Do you believe in Spirit Guides?
I do.
I’ve sensed them since I was a child.
They have never steered me wrong.
The more I read and learn about Spirit Guides from people like Deborah King, Native Americans, and other cultures, the more I recall about those who were so much a part of my life as a child and as a teenager.
My first living Spirit Guide was my grandmother on my mom’s side, a German immigrant with a thick accent who loved me unconditionally. I found this out the day I stomped on her foot with all of my 35 pounds of fury when she wouldn’t let me go outside and drive away with my parents, who had left me with her to go on a brief “no kids/reconnection” vacation. In spite of my fear and fury, she carried me to the couch and let me cry out my frustration, and then she picked up her Children’s Book of the Bible and read to me about Jesus, the finder of lost lambs. I resonated with the story: I felt like a lost lamb then, and later on for years, too.
So, Jesus became another Spirit Guide for me. He still is, although I no longer consider him the Son of God any more than any of the rest of us are sons and daughters of God, or Spirit, or Source, or Cosmos, or whatever you choose to call the Creator of this magnificent endless universe. (Yes, I believe there is Intelligent Design behind the universe, and a Creator or Co-Creators. You and I are co-creators. We are all made of stardust and we will become stardust again. Everything does!) I believe he is an Ascended Master (there are a great many from different cultures and religions) and that he has only grown in power and stature since his incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth.
From a very early age, my own Higher Self spirit guide told me I was a male, and I have never believed anything else, despite being viewed as female for most of my life…something which continues in many minds, even to this day. I know who I am every bit as much as you know who you are when it comes to gender, and I knew it from a very young age, before I had the words or the vocabulary or the research behind it to confirm it. My AHA moments were many, and all of them gave me unutterable joy to learn that I was far from alone.
My Unicorn Pegasus
When I was in grade school, a sleek black, winged Pegasus-like stallion with a unicorn horn on his forehead and an invisible small pony were my spirit guides. “Pegasus” stood atop the spire of a leaning dead tree that was on my left-hand side when I walked to Enchanted Island to visit with my friends Penny and Judi Cooper. He was there every time I passed as a child until we moved to Cle Elum when I was ten. (I was deeply saddened, upon returning to the Pacific NW from Hollywood in 2004, to discover that the leaning spire was no longer there. It saddens me to this day. A friend I once knew, and loved dearly, had perched there. Where is he now?)
The invisible pony went to school with me during the early days when school was such a culture shock to me, when I was feeling vulnerable and alien. I tied his reins underneath my desk (without anyone noticing, I hoped) so I could feel him near me as I navigated through my feelings about becoming part of a classroom in which there were so many strangers. I petted him many times, and kept reminding him we could go out again as soon as school was out.
Not long after, horses became a part of my life. (I blogged about that not long ago.) (On my other website.)
THE WEIGHT LOSS SPIRIT GUIDE ON MY SHOULDER
As a teenager, as my gender dysphoria settled in to plague me — menstrual periods started when I was just nine, large breasts began to bud and flourish soon before or after (my chest was masculinized just two years ago), dress codes at school, expectations about dating, etc.) — I began to pile on self-protective flab to keep everyone except my two closest female friends at arm’s length. I didn’t want to attract positive attention to my body, because it was a make and model I disavowed with every ounce of my being; I didn’t want other boys thinking about me in that way. I wanted to be their buddy, their pal, not a desirable female. Alas, that didn’t last long. As soon as they figured out I was a female, and un-dateable, I became a non-entity, which is NOT what I wanted, but it’s what I got.
As the pounds came on, my mom became more and more concerned about me, so she took me to a “weight doctor” in Ellensburg who prescribed (are you ready for this?!) amphetamines (speed!) to me. (This was before drug education reached the school curriculums.) It was at this crucial time that my Spirit Guides came back to me in full force, unbidden but seriously concerned about the trajectory my life appeared to be taking.
I went through a bottle of the amphetamines during the summer months that year and lost thirty pounds. Mom was excited. I was fidgety, unable to sleep, and unable to wake up when I finally did manage to get to sleep at 3 or 4 every morning. When she said it was time to refill the prescription, I said, “No.” What I called the little angel on my shoulder had told me, “If you take another three-month dose, you won’t be able to stop.”
I told Mom, “I don’t function normally with those pills. I can’t sleep all night, and I can’t wake up in the morning without taking one. That isn’t right. I’d rather be fat.” I distinctly remember times when I was up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to dance on the ceiling! (This was decades before the song DANCING ON THE CEILING came to be.) I was NUTS!!!!
Fortunately, Mom didn’t insist. My Spirit Guide had warned me, and I listened!
MY NICOTINE SPIRIT GUIDE
When I was an adult and traveling with my Mom and Dad between restaurant builds in various parts of the country (Dad was a general contractor under contract with a number of major restaurants to build or remodel their franchise store across the country), we lived in a fifth-wheel trailer, so we carried our home pretty much on our backs like a turtle. We also had a pleasure vehicle, so Mom would sometimes drive that (I would drive it the rest of the time) and I would ride shotgun with Dad in the Ford F-150 that was hauling the fifth wheel.
Whenever I rode with Dad, he would ask me intermittently to light a cigarette for him and pass it over to him, so he didn’t have to try to light it while driving. I did that for several weeks until it occurred to me that I was looking forward to lighting his next cigarette and wondered why he was taking so long to ask for it. That’s when I realized I was on the cusp of becoming addicted to tobacco. My Spirit Guide showed up again and said, “No more cigarette lighting. If you do it one more time, you will be hooked, too.” So I told Dad I wouldn’t be lighting his cigarettes anymore, and why. He didn’t argue (which was rare with Dad; he was quite the tyrant when it came making sure we did what he wanted). He understood.
MY “FUTURE” SPIRIT GUIDES
And, of course, there was the Spirit Guide who kept sending me repetitive dreams about being a close, relative-like friend of DeForest and Carolyn Kelley. I had only met them for scant seconds in 1968, so I could never figure out why I had this blasted obsession about being in their lives in such a way that I felt like their offspring. You know how that turned out if you have been following me for very long. Had I dared to imagine that it would turn out the way it did, I would have committed myself to a rubber room. What happened almost NEVER happens in real life. In fact, I didn’t even believe or fully embrace it until the end of De’s life when he invited me in to help him as he lay dying of cancer. It just seemed too fantastical to be real!
So, I’ve learned to listen to what some call my intuition, but what I am fully convinced are Spirit Guides, because the wisdom came from beyond me, not from inside me. The messages were communicated to me, they it didn’t originate in me. I know when my intuition is informing me and when someone else is.
And in the very near future, I’m going to be calling in Betty White as my newest ethereal spirit guide. But I’m giving her a few weeks to reconnect with her dear husband before I do that. It’s only fair. They have missed each other so much! Betty White will be my newest disembodied Joy Bringer.
