Since my awareness of being a spirit worker is only a couple years old, I remember very clearly what it was like to question how psychics, intuitives, and energy healers got their information. It was an inner struggle!

A part of me would look at them and think:

How do you know what you know?
How can you be sure you’re not just imagining it?
And for that matter, how can you be sure you’re not just crazy?

Then, this part of me would start to get a little scared that if I tried to let in this “other” kind of information, that I might become crazy or lose touch with reality.

Your resistance serves a purpose

Hey, it’s a valid thing to be concerned about. I am so glad I have a part that keeps track of reality and makes sure that I stay mentally, emotionally and spiritually safe!

And while this first part was busy being skeptical, dismissive, and even judgmental, another part of me would be inspired, curious, and hopeful that I could have some access to that kind of information.

Now I know that this second part of me was speaking for my heart’s desire and my connection to my Calling. But at the time, I just experienced an inner tug-of-war between these two parts.

Your inner yearning is meaningful, too

I think we all yearn to be more connected to Love and Spirit, which can externally look like many things.

If you’re here reading this, you’ve probably been drawn by this particular language about Spirit and by the idea that you could have more connection with sacred Source.

My journey to connecting with my guides and Spirit itself took a few years of struggle with myself and a fair amount of persistence.

Your information matters more than any other

The answers I got from other healers and intuitives were gradually fulfilling, but not nearly as much as connecting to my own way of knowing. Of all the intuitive information out there, I learned that I trust mine the most. And I think that’s ultimately true for all of us.

In other words, your own intuition and spiritual guidance is best for you, just like mine is best for me.

So, how DO you get connected with that guidance?

Your journey to finding your spirit guides is going to look different than mine, but I know that asking for what you want is the best place to start.

Below is a request or prayer that you can use to get started. I’ve written it purposefully to be clear, specific, and safety-focused.

Stay safe by listening to yourself

When you’re just getting started, it can be hard to tell what sensations and information is coming from your true spirit guides. Other people’s energies, and simply “Other” energies, are out there and can come in to your system if the invitation is unclear.

When you’re seeking True guidance, it’s very important to keep checking in with yourself to see if things feel right. Trust your gut and learn to use your body as an instrument.

If you feel shaky, disoriented, anxious, scared, or in any way unsettled, that’s important information. Listen to your body, your heart and your gut. Stop doing anything if it doesn’t feel right.

Here is the sample request you can use to get started. Please modify it to suit your own language and heart as you feel is right for you.

Spirit Guides, please help me to know you–those of you who are solely invested in my highest and greatest good. I want to know you, know how to communicate with you, how to hear the sacred wisdom you give me for my highest and greatest good.

Please help me to understand the information I perceive from the world and the information I receive from my extra-sensory perception. If you are sending me messages, help me understand that it is from you, my trusted and sacred spirit guides. Please help me find clarity. Please help to know how to hear you.

Your true spirit guides want nothing other than to help you to access more love and wisdom. They will always help you stay safe, learn more, and find joy. They are waiting for you to see them and begin a direct relationship.

If you want to stop by and tell me how this works for you, please do. I would feel blessed to hear and learn from your journey.

I was just on the radio with the lovely Leslie Irish Evans of Peeling Mom Off the Ceiling, talking about how to use a simple technique to change your emotional state in as little as five minutes.

Listen in to hear about my background and stay for the demo of Emotional Freedom Technique.

But what can I do? I don’t live in the South and I’ve already donated money. I’ve signed petitions and written my letters to the editor.

Then it seems like my heart tells me that I can do something more: I can visualize healing for the ocean and our community. And beyond that, I can lead a visualization experience for people like me who want to help but don’t know how.

But Here’s Where I Get Divided. . .

Another part of me remembers an episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother where the character Robin, a pragmatic New Yorker, has a strange moment of meeting another part of herself.

She has recently returned from a post-breakup trip to Argentina, where she fell in with drum-circling, communal-eating, hippy folks. As she returns to New York and her regular life, she starts to feel the pull between who she was on vacation and who she normally is. In a dream, she walks out into her living room to confront the dreadlocked version of herself.

This hippy part says, accusingly, “What about the important things, like…lying on the beach and thinking about peace? Don’t you care about thinking about peace?”

Is Visualizing Just Lying Around and Thinking About Peace?

There’s research that suggests using your brain to imagine an activity can actually make you better at that activity (for example, weight-lifting).

But does that mean that visualizing a larger change, like a clean and healthy ocean, for example, will make a difference? Or am I just soothing myself with a fairy tale?

What Science Doesn’t Know. . .Yet

There aren’t many research studies that can offer proof of the power of visualization or prayer on a large scale. Even though the movie “The Secret” features a woman saying she cured herself of breast cancer using visualization, how can we know that’s what made the difference? How do you measure whether something external (another person’s health, a World Cup game, or even an ongoing tragedy) is affected by something not tangible?

I can’t prove it to you, anymore than I can prove it to myself.

So what do I say to the skeptical part of me who thinks I might be acting silly and wasting time?

It Can’t Hurt

Focusing my positive thoughts and images of well-being on someone or something that desperately needs it certainly won’t make it worse!

I’ve seen and heard of positive results coming through after participation in visualization and prayer. There are so many stories, both commercial and local, that speak to the power of visualization. “The Secret” is just one example of people testifying to the idea that visualization can bring you anything you want.

People report having found lost wedding rings and gotten unexpected checks in the mail. A few celebrities, like Scott Adams, even speak to the power of visualization in their careers.

The skeptical part of me can at least get behind the idea that “positive thinking raise(s) your consciousness to possibilities so they can snag your attention” (Harvard psychologist Carol Kauffman).

It Says “I Care”

More than anything else, I think I keep visualizing and leading people through visualizations because it’s a way that we show our inner parts that the situation matters to us. We’re letting ourselves know that this IS a big deal, that it’s worth spending time on, and that we do crave change.

And how else can we start to create change, if not by declaring that we care?

There’s Hope in the Intentions of Others

I’m not the only one who feels a call to organize people in visualizing and praying for the gulf, by the way. Deepak Chopra, James O’Dea and other spiritual leaders have put together a set of three telephone and internet gatherings, which they’ve named “The Gulf Call to Sacred Action.”

I’ve signed up. And I may still lead my own kind of visualization ritual here. That’s me serving the best I know how.

Have you had an experience where visualization helped the outcome? I’d love to hear about it in your comments.

Learn from Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, aka “Shrink Lady” of MyShrink.com, in the first part of her Brain Wise series.

In it, she describes what happens for folks in therapy, successful and otherwise. She reveals how the brain learns to stay out of “crisis” or “freeze” mode in successful therapy so clients can experience staying in the flow of life.

I loved her pictures and explanation, and I think it’s a great way to understand why certain therapies and therapists work for you, and why others don’t.

Check it out: http://www.myshrinkmembers.com/brain-wise-series/

Check it out to hear me talk about energy work, the voices inside our heads, and the one thing we’re always trying to get more of.

Just click the little play button below.

[audio:rachelonsistersofsizzle.mp3]

You may even discover a story that was hiding out in your body, or meet a spirit guide while on the table.

This work is done fully clothed and I use little to no physical touch.

My clients always come out of the energy work sessions feeling relaxed, grounded, and more joyful!

Want some straight talk about energy work? Check out my post What IS Energy Work?

 
Want to know more?
Check out my service package options to learn what you could discover about yourself.

You want guidance, support and safety?

That’s what I’m here for.

I’ve got the tools, the learning, and the deep listening.

You’ve got the information. All that you need is already contained inside you.

Together we illuminate all that’s been missed, ignored, or cast in shadow. We learn how your whole system has been working to give you what you need. And we realign you to your beautiful vision.

 
Want to know more?
Check out my service package options to learn some of the things you could discover.

Why are you stuck in this situation or that relationship? What holds you in one place? And on a bigger scale, you want to know what is your purpose, your unique calling, your reason for being?!

Let’s start with what IS and who you are today.

You are a daughter or a son. You belong to a family, a zodiac sign, a career, a company, a spiritual belief system, a group of friends, a country or countries, and more.

You are a complex, multi-faceted individual.

You belong to many systems and there are whole systems at work just INSIDE of you.

There’s no ONE method that we could use to discover all that you are.

That’s why I have a number of cool ways I work with my clients. We explore everything from ancestral patterns to somatic stories to animal totems.

We seek information and experiences from your brain, your body, your unconscious, your spirit guides, and Spirit itself.

All you have to do to start is ask the burning questions. I’ll take it from there.

 
Want to know more?
Check out my service package options to see what you might not yet know about yourself!

I was really in a bind. A loved one and I were in some deep conflict, and I really didn’t know how to get out of it.

After several months of inner struggle, I finally got some help and some space, and realized what was happening. And only then was any kind of change available to me.

We Are Often Blinded To How We Feel

Some part of me REALLY didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening.

This part of me felt like that information would overwhelm or paralyze me. And another part of me felt ashamed for being in the situation in the first place.

You could say everything in my system was conspiring to keep me blinded to what my real truth was – how much dread I felt in dealing with my friend, how much I felt I should have known better, how guilty I felt for being upset with him.

It’s Actually More Painful To NOT Know
Yes, it was hard to really see how much anger, shame, and sadness I was carrying around.

But trust me, it was much more painful to have those emotions buried and feel helpless to change. Seeing the reality of what was happening for me was actually a relief.

The Secret Second Step To Change
Okay, so I really acknowledged what was happening for me. And then….?

This is the secret step that most people don’t know about: You find compassion for yourself.

The truth is everything we do, EVERYTHING, is about trying to get more love and acceptance. When I looked at all the things I had been doing with my friend, all these coping and stifled behaviors, I realized that I was really doing the best I could.

All the parts of me that were hiding my truth were trying to keep me from feeling hurt. My anger was trying to protect me from feeling hurt. Even my shame was trying to help me be a good person and treat my friend well so that both he and I would feel loved.

Attention Is The Most Basic Form Of Love
The parts of us that keep us from seeing our deep feelings and needs are working hard to protect us.

One of the most loving things you can do for yourself is acknowledge your inner protection. Yes, even the parts that encourage you to have a drink or eat a bag of cookies or have a one-night stand.

Even those parts are trying to protect you. Even they deserve love.

The Inconvenient Truth
Is this easy? No.
Radical self-honesty and deep self-compassion take work.

Is it effective?
Abso-frickin’-lutely!!!

Why not try it and see what happens? Let me know what you discover.

Recently I experienced a big shock—the kind that most of us don’t encounter very often.

I was with a friend when I discovered evidence of a physical disaster near my home. I did not, at that time, know any of the details, nor did I know what kind of impact it might have on my own life.

Now, normally, I am a person who likes, even needs, to process my emotional impact verbally. In other words, I really like to talk things out. (What else would you expect from a professional therapist, right?)

But in this circumstance, I found myself unwilling to talk about my inner workings at all. My friend who was with me was even a little frustrated. She couldn’t understand why I shut down. I didn’t even know, myself.

So What Happened?

Later though, as I recovered from the feeling of shock, and that first big emotional whallop, I had some insight into my own process.

Usually, I am pretty grounded. I know how I feel pretty quickly, and I’m agile and adaptable, able to examine my shifting thoughts and feelings within a few minutes.

When something like that shock hits me, though, I don’t know how I feel. I hear lots of my inner parts giving all different kinds of feelings and ideas. I can feel my Core Self listening to them, kind of like a trained cop handling tens of panicky witnesses.

And I discovered that the reason I didn’t want to talk about these thoughts and feelings as they came up was because I didn’t want to commit to any of them. I could’ve explored any one of those thoughts and followed it down the rabbit hole, getting worked up about a particular story.

In that vulnerable state where I still wasn’t grounded enough to know what I believed, I sent up my boundaries so that I could calm the riotous crowd inside me until I knew what thoughts and emotion I decided to allow to fully exist.

How’d I Do That?

This may sound like some kind of zen mentalist magic, but the truth is that anyone can learn to do this.

In her book Emotional Alchemy, author Tara Bennett-Goleman talks about “the very latest research in neuroscience–including the neurological ‘magic quarter second,’ during which it is possible for a thought to be ‘caught’ before it turns into an emotional reaction.”

It’s so much easier to nip a feeling in the bud, before it really takes root and spreads throughout my system and I have to go digging up the entire weedy garden.

Dr. Carl Jung knew, more than fifty years ago, that such mindfulness was possible. I’m so grateful to live in an age where the tools to achieve it are so readily available.

Check out more in Emotional Alchemy.