like. You may or may not see what they look like, you may or may not know what they smell like, you may or may not hear them or know their names.
The common advice out there on how to connect with your spirit guides is to do a visual meditation that takes you to a peaceful location where your guide presents him/herself visually before you start talking. Sometimes you are encouraged to ask for the guide’s name. But in truth, you do not need to know what your guides or Higher Self look like or what their names are to have a full relationship with them.
We are all psychic, but how we receive and interpret that information differs from person to person. If you are clairvoyant, you will see images, movie clips, symbols and what your guides look like. If you are clairaudient you will hear sounds or their words. If you are clairsentient, you will receive information through emotions and sensations. Often you have more than one psychic modality. I will have an article that goes into the various modalities soon.
I encourage meditation as well which we will get to in a second, but I suggest a different way that isn’t focused on just one, or really any, psychic modality.
Meditate, but listen
As I mentioned, meditating is an important part of connecting with your guides. As you get more comfortable communicating with them, you will be able to get in touch with them without going into a full on meditation every time you need to talk. But a full on meditation is a great place to start.
And it is useful to meditate with them a few times a week because even though you will be able to connect with them on the go, there is nothing like having an in depth guidance session with them. I get so many epiphanies when I sit down to have a deep conversation with them. Those are some of my favorite days :)
The meditation process I suggest is to set aside 30-45 minutes to meet with them. For the first 3-5 minutes, take deep, slow, long breaths and relax your body. When you relax your body, you relax your mind.
For the next 5 minutes or so, do your best to either think about nothing or to focus on one thing. To think about nothing, just see in your mind’s eye a black void. Or imagine nothing in a way that makes sense to you. Maybe you prefer a white void or to focus on silence.
To focus on one thing, imagine a green dot, simple symbol you like or quiet forest if you like visual meditations. Focus on a sound frequency in your mind or on the sound of the air conditioning in the room you’re in if you connect better through auditory means. If you can focus better on feelings, focus on a happy feeling in your solar plexus area. If you prefer sensations, focus on tingling sensations on your skin.
As you meditate, if thoughts start to creep in, that is 100% ok! You aren’t trying to be a monk or yogi here. You’re trying to connect with the team that always has your back.
As these thoughts start to creep in, pay attention to them. How do these thoughts show up, are they images, thoughts, words? Do you feel sensations in your body?
What kinds of thoughts are coming up and how do they make you feel? If they make you feel worse, notice that, then let that thought go. If they are fun, exciting, interesting or make you feel good, pay attention to those, they are key.
Follow those positive thoughts. If they come to you in images, watch the images, if they come to you in words, listen to the words. If they come in emotions, what do you think the emotions mean? If it’s in sensations, what are those sensations like? Get caught up in these positive thoughts.
This goes against conventional meditation wisdom. But I recommend this because those positive, encouraging thoughts are often your guides talking to you! As you pay attention to these thoughts, your guides will know they can speak to you this way and they will start becoming clearer and more specific in what they share.
So spend the next 10-15 minutes just listening to these thoughts. Another major benefit of doing this is as you start paying attention to these thoughts, you will start to pick up on them as you go about your day, even when you’re not in meditation mode!
And your internal, self-awareness will make objects, words, etc. in your daily life stand out to you. When this happens these are signs from your guides and higher self. They don’t just speak to you in meditation, they are speaking to you always.
So to recap, set aside 30-45 minutes to meet your spirit guides.
Spend the first 5 minutes breathing deep and relaxing your body
Spend the next 5 minutes thinking of nothing or focusing on just one thing
Spend the next 10-15 minutes observing your thoughts and being inquisitive about the positive ones
For the remaining 10-25 minutes ask your guides questions that are on your mind
We will cover asking questions in the next section.
Before we get to that, if you would like more in depth information on how to sit, breathe, relax your body and a host of other meditation specifics, join my free, 5-day empath survival course. On Day 4 I talk about meditation from beginning to end and also include 10+ meditation ideas you can use.
Don’t require immediate answers
In the last part of your 30-45 minute spirit guides session you can ask your guide questions that are on your mind.
Notice I haven’t asked you to see what your guide looks like or ask what their name is. You will get all that information naturally as you keep talking to your guides. That information is not needed to have a full relationship with your spirit team.
If you would like to use your Q&A time to ask what they look like or what their name is, that’s fine. But in the beginning, I would focus on more important questions you have on your mind. As you get better at communicating with your guides, you can ask all sorts of details about them. But growing that connection is, in my opinion, the most important to begin with.
When you ask your questions, do not require an immediate answer from them. If you are just starting to meditate and/or communicate with them, it will be hard for you to trust the answers you receive. So ask, and if you get an answer, great. If not, no biggie!
You may say that it is easier said than done to ask a question and be ok with not getting an answer. But just because you don’t get an immediate answer doesn’t mean you won’t get one at all. Once you are done asking questions and you bring the meditation to a close, whatever wasn’t answered will be answered later.
As you go through your day, you will suddenly “know” the answer to questions you asked. You may turn on the TV or talk to a friend and they say something that answers your question. You may read a book and find the answer there. The answer will turn up, one way or another.
And as I said in the previous section, meditation will tune you into these signs so you will pick up on them at levels you hadn’t before. It will be like the whole world exists to answer your questions and help you out!
Trust
There is one more important component to all of this and that is trust. You must trust in yourself and trust in your spirit guides and/or higher self.
It will be hard to trust the answers you receive in the beginning. You may feel like you are making them up. This is why it is important to let go of the need for an answer. Because if you try to force it, you will second guess yourself.
Ask and then let the answer come to you however it wants. That can be an immediate answer, a “knowing” later or through signs from what others around you say, things you read, songs you hear, etc.
If I don’t get an immediate answer, I often get it later that day, but sometimes it takes up to a week. For bigger, more complicated questions, it can take a few months but for most I get answers within a day to a few days.
If you get an answer but worry you are making it up, don’t worry. This happens to the best of us. Your guides will send you signs to back it up if you are in doubt.
Your guides want you to live your happiest, best life. This means that they WANT to talk to you. And they will take any opportunity they get to do so. So just by doing a little bit of meditation effort, you are opening up so many doors for them to speak to you. And so many doors for them to confirm and re-confirm their messages to you if you misheard or are in doubt.
With practice you will be able to communicate with each other more fluidly and you will also gain more trust throughout the process. Just take the first steps, have fun, and do your best to trust until you’ve had so much experience trusting is rarely a question for you anymore.