Ever find yourself feeling like you instantly belong when you’re in a new town, city, or country? Or randomly reminisce about a scene from your childhood? Or experience recurring themes in your dreams or in your meditation practice?
Moments like these can always be put down to coincidence. However, they could also be signals from the spirit world—knocks on your consciousness from your spirit guides.
“There are many types of energy,” explains Jeffrey Allen, a renowned energy healer and trainer of Mindvalley’s Duality Quest, “many types of consciousness or spirits.” He adds that while there’s more than you really need to understand, “it’s good enough to just feel it.”
So what are spirit guides, and what’s their business trying to reach you? Discover how those silent whispers can help you understand your life’s purpose in a deeper way.
What is a spirit guide and how do they touch your life?
Your spirit guides are your personal guides to the energy world. They understand not only how you want to live your life but also how to navigate you toward your greatest potential.
Whether you’re consciously interacting or not, [your spirit guides] are helping you. — @iamjeffreyallen Share on XThey do play several roles:
- Advisors. They share insights and provide you with options.
- Concierge. They plan, organize, and implement.
- Coordinator. They coordinate with the spirit guides of others around you.
From revealing your true love to directing you toward breakthrough business ideas to helping you make financial decisions and more, they know all the buttons to push (or not push) on the path to attaining your best life.
However, here’s the clincher: Not everyone can actually hear or access them. And that’s because it takes practice to receive spiritual guidance.
Discover the different types of spirit guides and their unique roles
Your spirit guides have known you and all your past lives for years. According to Sonia Choquette, an intuition expert and the trainer of Mindvalley’s Sixth Sense Superpower Quest, they’re a “part of you that transcends your ego.”
Here’s a quick rundown of the types of guides out there.
1. Guardian angels
Your guardian angels are your “life guides,” and they are with you for your entire life, even before you’re born. As the name suggests, they quietly talk to you during times when you’re unsure and always protect you from bad vibes and danger.
And just like a best friend who’s always there for you no matter what, guardian angels carefully push you along a path that shines with hope and light, making sure you’re always safe and guided. So, even when things get a little tricky, they’re right there, helping you find your way.
2. Archangels
Imagine a group of big, strong angels, called archangels, who move smoothly among different heavenly levels. These beings glow with comforting energy, creating a bubble that lifts you above all your earthly troubles and worries.
They don’t just look after one person; instead, they help with big issues that affect the whole world, doing so with calm and steady power. Even during hard or confusing times, their kindness and love stretch across different realms to give you peace and comfort.
3. Spirit animals
Life can sometimes feel like a wild, challenging journey. In these tough times, animal spirit guides come forward to show how to be strong, bounce back, and trust your gut feelings.
Not only that, these special creatures guide in practical ways, too. They share their awesome skills and natural know-how to help you handle all sorts of tricky situations with skill.
Just like a bear knows when to hibernate or a bird knows when to migrate, they help guide you with their powerful, built-in instincts through your own life’s tough spots and choices.
4. Ancestors
This quiet, supportive influence is the spirit of your ancestors, who once navigated life’s pathways just like you. Their seasoned wisdom and hard-earned lessons traverse a gentle, unseen divide, delicately shaping your choices and decisions.
With each move you make, they’re inconspicuously present, extending an unseen yet loving support system that persistently walks beside you.
5. Ascended masters
Sometimes you might find yourself wishing for a guide who’s been through a lot and learned many important lessons. Ascended masters, who were once people living on Earth, have been through many challenges and now glow with a special light in a peaceful, wise place.
They use their special skill of clairvoyance to peek into your spiritual journey. And, like gentle teachers, they put little lights of knowledge and wisdom along your path to help guide you.
In a kind and loving way, they use what they’ve learned from their own past experiences to help steer you toward understanding and enlightenment.
6. Healing spirits
When you’re feeling down or sick, healing spirits bring a kind of clean, fresh energy that tries to fix not just body aches but also heartaches and soul troubles. They guide you softly back to feeling good and balanced again.
They gently remind you that healing comes in many forms, and they are here to assist in every way they can. So, in those tough times, they quietly help guide your journey back to being your best self.
7. Elemental spirits
Picture this: you’re outside and suddenly a bunch of leaves rustle or a swift breeze passes by. This might be a little hello from the elemental spirits.
They’re all about the basic natural forces around you—like wind, fire, and water—and they love to share the secrets of the earth. They’re also there to remind you how to ground yourself by staying in touch with nature.
So, every little natural surprise might just be a message, keeping your bond with the earth alive and strong.
8. Messenger Spirits
Sometimes, little signs or dreams might pop up in daily life. And messenger spirits are often behind these.
They use symbols and surprise events to send messages from the spirit world to your regular day-to-day life. So, if you ever see something and it feels like they’re trying to tell you something, that might be them.
5 simple ways on how to connect with your spirit guides and enrich your spiritual life
“Who are my spirit guides?” you may wonder. There’s only one way to know—and that’s by connecting with them.
Your different spirit guides will show up depending on what situation you’re in or what direction you need. They’re very clever and resourceful, as Jeffrey explains. “They’ll use any way they can to get through to you.”
But if you want to strengthen your connection with them, here are some practices that can help.
1. Summon your invisible counselors
The “invisible counselors” is a visualization technique created by Napoleon Hill that Vishen, the founder of Mindvalley, often talks about. It’s a way to increase the resonance of your thoughts to connect with other thoughts and receive information outside of your brain.
In his 2022 stage talk in Los Angeles, Vishen shares that these guides can look and feel very different for everyone. Sometimes they might show up as light, famous people from history, or even mythical figures.
When you try this technique, you might find your own guides and get messages or feelings from them. This can be a special way to find new ideas or answers to problems in a way that feels magical and personal.
Watch Vishen’s stage talk to learn more:
2. Notice the signs
Paying attention to both what you see and hear can be a bridge to understanding messages from your spirit guides. Sometimes the communication isn’t a loud, clear voice but might appear in more subtle forms like symbols, numbers, or even a persistent ringing in your ears.
Spirit guides will communicate in any way you’ll listen. Signs, numbers, symbols, images, friends, synchronicity. — @iamjeffreyallen Share on XWhen you’re in this space of spirituality, you begin to interact with the world differently. And it’s in this space that your spirit guides may try to connect with you through visuals in the physical world or in your dreams and meditations.
What you can do: Incorporate a practice to remember these subtle nudges. Apart from keeping a daily journal, dream journaling can also help you explore your spiritual experiences and perhaps discover hidden messages and guidance within them.
3. Use your intuition as a compass
Having sudden jolts of energy, enthusiasm, joy, anger, or sadness—indeed, these are normal human experiences. But they can also be your spirit guides, sending you a message via your intuition.
“When you get the sign, it’s not enough,” explains Sonia. “You have to take it in as important information.”
This practice doesn’t merely enhance your decision-making but also enriches your journey. So, when unexpected emotions surface, it’s pivotal to pause and reflect.
What you can do: Attentively listen to these emotional messages and recognize them as potential guidance. You may just find that there’s a profound connection with your spiritual compass.
4. Pause and relax
Do you tend to overthink solutions to your problems to the point of burnout, only to suddenly receive the answer out of nowhere? These moments of clarity may be thanks to your guides, as they’re able to enlighten your thoughts and insights.
“Be willing to listen to yourself to stop the noise and go beyond the fear,” Agapi Stassinopoulos, a world-renowned spiritual teacher, says in her Speaking With Spirit Quest on Mindvalley. “There is a wise voice in us that will always counsel us if we can just make room for it to speak.”
What you can do: Connecting with your spirit guides can be as simple as taking two steps away from your fixations and giving yourself some time to breathe. This will allow you to hear your guides over your thoughts.
5. Practice openness to new situations
Your guides continuously work to guide you toward the life you desire. And they often present spiritual awakening signs in the form of new situations and opportunities for growth.
Agapi advises, “Learn to trust that there is no urgency in the Spirit. Your spirit might say, ‘Hold off on that. Be patient.’”
What you can do: Be open to these new experiences and practice asking yourself and your guides, “How did I end up in this situation?” You never know; you could actually be on a stepping stone to your ideal destination. And it never hurts to ask them for more clarity.
Explore spirit guide meditations on Mindvalley
It’s no secret that meditation opens new doors within, creating a sacred space to explore your spiritual nature. In fact, research shows that those who do it on the regular report higher levels of spiritual well-being and connectedness.
Here are six meditations on Mindvalley that you can do for spiritual guidance.
1. Meeting Your Divine Spirit
Sonia Choquette guides you through this beautiful meditation as a way to remind you that you’re safe, protected, and deeply loved.
2. Connecting With Ascended Masters
If you’re looking to have a one-on-one with one of the spirit guides, this meditation with Marie Diamond can help. Receive spiritual guidance, find out your soul’s purpose, and raise the vibration of the planet.
3. Tapping Into Spirit to Remove Loneliness
With Agapi Stassinopoulo as your guide, use this meditation to dissolve the grip of loneliness. Additionally, it can help you uncover a deep sense of connectedness within yourself and with the world around you.
4. Releasing the Past & Calling In New Guides
The pain of the past is a blocker to your future possibilities. But you can release these burdens with the help of your guides. In this healing meditation with Sonia, restore your natural frequency of peace and love.
5. Creating Your Dreams With Your Guides
In this deeply relaxing meditation, Sonia guides you to learn how to grow the seeds of intention. And in it, you use higher guidance to help your dreams and relationships flourish.
Frequently asked questions
Channeling spirit guides can spark numerous questions and curiosities. This list of questions is curated to answer some of the common queries about spirit guides, their behaviors, appearances, and influence in life.
How do spirit guides behave?
Spirit guides often act with kindness and offer support in subtle yet profound ways. Typically, they gently nudge you toward certain paths, helping you make decisions that align with your higher self.
“It speaks to you energetically, but it also loves to speak to you with signs, symbols, metaphors, surprising ways,” explains Sonia. “Get your attention, snap you out of your automatic recording brain, be present, take in what’s happening right now, and make decisions that really support that.”
You might experience unexpected good luck, have enlightening dreams, or stumble upon repeated signs in your daily life. For instance, seeing specific animals or numbers often.
Importantly, their presence is always benign, providing a safety net of spiritual comfort and guidance when sought.
What do spirit guides look like?
Spirit guides can take various forms and might appear differently to everyone. Some people feel it intuitively, some perceive them as human-like entities, and others may visualize them as lights, animals, or even mythical figures.
During Vishen’s talk in Los Angeles, participants shared visions of guides ranging from luminous beings to historical and fictional characters. Remember, there’s no right or wrong; your guides will appear in a form that resonates most with you.
How can my spirit guides help me in my life?
“Every day we are all faced with endless decisions from health to finances, relationships, our homes, our work, kids, even what we are having for dinner or where we should go for dinner,” Agapi points out in her Mindvalley Quest. And oftentimes, we struggle with making a choice we deem right.
“This is such a great opportunity to remind yourself that you can reach for your lifeline and dial the spirit for direction,” she adds. They can assist in providing comfort during tough times, inspire ideas during moments of creativity, and sometimes guide you toward beneficial opportunities.
Moreover, they may help you connect with your inner self, facilitating personal growth and steering you toward paths that align with your soul’s desires and evolution. This guidance often unfolds in mysteriously synchronous ways, intertwining with your life’s path delicately and significantly.
How do I know if my spirit guides are real?
Belief in spirit guides often intertwine with personal experiences and faith. You might feel an unseen presence, receive messages through dreams, or notice patterns that feel too deliberate to be mere coincidence.
“Whether you’re consciously interacting or not, they are helping you,” Jeffrey explains. “They helped you plan this lifetime before you were born, and they’re with you for your entire life and into your next journey too.”
Ultimately, the validation of their reality largely stems from personal experiences and the personal spiritual framework within which they operate. Spirit guides become real when you experience their gentle interventions and choose to trust those experiences.
Seek guidance, seek greatness
It doesn’t take psychic abilities to communicate with your spirit guides; you have access to them at any time, at any place—as long as you continue to listen. And the connection is unique for any individual. So get creative with your listening and trust yourself in the process.
If you want to learn more about how to best communicate with your spiritual guides, you can tap into the insights and wisdom of Mindvalley’s spiritual experts:
- Duality Quest with Jeffrey Allen, where you’ll learn the skills for intuitive self-healing, energy work, and facilitating healing in others.
- Sixth Sense Superpower Quest with Sonia Choquette, where you’ll awaken and amplify your intuitive intelligence, enhancing decision-making and creativity in your life and work.
- Speaking with Spirit Quest with Agapi Stassinopoulos, where you’ll learn to forge a deep connection with Spirit/God for fulfillment and joy.
- The Silva Ultramind System Quest with Vishen, where you’ll master your mind’s abilities and enhance your intuition, creativity, and self-love to unlock your fullest potential.
The awesome part is, when you sign up for a free Mindvalley account, you unlock the first few lessons of the quests so you can get a glimpse of the intriguing world of spirituality. Moreover, you have access to soothing and enlightening daily meditations that are bound to elevate your journey.
So when you next connect with your guides, what will be the first thing you’ll ask them?
