Spirit Guides: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Have you ever found yourself in a new country, city, or town and felt instant belonging? 

Do you often randomly reminisce about a scene from your childhood?

Ever experienced recurring themes in your dreams or in your meditation practice?

Moments like these can always be put down to coincidence, but they could also be signals from the spirit world. These knocks on your consciousness could be your spirit guides trying to reach you through the mediums of the physical world and through your patterns of intuition. 

Perhaps it’s time to stop reading into it alone and start actually reading more on it. And you’ve come to the right place. In this comprehensive guide  to spirit guides, you’ll discover all you need to know about this exciting phenomenon based on a collection of research, and modules from our spiritual experts. From the meaning of a spirit guide all the way to understanding their key role in our lives, we hope this guide serves you well as you embark on your spiritual journey. 

• What Is a Spirit Guide?
• Meet Your Spirit Guides
• What Do Spirit Guides Look Like?
• How Do Spirit Guides Behave?
• How Do You Connect With Your Spirit Guide?

What Is a Spirit Guide?

So what are spirit guides and what’s their business trying to reach you? Would you believe it if we told you that they want nothing from you in return (apart from the desire to see you happy)? 

According to energy healer and author of Mindvalley’s Duality Quest, Jeffrey Allen, your spirit guides are your personal guides to the energy world. You can think of them as your special friends assigned only to you from that dimension. 

These guides understand not only how you want to live your life, but also how to navigate you towards this ideal life. From revealing your true love, to directing you towards breakthrough business ideas and even helping you make financial decisions, they know all the buttons to push (or not push) on the path to attaining your best life. 

But here’s the clincher — not everyone can actually hear them. Not everyone can access this valuable guidance. 

That’s because connecting with your spiritual guides takes practice. And like any friend in the physical world, to make a connection, you first have to meet.

Meet Your Spirit Guides

Your spirit guides have known you and all your past lives for years. But have you taken the time to get to know them back? Here’s a quick rundown of the types of spirit guides out there. 

The 4 most common spirit guides

You can find several lists on the different types of spirit guides. But because everyone experiences guides differently, we’ve shortened our list to the four most common types. 

#1: Guardian angels

Your guardian angels are your ‘life guides.’ They serve as your main guides because, as the name suggests, they are with you for your entire life, even before you were born. Jeffrey describes these guardian angels as members of your spirit family who, together with you, have traversed as one clan moving from one lifetime to another. 

“Your spirit guides are assigned specifically to you, usually [they are] a part of your spirit family where you’re moving together from life to life,” he explains. 

#2: Healing guides

Contrary to your guardian angels, healing guides are temporary. They come to you when you are in a time of need, when you’re struggling, or when there is a lesson for you to learn. 

Do you think you need to hear from a healing guide soon? Try embodying these lessons on healing your spirit by Jeffrey Allen. The more you take care of your spiritual fitness, the closer you will be to synching in a vibration that aligns with meeting your potential healing guide. 

#3: Ancestral guides

Did you know that a deceased relative could be your assigned guide? Ancestral guides are related to you by blood. 

Your ancestral guides can range from relatives who have recently passed or souls from several years back. If you feel a strong familiarity with one of your guides, this might just be an ancestral guide. 

#4: Spirit animals 

Today, young crowds might refer to a celebrity or pop icon who encapsulates their inner personality as their ‘spirit animal.’ However, the idea of a ‘spirit animal’ actually originates from indigenous groups and Native American cultures. In these cultures, their ‘spirit animals’ are representations of the animals in their environment and what they teach or provide to the community.

Similarly, your spirit animal guides are animals that may be a representation of what you need to learn. They may also be deceased pets looking after you. If you had a spirit animal as a guide, what animal do you think it would be?

What Do Spirit Guides Look Like? 

As guides serve different purposes, they also appear in different ways. Guides can be masculine, feminine, or animal-like. They can have a face, appear as a symbol, or simply feel like an energy force. 

Like a friend that you start to see more often, the visual emulation of your guide becomes clearer to you over time and more familiar to you as you keep working together. The key is to keep checking in with your guides and accepting whichever concepts of your guides come to you from all your senses. 

How Do Spirit Guides Behave? 

Once you start tuning in to listen to your guides, it’s important to remember that your spirit guides are not here to hurt you.

When you are conflicted with a decision, they will offer you an energy that is insightful and not judgemental. They can even deliver these messages in a light and funny manner. 

Your guides are simply coordinators. As coordinators, your guides can actually work with the other guides of your nearest and dearest, or even with the guides of strangers. 

It is their goal to connect your plans as they try to provide you with options but the choice is ultimately up to you. Your guides will never demand a particular outcome. Like a concierge offering assistance in your hotel stay, your guides allow you to live an effortless life when you trust in their timing and work. 

When we trust in our guides we can let go of overthinking our decisions. “We tend to keep asking, asking, asking instead of just waiting for what’s already in progress and this is inefficient and ineffective,” Jeffrey explains. He adds, “You have to do your part and take action but you don’t have to figure everything out ahead of time.”

How Do You Connect With Your Spirit Guides?

As we’ve shared, being able to listen closer to your spirit guides has a great pay off when it comes to your wellbeing. Here are some practices you can start carrying in order to connect with your spirit guide better, as well as ways that they might connect with you too. 

#1: Lend them your ears

Some people hear the actual speaking voices of their guides. Others may hear a ringing in their ears. The ability to hear these kinds of sounds from spiritual beings is called clairaudience.

When you find yourself encountering a ringing in your ears, it is advised to sit with it and ask your spirit guides why you are experiencing this at this moment. The ringing could mean they are trying to warn you of something important like a danger lying ahead, for example. 

#2: Keep a watchful eye

Your spirit guides may try to connect with you through visuals in the physical world or in your dreams and mediations. To practice retaining visuals in these semi-conscious states, apart from keeping a daily journal, you can also start keeping a dream journal.  

Some of these visuals can include seeing an aura or glow around the head of some of the people you encounter. Jeffrey shares that these instances can indicate the importance of connecting with that certain person at this point in time. There are many unique ways to practice seeing auras. You can explore some methods on TikTok. 

#3: Pause and relax

Have you ever tended to overthink solutions to your problems to the point of burnout, only to suddenly receive the answer out of nowhere? You may be experiencing these moments of clarity thanks to your guides, as they’re able to enlighten your thoughts and insights.

To find these answers, it helps to take two steps away from your fixations and give yourself some time to breathe so your guides can be heard over your thoughts. 

#4 Practice open-ness to new situations

Because your guides are always trying to walk you towards the life you want to live, they will find several ways to present situations and opportunities for you to grow. Our tip is to be open to these new experiences and practice asking yourself and your guides — “how did I end up in this situation?”

You never know, you could actually be on a stepping stone to your ideal destination and it never hurts to ask them for more clarity. 

#5 Use your emotions as a compass

Having sudden jolts of energy, enthusiasm, joy, anger, or sadness — indeed, these are normal human experiences. But they can also be your spirit guides sending you a message. An example of this occurrence could be when you are strangely pulled towards certain people or objects. Jeffrey shares his example in his Mindvalley Quest about when he felt a strange fear of rock climbing. 

“I remember being overcome with fear one time when I was climbing. My guides pointed out: ‘Ah, this fear is really about business but you can’t see it there so we put it in your climbing space.’ I started working on some business stuff and the climbing fear went away.”

Seek Guidance, Seek Greatness

In a nutshell, your spirit guides will communicate with you as long as you continue to listen. These can be through signs, numbers, symbols, images, friends and, circumstances of synchronicity. And the experience of connecting with guides is unique for any individual. Get creative with your listening and trust yourself in the process.

If you’re ready to fine-tune your listening skills to better connect with your guides, check out Jeffrey Allen in Mindvalley’s Duality free Masterclass. The class also talks about intuition training, and there’s a good reason it’s one of Mindvalley’s most popular spirituality courses. It truly is guaranteed to be a safe place to start your journey. 

So when you next connect with your guides, what will be the first thing you’ll ask them?