Manifesting Your Best Life By Working With Spirit Guides

A core principle of the manifestation ethos is pronoia, the belief that fate is conspiring in your favor. Manifesting, then, is an act of co-creation, aligning your will to an already-surging current. If you’re ready to accept that someone — indeed, many someones — are not only listening to your wishes, but are rooting for you with unconditional support, then why not get to know your team? How do you get in contact with the guides, ancestors, past lives, inner parts, angels, higher powers, and archetypes who are in your ring? Here’s how to forge a connection and ask for help — who may answer the call.

WHAT ARE GUIDES?

Assuming that you’re seeking to manifest your very best self — to fulfill your highest purpose, to be of service to the world around you, to find those soulmates who expand your horizons, to feel safe and free in your body, to become a vessel for divine experience — then you better believe there are interested investors in your cause. If you’re really down to fulfill your destiny, then you’re no longer working alone (not that you ever were). Think of the mentors and masters who help every hero reach greatness, from Minerva McGonagall to Rupert Giles, and consider that you have a whole parliament of elements with your very best interest at heart, to whom your growth and gifts serve. You’re a part of something much, much bigger now.

Guides can take the form of ancestors and even homelands, connecting you to your source and realigning you with your family and purpose. They could be gods, saints, or mythic archetypes with whom you resonate. They could be angels or simply some elevated self, watching over you. You don’t need to be able to identify them to recognize that they’re at work, and that they’re always available to redirect you to your highest purpose. You’ve likely heard a voice in your head, nudging you to arrive at the right place or right time, setting up that chance encounter that changed everything. As Liz Greene writes in The Astrology of Fate, “these ‘meaningful’ coincidences invoke a conviction that another world lies somewhere beneath the apparent one, and intrudes, on suitable occasions, with an experience of fated orderedness.” What if you didn’t have to wait for such coincidences, but could actively set them in motion?

ESTABLISHING CONTACT

So the first step, when meditating, praying, setting intentions, or even just washing the dishes and zoning out, is to throw out feelers. Who may be listening? Who would you ask for help, wisdom, and guidance? Where do you feel safe enough to not only call out, but to listen? When do you feel most disconnected to the noise of the world around you, and most in touch with some inner compass?

Many who engage in dialogue with higher powers create memory palaces, or liminal spaces of their own imagination, where they feel safe to return to, and set boundaries and limits for contact. Essentially, you’re designing the psychic foyer where you could receive your “visitors.” Others may find a time of day or physical location that stirs up connection: perhaps, on your sunset walk in the neighborhood, you feel especially at ease, and able to open the channels. Whatever makes you feel a link, a charge, or a spark, go with it, invest in it, and keep coming back. Your team will be ready to jump in.

ANCESTORS & LOVED ONES

Different guides may show up in different ways. Many of us have met our guides already, in the flesh, only to have lost them. When manifesting, we can call on those loved ones we’ve known to restore some sense of wholeness, and to redirect us to our path. And when it comes to working with your bloodline, it goes way beyond the grandparents you knew. What if each of us was the inheritor to our entire lineage, going back thousands of years? What if you could access the histories, strengths, and gifts of eons of elders, even those long-lost through oppression, genocide, slavery, migration, and the ravages of time? If you could encounter your ancestry as a whole, or even meet individual entities along the way, how would it expand your perspective?

In Ancestral Medicine, Daniel Foor explains that in these encounters you will “ideally feel loved and supported by your older ancestors; however, accessing their support can call for healing and repair with living family and recent ancestors.” As you work to manifest your highest potential, and to connect with your biological karma, you will find yourself not only asking for help from your familial guides, but honoring their calls to heal the bloodline as a whole. Consider how your contributions could honor, heal, or transform the story of your family. With so much at stake, you can count on scores of ancestors to help you succeed at your mission.

LAND & ELEMENTS

Perhaps you have an intrinsic connection to your birthplace, motherland, or chosen city, be it the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, or just your hometown Wawa. By visiting your chosen land, or even calling on it from afar, you can tap into its strength, roots, and history to power you forward. And by affirming the original inhabitants of the land you’re in, you can ensure that what you manifest honors their rights and dignities, so that what you’re calling in is of creative and restorative value, and not driven by hollow self-interest.

Go beyond the land you’re on and tap into the earth itself, to its roots and buds and branches, to its network of trees. Ride the current of the waves and waters, or call on the creative fury of fire. Incorporate flowers, minerals, and herbs into your altar; make time in the sea, or bathtub, for open channeling; light candles and bonfires with sacred intent. As any amateur bender knows, the elements are moving through us all the time. By surrendering to their power (and facing any conscious blocks to connection), you make yourself a vehicle and vessel to forces of immortal majesty.

GODS, SAINTS, ICONS, & MYTHIC ARCHETYPES

Let’s face it: much of manifestation language is a repackaging of old-fashioned prayer. But if you’re uncomfortable with the vague, possibly oppressive Holy One from your childhood, that doesn’t mean you’re out of options. Every culture and religion is host to scores of mythic archetypes and characters with whom you can resonate. Among Hindu and Greco-Roman religions are endless gods, heroes, and villainesses to discover, all with their own rituals, festivals, and offerings. When looking for love, why not invoke Venus, goddess of love, through her Hindu incarnation Lakshmi or her ancient Semitic antecedent, Asherah? Why not start every Wednesday, Miercoles, Mercury’s day, by reading his Orphic Hymn and manifesting money and productivity?

Of course, the monotheistic religions offer endless creative avenues to source, from Islamic sacred geometry to the Catholic saints. And, if you’re someone who sees the divine in the culture around them, there’s no reason you can’t recruit your most beloved heroes and villains as sources of strength. Perhaps, when starting a new job, you call on Jane Eyre’s wit and tenacity; or, when manifesting contact with your crush, you invoke Rae Earl’s moxy and daring.

These archetypes, whether ancient or postmodern, offer easy access to visualization and very personal, specific relationship dynamics. Be sure to research traditional offerings (or design your own) so that you can deepen the commitment and connection.

PLANETS

In his masterpiece Cosmos & Psyche, Richard Tarnas writes: “to assume a priori that the entire universe is ultimately a soulless void within which our multidimensional consciousness is an anomalous accident, and that purpose, meaning, conscious intelligence, moral aspiration, and spiritual depths are solely attributes of the human being, reflects a long-invisible inflation on the part of the modern self.” Indeed, astrology operates on the primary principle of “as above, so below,” that each of us operates in microcosmic synchronicity to the movement of the universe around us.

Your body and your life, then, are model orbits of the entire star system. Look to the planets, their meanings, and their movements to direct your path. For example, how does Mars, planet of ambition, emerge in your chart? Which planets challenge it, and what blocks must you face as you try to awaken its themes and powers? Where is Mars in the heavens at this moment, and how can you tie your dreams and desires to its current trajectory? Astrology is an art of time, patience, and scope. By paying attention to the cosmic story around you, you can more clearly put your intentions into a bigger perspective.

INNER PARTS

Over the past few years, IFS, or Internal Family Systems, has surged in popularity, espousing a new definition of the self as a host of many disparate parts. Within each of us could be children, animals, warriors, demons, destroyers, and beyond, all impacted by our experiences and point of view, with different urges and desires. By cultivating an active dialogue with your parts — be it your inner eight year-old who wants to play Sailor Moon all day, or your sexually insatiable werewolf, at home at the local dungeon orgy — you can appreciate the wide constellation of archetypes at work within you, all the time. For each arena of life you’re seeking to manifest in, from love to work, there are likely several inner parts with the skill set to launch you forward. Get to know them; they’re specific only to you. Don’t judge them. Let them loose (within established boundaries). Make yourself a channel for these inner guides, and you’ll find they handle most of the magic for you.

FUTURE SELVES

When Harry Potter and his godfather Sirius Black are surrounded by a mob of hungry dementors in Prisoner of Azkaban, they are rescued by a distant, glasses-clad figure resembling Harry. Could it be his long-dead father? No. It’s Harry himself, traveling back in time to save the day. In the future, you will have faced your current anxieties, dramas and fears, and, hopefully, gained some wisdom in the process. There you are, a month from now, a year from now, or decades from now, chilled out with perspective, and down to offer insight. These future selves are always available as destinations for manifestation, or as hands to grip when you’ve lost your way. They’ll remind you what’s really important, in the long run.

HIGHER POWER

Twelve step recovery programs direct all efforts to the grace of a “loving higher power of our own understanding.” The work of recovery is to turn over “our will and our lives,” those things which are not, nor have ever been, in our control. Call it faith, trust, grace, or just optimism. Whether or not you connect to deities, images, or archetypes, there will always be an element of blindness involved in the process of manifesting. Though this is the art of declaring what you want, and making it real, you won’t get far without handing over the outcome to something beyond you. This may be God, angels, or some higher standard of peace and purpose. You don’t have to know it, or understand it. But if you’re down for a miracle or two on your path to manifesting, you might as well open up to it.