Guides and Guidance - part one

Guides are fun to work with. In fact, in my estimation, I believe those people who work with guidance either at a conscious or unconscious level, are beginning to operate at a much higher and more effective level of performance in whatever field they’re in. So, although this blog is generally geared towards people interested in healing energies, guides and guidance are not exclusive to healers. And although my connection and experience with guidance has come through my own work with subtle healing energies, I welcome input from anyone who has made contact with guidance.

The problem with this discussion is that most people will think you are nuts if you start talking about guides or guidance. But let me ask you this? Haven’t you ever felt guided to do something without any identifiable reason and then later, once you’ve already made a commitment to the action, you find out that this was something you were meant to do? Some people call it a coincidence. Well, my teachers would all say that there is no such thing as a coincidence. Serendipity and synchronicity are words we use to describe coincidences when we begin to realize that they aren’t just a coincidence. And when it does happens to us, we feel something that transcends just being happy or simply feeling like you’re in the right place at the right time. The feeling is almost euphoric and by some has been called being in the “zone”. You start to do all the right things without even thinking about it. It’s the subtle step beyond living your life to being your life.

Does anyone remember how you got to that point where everything started to click? What were you doing that precipitated the experience? Or possibly even more important then figuring out how it started happening is trying to figure out why it stopped.

Guidance is available all the time. The first key to receiving or listening to guidance is you, or more specifically, your body. Your body is designed for detecting all sorts of information to help you live better. One of the basic ways your body communicates information to you is by pain or discomfort. Now, of course this might not seem too earth shattering when first considering physical pain, which is a physiological process. And although I will eventually delve into pain, disease and conditions, let’s first consider discomfort that doesn’t relate to a physical hurt like breaking a leg or cutting a finger. When was the last time someone, something or even some place made you feel uncomfortable? Have you ever walked into a city, neighborhood, room, bar, classroom, store, etc. and felt uncomfortable? Why? Other than physical cues, what else causes the yucky tummy feeling? I believe the yucky tummy feeling is actually a form of guidance. Guidance can be very subtle, even subconscious, and yet can still be very effective.

Some have said that we (humans) have evolved so far away from nature and wilderness that we have lost portions of our humanity and much of our basic animal instincts. I’m not so sure. Over time, our “habitat” has become the freeways, trains and buildings where we live and work. Our habitat is now a neighborhood. An interesting study was done of train commuters to see if their commute patterns correlated to accidents on specific train lines. The study found a statistically significant correlation. The study showed that whenever an accident occurred on a specific train line, a significant population of commuters who would normally take that same line, actually avoided the accident prior to the accident taking place. They would either take a different route, a different mode (car or bus), or would change plans to come in to work altogether.

Similar studies have been conducted with similar results. If anyone’s interested in the study, I’m sure I could dig it up. Personally, I’ll share a story that has no scientific relevance, but was profound enough to really make me consider our innate ability to receive guidance. I worked in the World Financial Center for almost six years prior to 9/11, but had already moved to California by 2001. From those years I developed a large number of friends and colleagues who should have been downtown, at work, in or around the World Trade Center during the attacks on 9/11. However, as the days after 9/11 unfolded and as I obtained updates on everyone I knew who worked downtown and who might have been affected, a strange trend began to emerge. Similar to the train study, I found a significant number of my friends and colleagues weren’t even downtown at the time of the attack. Except in this case, it was as if I knew the entire fragment of the population who avoided the city that day.

One had a meeting in midtown that morning. One took a personal day and so never left New Jersey. One friend had his parents in town for the week and so had taken the day off to tour the city with them but had yet to make it in to Manhattan from Brooklyn. Another one decided to go in late that day and so was stuck on the subway when she normally would have been at work during the first crash. All of these people are Wall Street workaholic types that are rarely if ever late and almost never miss work. Another one of my friends decided to volunteer his time for a political campaign and so was also out in Brooklyn during the attack, instead of at the office, just a couple blocks away from WTC. And if you knew this guy, you’d find it hard to believe he would even be a political volunteer, much less sacrifice an entire workday to be one. And of course, not everyone I knew was so fortunate. But, an extraordinary number of people I knew and certainly the majority of them all stayed away from the WTC during the 9/11 attack. So, what’s the connection between all of these people? Is there one? It can’t be related to me, most of them don’t know each other and I wasn’t even living there at the time. They aren’t from the same age group or ethnicty, they are of no speficic religion, and most were from different companies. So, where's the connection? Okay, they were all human...

If you put any weight in scientific studies, anecdotal experiences or quite possibly even your own experiences, you may have to consider or reconsider that humans, not just the gifted ones, are capable of using guidance.

I’ve always been aware of the idea of guidance, but I used to only believe it was only available to saints, prophets, psychics or other gifted people. And certainly not to anyone I knew. And then when I really began to study energy healing, the lines I had drawn before began to blur. And now after years of working in alternative healthcare (now being called cooperative healthcare) I've begun to recognize things that have been staring me in the face all along. And the reason I couldn’t see them was because I couldn’t believe them. It wasn't even a possibility. But as I slowly began to truly imagine the possibilities, I also began to witness and take notice of reputable healers in a multiple of healing modalities using guidance as an integral part of their healing work. I had always known of a few of these people, but I hadn’t made the connection. In each case, I would always think the use of guidance was only peculiar to whatever particular healer I was studying or reading about. Like a freak occurrence or something. It’s kind of like the exception rule. Some people can keep their belief system in tact, even in the face of information directly to the contrary, if they look at the new information as the exception and not as the rule. Everyone from the most elite scientists to the biggest racists have been guilty of this “logic” at one time or another and of course some more than others. I personally think Americans (and Brits) are prone to this fallacy more than others simply because there are so many exceptions in the rules of the English language. But that’s another subject altogether.

The next thing I began to realize was that there are people in practically every profession using guidance every day. Some people even use it in their play. And many don’t call it guidance. They might call it intuition. They may say it’s listening to their gut.

Well, I’m running out of time for today, but I wanted to get this discussion started for a few reasons. First, I wanted to re-dedicate my efforts to keeping this blog current and up-to-date with whatever I’m most currently working on in respect to my path of energy healing. And guidance is the topic I’m working with right now. But also and possibly more importantly, this is a message to my guides, thanking them for all they have taught me so far, and inviting them to take a larger role in my life and with my work in energy healing. More to come…