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CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS A SPIRIT GUIDE?
Many people are bewildered when it comes to what a spirit guide is. I understand this confusion, because each of us has angels (10 categories in all); our loved ones who have passed before us to the Other Side; and ghosts, who are souls who haven’t made it to the Other Side and feel that they’re still alive. We also have what can often be hard to discern: energy implants. With an energy implant, there isn’t any entity present, but a trauma is implanted by an individual at a particular place and time, and a psychic can then pick up the events imprinted in that soul’s energy.
In this book, however, I want to focus on spirit guides. These are entities who have lived life on this earthly plane. They can be male or female, and they’re very solid in their own dimension on the Other Side. They study your chart (our program that we choose to come into life with) and help you decide the lessons you’re here to learn, and also how they can help you do so. To put it in the simplest terms possible, you made a contract with this particular entity to watch over you while you’re in life.
Many guides often study for a long time to be your guide so that they can get your chart right. Of course you have help from the Council, too—the spirit guide will approach the Council before your birth and even after you come into life for advice and guidance with their charge (that’s you).
Sometimes spirit guides have lived lives with you, but this is fairly rare. Guides can’t be relatives who died when you were three years old or younger, because that would mean that you went unattended for a period of time. No, the guide is with you when you enter, and it’s there throughout your life. The guide even helps to take you to the Other Side, along with your loved ones, angels, and souls you cared about before you came into life, but whom you haven’t necessarily known on Earth.
Spirit guides come in all shapes and sizes, and they’re from all different cultures. They can assume any visage, but I assure you, they’re trusted, valued friends who will never disappoint you. They have great wisdom and courage, and you’ll hear from them if you’re quiet and listen. Guides don’t always have an audible voice, although the more you believe in their existence, the better they’re able to communicate.
Maybe I had an edge because I came from a long line of psychics (going back 300 years!)—but I actually heard my guide speak to me when I was seven years old (I’ll discuss this in detail later in the book). In the beginning, she didn’t give me a running commentary, but she did give me messages. Please understand, this all started 61 years ago, and it was a much different world back then—one where people couldn’t even begin to accept this concept—not to mention the fact that I was born into a Catholic/ Jewish/ Episcopalian/ Lutheran household. None of this lent itself to making contact with a disembodied spirit. When people now tell me that they’re struggling with similar confusion and fear, I understand completely.
I found out back then that my guide’s name was Iena, and how my family and I got Francine out of this is beyond all of our memories. Maybe I just didn’t like the name and changed it. Who knows? A guide’s name isn’t really critical, but I’ve found that it’s significant to at least know what sex your guide is and to have some identity basis—if nothing else, it makes them more real to you. I’m also convinced that when we call upon them and believe in them, it helps our guides pierce the veil of the dimensions from the Other Side to this side. (And since this is a question that is often asked, let me clarify: It is possible to have more than one guide, as I do—Francine, my primary guide; and Raheim, my secondary guide—but usually you’ll have just one.)
To go back to the name issue, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people their spirit guides’ names, and they’ve either exclaimed that this has always been their favorite moniker, or that they called their dog that, or their mother was going to give them that very name. It seems that the name of the guide is often imprinted in our consciousness. I’ve even had people come up with the right name after they “met” their guide during one of the meditative exercises that follows later in this book.
Now, you’ll get as many as 20 or 30 messages a day from your guide, but you’ll have a tendency to chalk these communications up to your own thoughts, or to coincidence. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have your own infusion of psychic knowledge from God, but your guide certainly has a voice as well. For example, what made you call Susan and find out if she was sick? What caused you to put on your seat belt the day you had an accident (something you should wear each time you’re in a vehicle anyway)? These small and even larger episodes can very well stem from your guide. Unlike angels who protect and heal, your guides, as clairvoyant Ruth Montgomery once said, are “the nudging companions along the way.”
