Writing Spirit Guides 101
Very early on in my introduction to the “woo,” I heard the term Spirit Guides thrown around a lot. I wasn’t sure what they were, or more importantly who they were. As a healthy “skeptical mystic,” I wasn’t sure I believed in these so-called guides. It wasn’t until I opened myself up to the possibility that they could actually be real that I started to work with them.
And once I did, an entirely new world opened up for me. I’m not an expert on working with guides, so let me dispel that myth for you. However, while doing a lot of research and experimental practices, I have to admit that I’ve never been this close to my guides before. Between allowing myself to receive with an open mind and intentional practice, I feel like I’m uncovering relationships with my guides like never before.
While Spirit Guides have deep roots in almost every culture and tradition, a widely accepted definition is:
“Non-physical entities that provide guidance, protection, wisdom, and support to the living.”
The concept of spiritual beings or entities that assist or communicate with humans is as old as human history itself. While the specific terminology and interpretations differ among cultures, the underlying theme remains consistent. The ideology of Spirit Guides has been studied in Indigenous cultures, Egyptian history, African traditions, Shamanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Spiritualism, and of course, the New Age Movement.
If you find yourself wanting to learn more about Spirit Guides after my brief introduction to your writing-specific guide, I highly recommend you dig into the research! I’m providing additional resources for you to take your studies further if you want to at the end of this essay.
What’s the point?
You might be wondering why it even matters if we have spirit guides or not — especially one specifically for writing. It’s a valid question and while every person will need and receive what is meant for them, here are some examples of what my spirit guide has helped me achieve while working with her:
I was accepted into and attended a writer's workshop in Dublin, Ireland
I was accepted into and am working in a mentorship program
I've built up the courage to start publishing my first writing fiction to heal novel, Until They Burn
I've worked through countless character and plot issues by communicating with my writing spirit guide
I’ve learned how to access my writing “blocks” and use my spirit guide’s thoughts to help untangle what is at the root of it
I’ve been gifted opportunities that I’d normally never know about but somehow find at the exact right time
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too! Since "meeting" and communicating with my writing spirit guide, I have found confidence in moving forward on creative projects and know that when I ask her a question, I will get an answer (although, it may not always be the answer I want).
The Two Paths
I’ve found two completely different ways to work with a writing spirit guide. We will go over them both but in short, the approaches are this:
There may be a writing spirit guide that has been waiting for you to reach out. This might be a guide that has been with you for a very long time or has just come into your life. Typically, these guides aren’t known to us until we make an intuitive connection with them.
You can call upon or invoke a specific writing guide(s) if you feel like they might be able to help. They may not always respond or be able to guide you, but in many cases, they want to be helpful and see you succeed. Calling upon a specific guide can be useful when you feel a deep connection with a person on the other side who inspires you or has helped you in some way already.
Before You Start Working With a Guide
If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to skip to the good part… finding out who your guide(s) are and how they will help you. But let’s go over a few housekeeping items first that will ensure that you’re ready to meet your guide(s).
Though there isn’t a consensus on an exact number, many teachers/instructors in the spiritual industry agree on one thing — you have multiple Spirit Guides that show up for you throughout your life and for different reasons. I highly recommend reading Sonia Choquette’s book, Ask Your Guides to learn more about the individual types of guides as we will only be covering the ones that are directly related to your writing in this section.
Open-Mindedness
The number one most important factor in connecting with your guides is your willingness to be open-minded. I can attest to how vitally important this is because I did not truly start speaking with my guides until I fully surrendered to the belief that they could exist. I thought I believed they may exist, but if we’re being honest… it wasn’t a 100% belief. So your communication with your spirit guides will almost always be contingent upon your dedication to remaining open to guidance and allowing whatever happens to happen.
Silence is Golden
Getting quiet and going inward is probably the next most important factor when it comes to working with your guides. As Sonia Choquette says in her book, Ask Your Guides:
Spirit guidance comes in wisps and glimmers of energy that gently bring our attention to something we are missing as we move through each day. These alerts are so subtle in most cases that it's easy to miss them altogether unless you pay attention to your feelings, notice the signs, and make space in your consciousness when they do appear. If you are rushing about, preoccupied, always talking or overthinking, you will drown out guidance. This means it is best to slow down, pause, and quiet your thoughts regularly, so you are available to more than your noisy, reactive brain.
Now, I’m notorious for doing the exact opposite of this. Meditation is very difficult for me. But I think the combo of staying open-minded while doing a guided meditation or visualization exercise has gotten a little bit easier as I’ve made efforts to reach out to my guides. We’ll go more in-depth on the ways in which we can communicate with them later, but what I’m gathering is that the ability to just “drop into” our inner stillness and quiet means having some sort of access to your guides no matter where you are or what you have at your disposal.
Get Familiar With Your Own Spirit
Having a keen sense of what your own spirit feels, sounds, and looks like will help you develop a language with your spirit guide just by connecting on the same spiritual plane. Your spirit guides can sense your spirit just as you can sense theirs. I’ve included Sonia Choquette’s short exercises in the workings section to help you get familiar with your spirit.
Getting Ready to Meet Your Writing Guide
I’m going to give you information on how I personally get ready to meet my writing spirit guide, but I’m also including a few exercises in the resource section that Sonia Choquette gives to prepare to meet your guide. If you don’t find success using my method, please experiment with some of the suggestions in the resources.
Prepare Your Space
With 8 animals and a chatty husband, I know any time I want to go inward, it needs to be done in a quiet and peaceful space. So the first thing I do is go to my altar, light my candles, sage/palo santo, and cleanse the area.
Call in Your Intention
Then I acknowledge what my intention for my time will be. In this case, I set the intention of meeting my writing spirit guide. After reading Sonia’s book, I recently added her prayer to this process. It’s short, but effective in my opinion. It’s this:
Creator of the Universe and all forms and expressions that support the goodness of life, thank you for [fill in the blank] that You have blessed me with today. Guide me this day to use my talents at the highest level for the greatest good for all concerned. Amen.
Feel free to tweak this prayer to fit what feels best for you.
After the prayer, I try to release any expectations of what will happen next. Know that if your guide doesn’t show up how you think it should, it doesn’t mean you didn’t make progress. Our guides are trying to find the best way to communicate with us so that we can understand them. Finding a shared language takes time!
Prepare Your Body + Mind
After I’ve said what I need to say, I get comfy. I haven’t yet “graduated” to being able to successfully meditate or visualize sitting up. So my default is lying down. I don’t think it truly matters as long as you are comfortable enough to let yourself experience the meditation or visualization exercise.
Connecting to Your Safe Space
There are many guided visualizations or meditations you can find (you probably already have some) that can direct you to find your “safe space.” This is a space that is often VERY individualized to you and in your mind’s eye. It’s a space that reflects safety, security, and peace within you. It can be an imaginary place, a real place, or anything in between.
At this point, you can either choose to connect to your safe space if you are familiar with it or you can use a guided meditation or visualization exercise to get you there.
When I first started working with my “safe space,” I needed sensory support to get me there in the form of guided visualization. Because we worked with this approach of a “safe space” so much in my witchy classes, I’ve now developed my own way of dropping into my safe space.
As an example, I will share how and what my safe space looks like — but please remember, this was built according to my internal guidance, what works for me as a safe space doesn’t mean it will work for you.
My Safe Space Process
I see a well-worn path leading to a clearing ahead. As I walk the path, I notice the sky is painted with stars and the moon is full and bright. I hear the waves crashing from the body of water in the distance. I hear crickets and owls and the sound of nature all around me. As I walk further along the path, I see the light of a campfire. As I get closer, I notice that the campfire is surrounded by logs in a circle. I sit down on one of the logs that look out to the horizon where water laps at the shore. I feel at home here. I can hear the crackling of the fire and smell the smoke mingling with the pine trees that surround me. I watch the flames lick at the sky and I know, I am home.
Initiating Contact with Your Writing Spirit Guide With Visualization or Meditation
Once you feel settled in your “safe space,” you can now call in your writing spirit guide. Again, this is a very individualized moment and only YOU know how best to call in YOUR spirit guides. And a reminder again, release your expectations of what will show up when you ask.
Sonia Choquette says:
Contact with spirit guides is experienced on a deep, inner level, not as some external entity coming at you. You experience them with your inner senses, not your physical senses, meaning your clairvoyant eye, or inner eye of imagination; your clairaudient ear, the inner ear of intuition; or your clairsentient body, your inner feeling sense.
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t sense your writing guide — it may take you several attempts to make contact. I’ve been practicing visualization for three solid years and am just NOW starting to sense my guides. Practice makes progress. And you may need to try a few different things in your mind’s eye until one technique sticks.
My Experience
As I mentioned, it’s taken me quite a while to be able to sense my guides. The most successful attempts have been when I ask (aloud or in my head) my guides to sit down across the fire from me. Sometimes, I can physically see a manifestation of them. Sometimes, it's just a blurry shape but I can sense it’s a guide of some form. Sometimes, it’s their voice.
Just be open to experiencing whatever comes and I think you will find yourself sensing more than you think.
Confused about the difference between meditation, visualization, and pathworking? I was! Here are some quick ways they differ:
A meditation invites you to focus on your breathing, your body, or your feelings; it does not usually involve visualizing. It is designed to increase awareness of your body.
A visualization invites you to focus on specific images; sometimes it tells a story or involves traveling through a landscape (real or imaginary); sometimes it is intended to bring about a specific result – this is known as creative visualization.
A pathworking takes you on a journey through an inner landscape usually with additional tools such as imagery, music, and other tools
Initiating Contact with Your Writing Spirit Guide with Automatic Writing
Connecting with your guides during an automatic writing session is probably the technique I’m most familiar with and use frequently. You’ll want to complete all the same steps leading up to the connection with your guide, but instead of going into a meditation or guided visualization, you’ll pick up your notebook and writing utensil, or gently rest your fingers on a keyboard.
From there, you can write down your desire to meet your writing spirit guide and see if your inner wisdom answers. If you begin writing quickly and without so much thought attached to it, your guide is probably trying to talk to you.
Allow whatever needs to be written to be written and try not to let your ego or “thinking” mind make sense of it. Just keep writing or typing as long as you can, putting down whatever is coming to you. Even if it sounds or feels like gibberish.
You’ll know your spirits are done communicating when it feels like there’s nothing more to write and you are stretching your ego or thinking mind to write the next thing.
At that point, get up and move your body — even just sitting up and stretching or going for a bathroom break will do. Moving the body will reset your perspective and close the loop with your guide.
Now, you can go to the page and read what you’ve written. Don’t be judgmental or upset if you don’t understand what you’ve written. It almost always takes a few hours to a few days for me to “get” what it is I wrote and what my guides were telling me.
Be an observer of what you’ve written. Look at the tone, the vibe, the words, the sentence lengths — what do those tell you? If you’re writing by hand, notice if your handwriting changes as you progress through the page. When I allow my guides to write through me, my handwriting always gets messy and hurried — nothing at all like my normal handwriting. Perhaps, you notice that with yours as well.
You can even highlight specific words, phrases, or sentences that stick out to you. I promise there will be a connection between what was written and what your guides are trying to tell you — you just have to be patient with them.
Initiating Contact with Your Writing Spirit Guide through Divination Tools
It wasn’t until I decided to work with a specific divination deck that I discovered who one of my writing spirit guides is. I’ve found that choosing the right deck for a particular guide really helps with the connection. When I started to really dive into connecting with my writing spirit guide, I decided to work with The Literary Witches Oracle. It’s a quite simplistic deck but it covers a lot of ground, too. There are a large number of “literary witches” depicted in the deck while the rest of the cards are considered either “witches tools” or “writer’s tools.” The specificity of the deck has really helped me tap into that very distinct writer’s spirit and get clarity around my writing spirit guides and other creative inquiries.
I have to admit that before I started working with these very specific ways to meet my writing spirit guide, I thought I knew who my writing guide was. But after working with the spreads and calling in the intention and essence around my guide, I actually discovered my guide wasn’t who I thought it was!
However, just because the woman I thought was my guide, doesn’t mean her energy or essence isn’t valuable to me. I will explain in the next part of this guide how to call in or invoke the spirit of someone you want to work with specifically as it has a completely different “feel” to it.
Example Spread and Reading
The most impactful reading I’ve done thus far to meet my writing spirit guide was done using the spread/questions as shown in my example (this spread is included in the resources section).
What this spread did for me was open up a line of communication with my guide that I was having a hard time with in other ways. For some reason, between the intuitiveness of the cards and my guide and my shared language, this is one of the best ways to communicate for us.
What I loved about this spread (and what didn’t go unnoticed) is just how well these cards also reflect my guide’s (Agatha Christie) sense of humor and themes from her own writing. It made it feel that much more cohesive. But most importantly — it was helpful. Which is exactly what you’re looking for when in conversation with your writing spirit guide.
Calling Upon or Invoking a Specific Writing Spirit Guide
The other method of working with a writing spirit guide is by calling upon or invoking one. What does that mean? Well, in a way, it’s similar to something you’ve probably been doing your entire life. Whenever an issue arises in your life, is there a person in your life you think of who has the wisdom to share with you (regardless if they are living or on the other side)? For example, I often think about my Grams and what advice she’d give me if she were here. She’s not very chatty in the afterlife (I haven’t had the pleasure of connecting with her yet in that way).
Calling upon or invoking a specific writing spirit guide is just like that and just that easy. Now, you may call on them, but they may not answer or communicate with you. That doesn’t mean their essence or spirit isn’t willing to lend you a hand, though.
A great example of this is the writing spirit guide I thought was mine but wasn’t, not really. I realize now that when I think of Maya Angelou as my writing spirit guide, it’s usually in the form of invoking her essence, her bravery, her beautiful writing, and the way she used fiction as a vehicle for healing. I call her spirit “Still I Rise” and I’ve called upon it so many times in my life. In fact, I have it tattooed on me! And the newest addition to our family was named after her, subtly of course.
I haven’t had the pleasure of connecting with Miss Maya Angelou though. I don’t hear her or see her. She hasn’t written back to me in my automatic writing sessions.
But still… when I call upon her, I feel her essence around me.
The process for calling upon or invoking a specific writing guide follows much of the same steps for calling in a guide you aren’t familiar with — you’re just formulating your intention around connecting with your specific guide. I’ve found it’s much easier to do this when I have something tangible around the guide to use as a connection point.
For example — when I call in Maya’s essence, I put one of my oracle cards that depicts her on my altar.
You could also use a book or a written passage from the guide. You could use a photograph, clip, or even music that has a connection point with the guide.
None of this is mandatory, but it’s a lot easier to work with them when I have something sensory to hold on to. You may find that’s the case for you, too. Again, be open-minded to experimenting and trying different things to reach your guide!
Once you feel like you’ve done enough prep work, the rest of the process is similar to the above! Try to connect with your guide through meditation, visualization, or divination.
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