Get Some Guides, Girl

You need a ‘team’! I believe this!

So, I usually start every week (and sometimes every day, every evening, every lunchtime) with a survey of the “woo woo” as it relates to my astrological chart, my human design, my tarot spreads and various other modalities that I’m unqualified to interpret. Fortunately, you don’t need to be an expert to work with these tools, just patient enough to mix some google research with your intuition.

These spiritual tools are probably intended to support transcendence from the “ego,” but as I’m still an unenlightened creature like all of us schmucks, I allow myself to revel in these varying perspectives on my favorite topic...ME! (But really, aren’t we all our own favorite topic in our heads? Might as well mix up the vocabulary with some planets and pentacles).

When I first heard the term “guides” referring to, say, ascended spirits, ancestors, angels and/or universal wise ones that some say “have your back”, I struggled to connect to the idea. I may have thought it was a bit of a cop out from facing my own life. I also didn’t grow up with a strong religious tie to the concept of angels or anything like that, so I never grew accustomed to the idea of feeling a celestial camaraderie.

Boy has that changed! I have a whole cast of characters that I talk to now (and no that doesn’t just include my lengthy chats with the dog during quarantine). My ‘guides’ help keep me introspective and asking questions. It’s so tempting in our culture to give in to the pull of distractions (and I still partake of many a mindless scroll-fest on instagram), but taking a few minutes here and there to frame some questions and interpret “answers” helps me to feel a bit more awake and intentional about my life. Tarot, for example, is a medium through which your guides can communicate as it offers a common language.

After reading my tarot regularly and frequently consulting my astrological natal chart and Human Design, I am convinced that “guides” are here for us, but they are more energetic and less “Dumbledore-ey” than I once thought. They can take on many forms and have endless powers of communication, but it is up to us to hone a skill or two that allows us to receive the messages they have to offer.

Like Paulo Coelho famously writes in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all of the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

If you’re into past lives, you may have come across the concept that souls travel together throughout lifetimes. When I heard this idea, it was the first time I really started to feel that there were allies circling around me. In Tibetan Buddhism, souls are said to reincarnate to continue working through karma, whether it’s a challenging or loving relationship there’s a kind of pact that you’ll keep pushing each other to shake off negative karma and move closer toward enlightenment. When I take away the urge to intellectualize, I intuitively know this is true. The people in our lives every day are also a type of guide, teaching us valuable lessons and nudging us towards “home.” I’ve had so many friends and lovers (no shame in SO many, and also the word ‘lovers’ is lame, but descriptive! ) that felt familiar early on, that I can’t help but ascribe to the idea that we’ve been through this before…trying time and again to nudge ourselves out of our bitchy little egos.

Whether they’re past life relationships, ancestors, ghosts, angels, goddesses, plants, empaths, teachers, gurus, famous people past or present, guides are basically offering to act as bumpers ushering us out of the gutters of our lives, and they really only require that we ask a question or two in order for them to show up for us.

And if that is still too “woo woo” for you, consider that everything we see is ultimately a projection of our own understanding and subconscious. So guides may simply be an extension of our own consciousness, helping us to help ourselves do the hard work of “going home” to who we really are.  

I had a therapist once who asked me to construct a “team.” This would be a group of people that I could summon up in my imagination to support my expansion and to cheer me on during dark times. She said not to choose anyone too close to my inner circle, as that would be colored with emotion. 

This felt embarrassing at first, but I found myself drawing on my “team” so regularly that I began to feel like their presence was floating around me always in a swirl of support that gave me confidence I didn’t know I had (or maybe that was just Lena Dunham talking because I put her on my team to inspire raw confidence).

When we choose our own ‘team’ we can invest in cultivating qualities we’d like to see in ourselves. When we work with a team, or reach out to our guides through tarot or meditation or astrology (or Akashic records, or past life regression, or human design, or numerology, or pendulums, etc…), we help deprogram our conditioning and elevate our sense of self through inquiry. This doesn’t mean giving yourself over to some higher power, it means strengthening our powers of inquiry and analysis in order to realize our highest self. See?! You need that!

Get your team and get going!