Preparing to Connect with Your Spiritual Guidesby Liza M. Wiemer"...The book Extraordinary Guidance: How to Connect with Your Spiritual Guides [teaches] you to connect with your guides in a simple, step-by-step manner. We will examine day-to-day issues and how your spiritual guides lovingly help you. We want you to see yourself in the examples we provide and know that you, too, can receive daily guidance that will make your life more beautiful and less complicated. Your guidance will depend on your needs and God's will. Most of your communications will be with a guide who has been with you for a long time. Rejoice, for this guide understands you well and is thrilled with the opportunity to help you. God bless you, and go in peace." This is Chapter Four from Liza's new book. You may wonder why it's necessary to prepare for spiritual connection, since Wil [a spirit guide] arrived in my life without any apparent effort or preparation on my part. The explanation is fairly simple. In a sense, I had been preparing for connection even though I had not been aware of doing so. In looking back on the year before Wil's early morning visit, I realize that many extraordinary things had happened to me that I cannot easily dismiss as coincidence. I can attribute these occurrences only to divine guidance, because logic alone cannot provide credible explanations. Although my preparation was unconscious, you can prepare yourself in specific ways so that you may receive guidance consciously. Before beginning Wil's instructions, however, I want to emphasize that communicating with your guides is not about seeing starbursts of light and feeling ecstatic, although these things may happen. It is about maximizing your ability to help yourself, others, and the world. The experience of connection may be quite pleasant, but think of that pleasure as an incidental by-product. The point of connection is larger and more profound than the experience itself. Although you can receive guidance without asking for it, learning to communicate with your guides and consciously seek their assistance can have a tremendous impact on how you view yourself and the world. From personal experience and from teaching others to communicate with their guides, I can assure you that preparing for connection is not a complicated or taxing process. You need only three simple methods to get started:
1. Make time for prayer in your life. I'm convinced that my constant faith in God and my daily prayer life helped open my heart and mind to the possibility of having spiritual guides. The Bible is filled with stories of angelic intervention and divinely guided experiences, so I knew that such interaction was possible. Since I already believed that I was being watched over on some level, Wil's visit wasn't a complete surprise to me. Many people have asked me if their guides will appear to them in the middle of the night as Wil did. I tell them that this is highly unlikely. Wil made it very clear that the purpose of his visit was to get my attention so that I could help people become aware of their own guides and communicate with them. If such a specific role had not been selected for me, I know that Wil would not have been so dramatic. Develop a Prayer Life Daily prayer does not have to be formally structured as it is taught in religious schools or practiced in formal religious institutions. You can pray to God in a heartfelt, individual way. For as long as I can remember, I have had conversations with God through prayer. When I pray, I offer thanks and praise for the blessings I've received, express concern for family and friends, and ask for help with problems that I feel are difficult to understand or hard to bear. I also pray in the tradition of my Jewish faith by saying the Sh'ma (Sh'ma Yisra'el, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai, Ekhad. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One"). I attend a synagogue and recite prayers with my family at home. In whatever tradition you were raised or currently practice, regularly communing with God is the fuel that keeps the flame of faith burning. If you feel that the early training in prayer you received in your birth religion was mechanical or inadequate, or if you feel uncomfortable creating your own prayers, read some of the excellent books that have appeared recently prescribing deeper and more contemplative approaches to prayer, for instance, Larry Dossey's Prayer Is Good Medicine or How I Pray, edited by Jim Castelli. Although prayer is a very effective way to prepare for connection, connecting with your guides is no substitute for prayer. We do not pray to our guides, although, as God's messengers, they may convey God's answers to us in some form. The following example illustrates how prayer can open the door to guidance. A close friend named Beth told me how sad she felt after deciding not to fly home to visit her family. Having recently given birth to her third child, she hated the thought of her family not getting to meet her newborn son. But she and her husband had examined their financial situation and reluctantly agreed that the trip was impractical. With a heavy heart, she told me how she planned to pray for the ability to live with this decision. "Pray to accept this for now," I said, "but ask God to help you find a solution." Although she could not imagine an answer short of winning the lottery, she agreed to give this approach a try. A few weeks later, her mother called and said that she wanted to reimburse Beth for the frequent flyer ticket Beth had sent her earlier that summer. At first Beth refused her mother's offer because the ticket had been a gift. After thinking about it for several days, however, she realized her mother's offer had been the answer to her prayer. Beth called her mother to ask if her offer was still open and if she could use the money to purchase a plane ticket to fly home. Delighted, her mom agreed. A month later, Beth took her youngest child on his first plane ride "home." Increase Your Awareness of Guidance Apart from prayer, one of the best ways of preparing yourself for spiritual connection is increasing your awareness of guided experiences. You can do this by identifying situations that you believed were coincidences. You will usually find that they actually were not. Of course, some coincidences are just that and have no perceptible meaning, but when "coincidences" begin to accumulate and direct your attention to a certain person or event, it is wise to pay attention and look for a discernible pattern. Have you ever received a call from a friend shortly after you thought about him? If you can accept the possibility that the two of you tuned in to each other in some fashion, then consider communicating with your guides along similar lines, by "tuning" your consciousness to align with theirs. Think back over those times in your life -- whether they were momentous or seemingly mundane -- when things appeared to happen miraculously. Maybe a last-minute change of plans took you to a different restaurant, where you ran into an old friend and rekindled that friendship. Our lives are often filled with such simple occurrences that we somehow overlook. I've experienced plenty of these "chance meetings" or synchronistic events myself, and even though connection has become a natural part of my life, I am still astonished by them. One took place on a spring morning a couple of years ago as Jim and I prepared for our first vacation alone in three years. The anxiety of leaving [my young sons, Justin and Evan,] overshadowed my excitement about the trip. "What ifs" invaded my thoughts. What if there is an emergency? What if the kids wear out Jim's mother? What if I can't bear to be separated from them? The list continued to grow as I dropped Justin at preschool and ran my last-minute errands. After I'd made three unsuccessful attempts to find blue shoe polish, Wil suggested a store around the corner that was not on my morning agenda. When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw my friend Anna leaving the store. She took one look at me and asked, "What's wrong?" "I don't know if we should go on this trip," I replied. "I'm worried about the kids." I ran down my litany of doubts, but Anna's reassuring words eased each of my concerns and completely changed my mood. I gave Anna a hug and entered the store feeling relieved and once again excited about the trip. When I saw that the bin for blue shoe polish was empty, I understood that the real reason Wil had directed me there was to receive a little comfort from an old friend. As your spiritual awareness becomes stronger, so will our ability to notice and utilize the opportunities that present themselves in your life. If you sense that you are meant to go somewhere, call someone, or do something that is not dangerous or harmful, I encourage you to act on that feeling and see what happens. Take heed of any uncomfortable feelings, however, before you decide to proceed. A sudden impulse to go skydiving for the first time or to explore that fascinating cave you passed while walking along the shore needs to be weighted a lot more carefully than a strong but inexplicable notion to see a new play when you've never had the urge to see one before. You may waste some money and time if the play turns out to be a bomb, but you're unlikely to sustain a serious injury. People sometimes ask whether our guides actually create or lead us into dangerous or difficult situations to help us learn by suffering. Absolutely not. Bad things do not happen because our guides want us to "learn a lesson." Bad things happen not because of anything we have or haven't done but because billions of other people are also exerting their own free will. Our guides watch over us and try to keep us from harm, but events will occur that challenge us physically, emotionally and spiritually. Regardless of the situation, if we have the ability to think, we can find options available to us. Sometimes, though, we need assistance to see things a little differently or see other, less obvious options. Our guides and prayer can help us. For most of my life, I saw myself as a victim who was powerless to control any aspect of my life, especially my relationship with my mother. Once I recognized that I had the choice whether of not to remain in that relationship, I gained the courage to distance myself from her. Spiritual guidance provided insight and helped me to take charge of my own life. Such guidance can help us cope with the ramifications and emotional fallout of adversity we have faced in the past. It also can help us grow in the present to prepare ourselves for the future. If you are currently struggling with personal or spiritual issues and are seeking answers, you are ready to connect with your guides. The events in our lives are like building blocks: each block represents a different emotional, physical or spiritual experience. Childhood traumas can sometimes make the building blocks of early experience fragile and the base on which we try to build the rest of our lives shaky. Our guides can help us identify problems and patch up our faulty suppositions so that we can build stronger lives. Because my mother and I had a very unsteady relationship, my base for future relationships, security, and health was weak. As our interactions became increasingly strained, I would easily fall apart with each argument. I hadn't learned to cope with past pains, to reshape my faulty reactions. Once I broke away so that I could reexamine my life and reshape my foundation, my life became stable again. Have the Desire and Intention to Connect Along with prayer and an increased awareness of subtle connections and guided experiences, you must sincerely want communication from your guides. Your desire to receive answers from them, however, must not replace your ability to make your own choices. You should not turn over your personal power to your guides. Instead, use their assistance to enhance your judgment, discrimination and effectiveness. I do not ask questions of my guides just for the sake of asking, nor do I spend my days having private conversations with Wil as the world passes by. When I'm playing with my children, watching a movie, sharing a private moment with my husband or chatting with friends, I almost never communicate with my guides. Days and even weeks can pass without an "eventful" connection. Still, there are times when I receive information regardless of whether I have asked a question. That raises the issue of whether information received spontaneously represents a message from a guide or is intuition or memory, or just a passing thought. To begin with, once you open yourself to connection with your guides, the channels stay open, especially if you continue to work at being open. In certain situations, your guides may provide you with information they feel you need to know even though you haven't asked. This isn't common at first, but it tends to happen more often once you have established regular communication with your guides through practice and a conscious decision to be open. In fact, as we learn to connect with our spiritual guides on a regular basis, our ability to tune in to our own inner knowing, our Higher Self, also increases. All of our spiritual senses, including intuition and ability to visualize, become heightened as a result of opening the channels of communication with our spiritual guides. A woman I had taught to connect told me that while on a retreat she noticed someone who seemed to be especially quiet. It wasn't clear why this woman was so detached, so my student asked her guides for any information that might help her understand the situation. She received a message that the woman was under a tremendous burden that she needed to unload. When the time was right, she would unburden herself and my student should be prepared to be loving and supportive. Within this next few hours, the woman revealed tearfully that her husband was extremely ill and had told her not to tell anyone, but that now she needed to share her pain and concern. My student's guides helped her be better prepared to deal with a situation she couldn't have known fully through intuition alone. Even though I try to remain alert to guidance, when I have not asked for information directly sometimes I can dismiss it as "just" a passing thought. More often than not I misread messages received while performing mundane tasks. We must learn to pay attention as much of the time as possible. For example, one day I wanted to pick up the dry cleaning before the baby sitter had to go home. I was running late and was certain that my purse was in the car. After arriving at the dry cleaner's, I realized that I had left my purse at home. It hit me that during the ride there I had dismissed the passing "thought" that my purse was at home on the counter. Instead of paying attention to this thought or checking around the car for the bag, I dismissed the thought by reassuring myself that my purse was in the back seat. I drove home smiling at my own obtuseness and arrived to find my purse on the counter. Whether this was an unsolicited message from Wil, trying to save me some valuable time, or just intuition is probably less important than the fact that I chose to ignore the thought. I've since learned to be more attentive to any inner stirrings. Although you may have the strong desire to connect at this point in your life and your guides are ready to communicate with you, do not feel pressured to connect with them until you are ready emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. It is perfectly acceptable to wait until you are at ease with the idea of connection. You may first need to address one of the barrier issues that can interfere with your ability to communicate with your guides. One day, for instance, a friend's guides informed me that she was ready to communicate directly with them. For months I had been receiving helpful guidance for her and her husband, and though she knew that I taught connection, she had hesitated to ask me to teach her how to communicate. Three months after I relayed her guides' message that she was ready to communicate, she asked me. She had needed time to understand the process and extinguish her fears. Although I have explained how prayer and awareness of guided experiences can help you prepare to connect with your spiritual guides, do not be alarmed if prayer hasn't been a part of your daily life or you can think of only a few guided events. If you are ready to receive loving guidance, your spiritual guides will be there for you, and the method taught in this book will help open the lines of communication with them. Gaining this kind of perspective on your life will help you open the inner doors of perception and pinpoint the areas that need to have more light shed on them. Your guides are ready to help you, and being open to their guidance can lead you to a new understanding.
Excerpted from Extraordinary Guidance: How to Connect with Your Spiritual Guides by Liza Wiemer, with permission of Three Rivers Press. Available at your favorite bookstore or by calling 1-800-726-0600. Liza Wiemer currently teaches seminars to adults based on contacting spirit guides. She is interested in hearing from readers who have stories about how connection with their guides has improved or affected in any way their life or the life of someone they know. She has taught in a religious school for the past fourteen years, and has served as president of the Milwaukee Temple Youth Group and as president of the Northern Federation of Temple Youth.
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