Based on a conversation last night I decided to read more about how to connect and work with Spirit Guides. Today while searching the web for a site that had articles bout this subject but wasn't too far out there I discovered the blog by Anna Sayce - Psychic But Sane. I love it because I understand her point of view. She is practical but spiritual. The name of her blog says it all!

There are so many informative articles posted and I can't wait to explore them as time allows. You can check out the articles at: http://www.psychicbutsane.com/articles

Hope you enjoy the article by Anna and that it helps you connect with your Guide(s)!!

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What are Spirit Guides & How to Work With Them

We are all blessed with spirit guides who surround us and support us. We usually have between four and seven guides in our inner circle. Our primary spirit guide is with us from birth. The rest of the guides tend to join our spirit guide team throughout childhood, teenage years and early twenties. Their assistance can be practical or spiritual in nature.

Here are some tips for getting to know your guides and working with them:

Know What Spirit Guides Can Help You With

We all go through the veil of amnesia when we incarnate. Most of us forget who we are as souls, where we’ve come from and what the heck we’re doing here. Spirit guides know that it is challenging to be incarnated here at Earth school AND keep a connection to your higher self and your soul’s purpose.

The role of your guides is to gently but consistently guide you via intuitive nudges to stay on track with your soul’s purpose. In addition, if something is in your purpose to accomplish, you will find support from your spirit guides in that endeavour. They will hook you up with resources, people, money, books to help you reach your goals. They can offer insight and comfort when you feel lost.

But there is one important condition to the help they can give us and this condition serves us:

Your spirit guides will only help you to accomplish and achieve things that honour the purpose that YOU set for yourself before you incarnated.

I personally know it is not in my soul’s purpose to win a million pounds on the lottery. I don’t have a project to accomplish at this time in my life that requires that kind of money. Instead, I know I would benefit from the growth I would experience in utilizing my talents to tap into abundance. So if I asked my spirit guides to help me win the lottery, I’m pretty certain they wouldn’t oblige.

I also have a friend who wanted his guides to help him win betting on racing dogs! The guides really weren’t interested in helping him, for the same reason mine wouldn’t help me win on the lottery.

How to Begin Enlisting the Help of Your Guides

Contrary to what you’d think, you don’t need to have really well developed psychic abilities to begin working with your spirit guides. You may not be able to perceive them at all times but your guides can certainly perceive you. You only need to set an intention and they will pick up on it. Address them out loud and they will hear you.

One way of setting your guides to work is to request their help with specific goals.

I have got into the habit of doing this automatically by writing down my goals for the coming week and month and I ask my guides for help in achieving each of my goals.

So here’s an example list of goals:

I would like X amount of money to decorate my new home

I would like to work with X number of clients next month

I’d like to spend X more hours per week of quality time with my partner

I’d like to be a more tolerant mother to my children and remain calm when they are acting out

I’d like more fun and laughter in my life

Read this aloud:

“My spirit guides, my spirit guides, my spirit guides, I request your assistance in achieving the following goals, provided these goals are aligned with my highest path and purpose and in the highest good of all. Please impulse me so that I can recognize assistance and opportunities when they manifest. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Why do you have to do this? Surely guides should already know where and when they could provide assistance? In fact, your guides will not intervene until you ask them to because to do so would violate your free will. This is why consciously enlisting their help is powerful. It effectively transfers some of your vital life force to them that they can use on your behalf in the spiritual. And of course everything manifests from the spiritual (or energetic) plane into the physical, not the other way round.

Your spirit guides work to help you manifest your desires into the physical, often in ingenious ways! I recently realized that I have a particular guide who hooks me up with the clients who could benefit from a session with me. Clients often report being prompted to get a reading with me in their dreams.

It’s not usually a good idea to ask for assistance to come to you in a very specific format. The wrong way to do it would be to say ‘please send more overtime work my way so that I can pay off my mortgage’.

Instead, say:

‘I would like to pay off X% of my mortgage by the end of the year, please hook me up with the resources and opportunities to make this happen’.

Be open-ended and the Universe will send you the resources you need in ingenious and creative ways. If you are attached to receiving help through a particular channel, you may miss or discard the help that shows up in other ways.

According to the above list, you could be gifted with some money to decorate your home or be offered second-hand items for your new home. You might get invited to a party or meet a new friend who is fun and makes you laugh. You may come across a book about conscious parenting to help you with raising your children. There are so many possibilities! Be open to them all by seeing the opportunity in every experience that comes your way.

Instruct your Guides, Do Not Pray to Them or Supplicate.

Many of us with a religious background have been taught that to invoke the spiritual means to pray, to ask very politely, or even to beg, stating one’s unworthiness. You do not have to do this with your spirit guides. They may be at a vantage point where they can see the bigger picture but they are no better or worse than you. See them as your helpers in spirit, rather than your superiors.

There really is no need to beg or to ask repeatedly. Begging or repeated requests may amuse the guides but it won’t set them to work faster!

Get to Know your Guides

Do you know what you guides’ names are? What they look like? What they do on your team? It’s important to know a bit about your guides before you can begin developing a close relationship with them. You wouldn’t begin a relationship with a real person without knowing their name and what their role is! Make the first move in your relationship with your guides. If you’re stuck with that first step of finding out that information, find someone who can tell you so that you can begin to get to know them.

My relationship with my guides began when I had a reading with psychic medium Erin Pavlina, who told me about my primary guide, who calls herself The Raven. Once Erin told me how this guide was helping me in my life, I saw how she had been helping me all along. And I began to take my spirit guides seriously.

Know How Your Spirit Guides Impulse You

To communicate with you, your spirit guides often choose the intuitive vehicle(s) that you’re most adept at using.

There are many intuitive gifts, but the basic four - clairvoyance, clairaudience,clairsentience and claircognizance cover most possibilities.

If you’re more visual, your spirit guide may pop into your mind’s eye with a message or an image that means something to you. If you’re clairaudient, you may become aware of an inner voice speaking to you or a lines from songs which appear in your head. Those who are claircognizant can have their guides ‘downloading’ information to them in the form of thought. I have very developed clairsentience and my guides impulse me with a funny tingling sensation on the side of my head. Once this happens, I know to listen carefully because a message usually comes through to me. They also impulse me with a cold, prickling sensation on my right thigh and the back of my calf. It makes me shiver and the hairs on that part of my leg stand on end!

Learn How to Distinguish Between Input from Guides and Input from Other Places

Guides have our best interests at heart. Their behaviour is very different from how a negative entity would behave or how your ego would talk to you. Here are some key differences between how a negative entity or your ego would treat you and how a spirit guide would treat you:

• Guidance from guides will always be uplifting and will raise your consciousness. It will honour the truth that you are the conscious creator of your life. It will hold you responsible for your life. By contrast, entities who align with negativity may have you believe that you need to do, have or be something in order to get to be the conscious creator of your life. They may encourage you to abdicate responsibility.
• Guides will not tell you what to do. They may recommend a course of action that aligns with your path, but they will ultimately leave it up to you.
• Guides obviously never get angry with you, or threaten. Guides do not deride or berate you. They are ever-patient and loving. Your guides may think you’re great but they won’t flatter your ego or encourage you to place yourself above others. The guides understand that none of these serve their agenda or yours.
• Spirit Guides have faith in your ability to get through issues and negative circumstances. They will be there for you and show great compassion for you, but they won’t ever throw you a pity party.

Understand the Guides’ Agenda and their Background

Spirit Guides are not that different from us. Obviously they’re not in a body but most of them have experienced a physical incarnation so they know what it’s like. Many of them have evolved beyond the point where they need to incarnate here and instead they are pursuing the next stage of their soul’s journey in the capacity of spirit guide. Assisting you serves them on their path of evolution, so they aren’t really doing you a favour as such. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. They do however love receiving gratitude for their work, so be sure to thank them.