Connecting to Spirit
The journey of connecting to your Spirit team, or the guides that support your path beyond the physical realm, is a journey of surrender. You may be someone who has received hints along your life path that such a realm exists and may have received signals, voices, or intuitive hits that you never trusted because they did not fit within society’s view of knowing. You may be someone who has never entertained such an idea in your life, yet for one reason or another you are open to hearing it now. Or you may be convinced that no such element of life exists and this writing may not be for you. In any case, here is an unfolding of my own witnessing experience and an offering to those who may be ready to receive it. I have written previously about intuition, which has been my window into the spiritual world. I, like most, was conditioned to see my thinking brain as the container for all answers regarding life and what I could know, but it was a painful process. The brain is a powerful mechanism of logic, reason, and survival, but it is always scanning for threat or danger. Depending on your level of trauma, early life or ancestral, your threat response will vary. My inherited, generalized fear for life was so high that I often did not have access to the benefits of my brain’s power and often received its consequences. The brain focuses on problem solving and, therefore, views life as one big problem to be solved. For some, that may be an exciting challenge. For others, it may be a threatening and stressful existence. My life appeared to be a series of problems that could not be solved no matter how many compulsions or negative thoughts my brain produced. The patterns only led me down paths of despair and anxiousness, rarely resulting in success in the areas of my life I had hoped to see it in. I fought tooth and nail with this brain, trying medications, meditations, drugs, and just about every escape I could think of to manage the onslaught of toxic emotion states that came along with my brain’s neural patterns. The logic and reason were often buried beneath layers of negative emotions and beliefs sending constant messages to my brain and reinforcing its response to threat. Not until I learned how to create the optimal environment for healing, including bringing safety to my nervous system, was I able to redirect the flow of my brain’s awesome power. At this point, I have simply spoken to modern trauma research and the evolutionary function of the nervous system, which most are in agreement with and as far as some are willing to go on their healing path at this time. But I was called to go further.
As I navigated debilitating states of mind body experience, I considered the nervous system to be the foundational layer of healing until I was encouraged to see the energetic process working beneath or alongside it. From my own witnessing and intuitive understanding, I saw emotions as literal energy in motion, meant to flow through the nervous system with ease, and only when the brain detected threat associated with a limiting belief did it disrupt this natural process. But how could I trust I was actually an energetic being with the capacity to connect to higher realms? Only with the desperate pursuit of answers beyond traditional Western medicine did I begin to witness experiences within myself in combination with powerfully intuitive healers that guided me closer to this truth. As I felt the energetic impact of various healing sessions and modalities in my physical body, including the relinquishing of debilitating pain and sickness, I could no longer deny the power of something energetic taking place beyond what could be explained by traditional therapeutic practices. The source of energy arising within me began to feel bigger than any individual wave of emotion, and I recognized a growing connection to something beyond myself - what I refer to as Spirit.
Even then, I attempted to keep my spiritual path separate from my clinical pursuits until my body literally would not allow me to. I was continuing to get sick weekly and nearly falling asleep in my sessions. After a grueling push to pass a licensing exam, I recognized my life was meant for something different than the pursuits of those around me. I was finally ready to open up to a path of knowing beyond the thinking brain and the limits of the unconscious emotions and beliefs I had carried up to that point - the path of intuition and connection to Spirit. Opening to intuition began by recognizing that the fear-based patterns of my brain were no longer going to guide me forward and I was going to need to let go of every connection I had to this style of living. No longer was I going to make decisions based upon some fear-based expectation or limiting belief of myself, others, and the world. More profound than leaving my clinic, my title, and nearly all of my professional relationships, was leaving a way of thinking about myself, others, and the world. I began to have faith in a different source, a source that aligned with my spiritual path and operated from a different perspective about the world. From this source, my life was no longer a problem to be solved but a path of divine purpose to be walked. I had faith in a blueprint I could not see but could feel coursing through me. I was guided to focus my energies on things like writing, speaking, and crafting the truth of my unfolding story. For the first time in my life, I was choosing to move in direct alignment with a path that had been hitting me over the head for years, a path I saw up to that point as a problem to be solved rather than a message to be heard. Fears and doubts rose like waves crashing over heard, but with courage, I persisted. As I begin to align with this path, my lifestyle began to change rapidly and I could feel stress begin to fall away. I had already changed several habits that weren’t serving me, but in addition to dietary and exercise changes, it was the internal changes that were the most monumental. I had always been a meditator in the traditional sense, but I learned how to actually listen to the intuitive guidance within me. I learned not only how to make decisions that best served me, but how to do so from a place of authentic power and integrity rather than fear and lack. The more I practiced checking in with a source beyond my brain, the more answers took shape with clarity and conviction. The practice of connecting to my higher self was a practice of moving through fear and doubt. Each check in presented an opportunity to recognize the place of fear, anxiety, hope, or disappointment I was coming from and to re-center. Over time, the answers began to shift from mere visual imagery representing “Yes” or “No” to voices that I could distinguish. Different guides carry different messages and, as I have learned, some come from the light and some from the dark. As I continue to practice, I continue to gain ultimate trust in the messages I am receiving and to know that I am supported beyond measure.
Once you set the intention to connect with Spirit and begin the practice of checking in, you may recognize that you have been receiving messages all along but have not felt supported enough to entertain them because of how imposing societal conditions can be. You may have written off voices, premonitions, symbols, or powerful states of presence as mere fantasy, and attempted to corral your mind back to the “important” information that others seemed to be taking in so seriously, like what kind of job you should get or car you should buy. But a part of you always knew the truth - you are an energetic being with a purpose all your own, and the only way to fully embody this truth is by finding ways to connect to the source of this energy and to the spirit guides serving your highest intention. You may feel alone in your path as you let many things go that no longer serve or define you, but what you appear to lack in human relatedness you will make up for in spiritual guidance and support. The more you lean in with your whole being, the more your guides will lean in to support you and make their presence known.
Creating an open channel to your guides all begins with present-focused awareness. All healing, all listening, all spiritual connection unfolds in the present. All of learning to D.A.N.C.E. is a present-focused practice to connect with spirit, in addition to healing mind and body. By creating the optimal environment for healing, you create the optimal environment to connect with your guides and the messages meant for you. Connection can come through breath and stillness, in meditation and visualization, and in allowing emotion and belief energy that no longer serves you to release. Growing an intuitive connection is like growing a muscle, it takes practice. I check-in hundreds of times per day with my intuition and my guides. However, I am not always looking for deep messages. Often, I am just checking in on what or when to eat for that day in highest service of my body. Cultivating the intuitive muscle begins by recognizing that the messages you receive from your brain are based in outdated wiring and survival, and by learning to discern this from a higher truth. If you pause and reflect on the messaging produced by your brain, you will see it is often laced with a kind of fear or need to achieve or prove something. A particular story in the area of health, relationships, or money may produce an impulse to act, but underneath the story commanding your attention is a motor running on fear-based fuel. On some level, your brain produces messages based on what it thinks you need to survive, honed from years of evolutionary and societal conditioning in addition to the ancestral beliefs you carried into this world. The process of connecting to Spirit is a process of recognizing your brain’s conditioning and beginning to unhook from that, like disconnecting from the Matrix (as overused as that reference may be). You will go through many trials and tribulations, but keep going. You will be rewarded for your efforts.
As in all of healing, the practice of connecting to Spirit stems from the foundational conviction that it exists and that you can actually do so. From this source of conviction, all practice flows and your channel widens. The messages will become clearer and your commitment to letting go of what no longer serves you will amplify. The process of connecting to Spirit is a process of recognizing yourself as a spiritual being and resisting the brain’s addictions to temporary fulfillment in all of its conditioned ways. Everyone has an intuitive capacity that can be nurtured in order to align with their highest spiritual intention for this life, which will no doubt bring the most inspired joy and passion for them. Everyone’s calling is designed differently; some may be destined for certain pains and sufferings, as I have no doubt experienced, but there is a different quality between the pain that flows from a natural source of expansion and the pain that flows from resistance to your calling. I have experienced both and one leads to growth while the other remains mired in stuckness and repeated enactments of trauma. Ultimately, as cliche as it may sound, every soul’s calling is to live in the highest available frequency - the frequency of love and gratitude for all things - though this will manifest in different paths for all. Personally, I have continued to receive the message that I am a bridge between worlds, meant to traverse the spiritual and the earthly so I may invite others to receive the light of such seemingly invisible offerings. I have so often fought against this while conceding to my brain’s impulses to fit in, to be validated, and to pursue pleasure in the way others do. I will no doubt continue to learn my lessons as I walk my own path of alignment. You may experience your own stuckness in the form of repeated relationship dynamics, career pitfalls, health problems, or chronic emotional strife. The issues may seem so unfair and isolating, but I promise you there is a greater path to surrender to. Spirit will continue to hit you over the head in more ways than one until you are ready to listen or to say “Yes” to the journey. If are sick and tired of a path that never felt truly aligned, I invite you to a place of readiness to begin.