Tag: spirit guides

Spirit Guides. We All Have Them.

Leave a comment

Spirit Guides. We all have them. Each and everyone of us.

I used to believe it was only “special” people who had guides and, when I became aware that I had guides – because other people told me about them, I believed only “special” people could access them. When I was told, by different people in different situations, that I was intuitively powerful, I didn’t believe it. When I was asked to access my intuition, all I drew were blanks and guesses.

Until the veil began to lift – just a little bit.

I first became aware of my guides because other people – psychics, mediums, intuitively gifted individuals – told me about them. I always believed in spirit so to have someone tell me about a guide was a gift. The first one I was told was watching over me was a priest from my father’s family. I asked my father if there had been a priest in our family and he told me about Bishop who died when I was young. I used to sit on his lap and play with his cross.

I was told about a master guide wizard who grew ominously large and fierce when protecting me from harm.

Kathy Sacred Tattoo Design

Sacred Art – my lion and a medicine woman – channeled for me by artist Tania Marie

Then I took part in my first drumming ceremony. The guidance we were given beforehand was to pay attention to animals that were coming to us. It was clear that my spirit animal was a lion, so many images of lions came to me in the days before the drumming. And it was / is my journey animal. In the drumming ceremony, I tried hard to have a vision and nothing came. Until I stopped trying so hard, surrendering to what was there – a sense of things that became vivid images – a meadow, then trees, then flying with the lion (yes, lions can fly in spirit world if they want to – and you can fly with them), then a bonfire with people chanting, laughing and dancing around the fire. The lion and I landed, shape shifting into one, dancing around the fire with the greatest sense of joy.

For a long time after that, nothing. Plus, I didn’t know what to do with what I already knew. Then, one day driving in rain pouring so hard it felt dangerous, I called on the support of everyone’s guides who were in the car and another appeared – a native American brave, young, strong with sharp features. And there are others and more.

The feeling of love and support when you know there are guides and entities in the unseen world who are always, always there is incredible. They are there, even when we don’t know they are. They love to be seen and acknowledged and all it takes is a simple turning of attention to them, just a thought and they come into awareness.

Many of us don’t go searching for them because we are afraid maybe they aren’t there, or we are not worthy, or we won’t know how to be in conscious relationship. But it is such a gift. To them. To us.

DSC03523

My own first rendition of my medicine woman guide – she urged me to draw her during an experience in Brazil in 2011

When I became aware that not only did I have guides, but I could help other people become aware of and connect with their guides – discovered almost my accident that I could do this, I did that work for awhile – helping people develop relationships with their guides. Like so many things, it fell by the wayside for a while. Now, people who have been reading Embracing the Stranger in Me are asking me to coach them in meeting their guides. And I remember, that this is also work I am called to do, a gift I have to share and I am gifted with seeing other people’s guides, the delight they have in being acknowledged. So, I have been stepping back in and happy to talk to anyone about what coaching support looks like for you to connect with your guides. You do have them and they want you to know them.

Expanding Awareness: A Few Suggestions For Growing Your Consciousness

5 Comments
IMG_2073

Lake Park, MN

Have you ever walked in the woods and felt yourself enveloped by the silence? Laid in the sun and lost awareness of everything around you except the warmth of the sun on your body? Or sat by the ocean and experienced the timelessness of the sand and waves, understanding your own life as a grain of sand on an ever changing beach? Or entered a cathedral and felt the history of the ages whisper in your soul? Have you encountered experiences and stories that raised every hair on the back of your neck?

All of this is information. All of this is expanded awareness, expanded consciousness. How do you go about intentionally expanding your awareness, growing your consciousness? Here are a few simple suggestions.

Pay attention to naturally occurring situations – any or all of the ones mentioned above and more – let your attention rest there and slowly expand your “gaze” to “see” or sense more. This is not necessarily seeing with your physical eyes, although it can be that too. This is seeing with your second sight, or your third eye, or your imagination – whatever you want to call it. Let a story unfold – or make one up. Your mind doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. And when you know that your body is around 65% water, you begin to understand how much of what we think is real might actually be illusion.

Soften your gaze anytime, anywhere – including in your own living room, back yard, in a place with people – airports, malls. You can allow the energy that is in the space you are in float around you as if it has its own movement, its own story, its own being – because it does.

You can tap into your imagination, letting it run away in its own directions. Where does the inspiration for imagination come from anyway? Do we know it doesn’t come from some metaphysical influences?

pixies_in_the_sky-1868When you are in the woods and you soften your gaze, can you see the wood nymphs, the faeries, the elves and other entities that wander there, that call it home? (If you are wondering if it is real or if you are making it up, see the previous post – it doesn’t matter.) If you could interact with them or talk to them, what would that interaction look like or sound like? Every time I expand my conscious to invite interaction with what I cannot see with my eyes but can sense with my being, the very first feeling is one of gratitude and appreciation for the acknowledgement. “Thank you for seeing me.” And very often there is light heartedness, joy and delight. A sense of playfulness. Hmmm, yes. Playfulness and light heartedness. True story.

It seems particularly important to see and acknowledge these beings / non-beings in city parks and green areas because so much more of the city’s energy is weighted down with concrete, asphalt and other man-made building materials. Every time these beings are seen and acknowledged it fuels them, gives them additional sparks of life.

Slide1

Beach photo courtesy of Peter Moorhouse

When you are on the beach, let your imagination wander into the water and see what comes into your awareness. The sea creatures – physical, non-physical, mythical. You can see them dancing on the waves, in drops of water, in the way the rays of the sun touch the surface and penetrate the depths.

In cathedrals built eons ago, feel the blood, sweat and tears of the men and women who built these structures. Feel awe at the feat as well as the grief and sorrow of those that lost their lives, the harshness of the times and circumstances. Imagine what it was like in the day they were built and what vision and perseverance it would take to bring it into being. And all the sacred ceremony that has filled the cavernous spaces inside, still alive in the density of the air.

notre dame paris cathedral

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

The ways to expand your awareness, expand your consciousness are not even limited to your imagination, although they are limited by doubt, by questioning, by not believing. Allow – no, invite – yourself to play, to dream, to imagine. And learn to trust your own experiences.

Expanded Consciousness – It’s So Simple Really

7 Comments
Expanded Consciousness

What are you waiting for?

From a very young age, I have always believed in the super-natural – things “attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature” or beyond our own limited “understanding” as human beings – limits, by the way, we have placed on ourselves.

When I was growing up and even as a young adult, I used to think it was something only very special or very gifted people could access and I was in awe of them. Now I think of it as “expanded consciousness” and I know that every single one of us has the capacity and ability to access it. Not just in special places or special states of being, but anywhere and everywhere, when we choose to. But we doubt ourselves and our experiences. We invalidate our experiences, saying “it wasn’t real, it was my imagination, I’m making it up.” It is part of the stranger within that goes unacknowledged, un-embraced. For many of us, this was what we heard growing up. Our connection to expanded consciousness, to source, was “beaten” out of us and replaced with the kinds of messages we now hear in our own minds when we encounter our own expansiveness.

We learned how to fit in with our families, friends and institutions (school, church) – our Worldview influences. Yet, for some of us, there was a niggling sense that something was missing, not explained or not quite aligned. Questions you couldn’t ask, observations you couldn’t make, and the door to expanded consciousness slowly – or abruptly – slammed shut.

This niggling sense does not go away though. Maybe it is just easier at first to imagine that only really gifted people have access to expanded consciousness. That way we can live vicariously through someone else’s experience rather than venture into a place we have been told doesn’t exist, that we have learned to shut off for ourselves.

My first encounter with spirit guides was when someone else told me about one of mine. When I was told I could develop my own “intuitive” capacity, I couldn’t. I got nothing. No information. No connection. No visions. And I certainly didn’t trust any information that might have come, certain I was making it up – with that certainty shutting down access to information.

Slowly, slowly, over years, I began to learn to trust my own experience, my own “visions”. There were periods of awakening, periods of “practice” of being in touch with my own expanded consciousness – which meant periods of regular connection to non-physical entities like spirit guides (mine and others) and there were/are greater periods of non-practice equivalent to shutting down connection, access to information and flow.

Yet, it is so simple. It is a matter, for me, of shifting awareness, asking the question, opening to my heart and my knowing, inviting the experience and the connection. So very simple.

So I ask myself this question, “What am I waiting for?” I don’t know the answer at the moment but these days, I am living the question, “What AM I waiting for?” Living the question will reveal the myriad of – or the one – response, which is true for me. Are you also waiting? What are you waiting for?

Drums 019

My youngest son and I making drums in 2009 – part of the compelling journey.