Guidance through an inner knowing

Guidance can come not only via signs from the outside or an inner voice, it can also come as an inner knowing. When there is an inner knowing, we just know but are not able to say how and why we know.

Several years ago, someone told me that if I completed a certain task then he would give me something in return (which I wanted very much and had already been waiting for for many years). But the very moment he made this promise, I knew he was lying. There was no inner voice telling me this. And there were no dreams and no signs outside. I just knew. But I couldn’t say how I knew. It was just gut-level intuition. And as it turned out over the next years, I was right.

Another example (which happened around 2012) was the story when the principal of my younger son’s elementary school called me at home saying, “You must come and pick up your son real fast. In the playground, some other kid accidentally stepped on his eye. You might need to go to a doctor immediately.”

Instead of going into emotional turmoil, I remained calm and thought that I would not go to a doctor with my son. Instead, I would give some homeopathic remedies that are used after such eye injuries and all would be well. All this was instantaneous during the phone call with the principal. I guessed that there would be a different reason for my visit to the school to pick up my son and I wondered what that was. Why would the universe send me there?

When I arrived at the school, my son had already recovered a bit, and it turned out that the reason I was sent there was most probably that I needed to see his teacher in action during teaching who mirrored some unflattering qualities back to me (e.g. annoyance and impatience with the kids).

So, sometimes we just know, but we can’t say how we know what we know. In order to access my inner knowing, I need to shift my attention from the mind to the heart and gut. While my mind may be busy with many thought streams trying to figure out which way would be the best solution to a problem, I need to ignore this internal discussion. Instead, I shift the attention to my body and notice the feeling there.

The response from the body bypasses the endless discussions in the mind and just says, “Yes, this is the right guy to marry. Yes, this is the right job for me. Yes, this is the right house to buy. Beware, this guy is lying.”

Like with the inner voice, there can be an additional validation with dreams, songs, and signs which makes it easier to trust the inner knowing.

Divine guidance through an inner voice

Guidance from spirit can come in many ways, and one of them is hearing an inner voice. This input channel of guidance has its own set of challenges.

When I try to receive guidance this way, the first thing is that I ask. Usually, spirit does not interfere if we don’t ask. The challenge is to not forget that.

After having asked for guidance, then the challenge is to become quiet enough so that the voice of spirit can come through. For this, meditation is helpful.

The next challenge is to notice the voice of guidance. If the mind is cleared too much in meditation, the thoughts of spirit can be continuously ignored. This happened to Esther Hicks (who channels Abraham) in the beginning. She thought meditation was all about sitting around with an empty mind and letting thoughts go as soon as they arose. Therefore, she received the thoughts of guidance and just let them go. Spirit had to find another way to get the message through. They made her move her nose and paint letters in the air until she got the point.

So, it is important to become quiet, peaceful, and receptive. Waiting for an answer is like waiting for the thunder after a flash of lightning. It is with an expectation that something will be heard.

When I hear guidance, it is like thoughts coming into my head that I did not think. There is a feeling of being passive, receptive, and allowing. Being allowing is important. One sure way to block the guidance is the inner resistance to what is being said. When I feel that my guides are about to give me an answer that I do not want to hear, then I metaphorically press my hands on my ears and shout at them to shut up. This blocks my ability to hear the guidance.

The thoughts can come in the form of dictated sentences, already fully formulated. An example of this would be, if you answer the question “What are the letters of the alphabet?” and you receive in your head an automatic stream reciting “A,B,C,…” (of course, this would be your own voice, but I used this as an example for what it feels like.)

Thought can also appear as blocks of thought which need to be put into a formulated sentence by me.

An example would be when someone asks you to explain to him your favorite hobby and all its tricks of the trade. When you think of your hobby, you get the information as a chunk of information (about why you like it so much; when you started; from whom you learned; what you are actually doing, etc.) which is not put into words in a linear fashion yet. This is how a download of a block of thought feels like. It is there all at once.

The thoughts I receive are not audible most of the time. Only on rare occasions, I get an audible voice.

All of these forms (formulated sentences, blocks of thought, voiceless voice, audible voice) are valid guidance.

In the beginning of my journey, I insisted that I wanted to hear an audible inner voice. Somehow, I had the idea that in order to be real guidance the voice must be audible.

So, one morning during the receptive time between sleeping and waking up, I heard an audible voice in my head.
It said „freedom” in a very low bass.
Next week on another morning, I got an audible voice in my head saying something in a high pitched Mickey Mouse voice.

That seemed like a humorous suggestion for customizing the voice of my internal satellite navigation system. What would I want my inner voice to sound like? Apparently, my guides were making fun of me.

I felt humbled. But I admired the universe’s teaching methods, patience, and humor. And I stayed with the voiceless voice setting.

The inner voice can speak after I asked a question or even unbidden when I did not ask before.

A good time to receive answers is at 3 am or between sleep and waking up. That is when I am most receptive. Or anytime during quiet routine activities like taking a shower, biking, peeling carrots, etc..

In the beginning, I found it helpful to write down what the inner voice told me. Initially, pen and paper worked better than typing.

Later, the broadcasts of the inner voice became too much to write them down. It was not practical anymore.

Another special issue or challenge for this particular type of input channel of guidance is discernment. Am I making this up? Is this really from spirit or higher self? Or is it my ego talking? Is this just regurgitated stuff which I have read somewhere?

This is not easy to answer. The ego can come as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The ego can mask itself as reliability and responsibility when it is really attachment to the former self-definition and attachment to security and comfortable old pathways. So, be aware that any of your well-meant intentions can stem from ego.

A foreign language might help. You can ask the inner voice to talk in another language to you. My guide talks to me in English, even though it is not my native language. This might help. But then, my ego can learn to speak English, too. So, it is not a foolproof method.

The best sign that the inner voice is real is if we are told stuff that we could not have known by ourselves. I was once told in a dream and then by the inner voice to contact an old friend and share about the woo stuff I had experienced. The voice told me that this was necessary because the person was in trouble. I did not know whether this was true, but even though it appeared to be a bit risky, I acted on the suggestion anyway. And it turned out my old friend actually was in a depressed mood and welcomed my email. And to my surprise, she wasn’t turned off by my woo-woo experiences, but could relate to them.

Sometimes the trust in this inner voice is built by acting on the received suggestions and then evaluating whether this made sense.

Other ways to validate the inner voice are when similar messages pop up through other input channels (like dreams, songs, or posts on the internet). Or it would be a validation when a psychic medium channels my spirit guides and I get exactly the same message from there.

Recently, I came across the docuseries They Call Us Channelers by Kevin Moore who interviews professional channelers. I enjoy learning about their various life stories and about the many different ways they channel. Here is the link to his YouTube playlist.

Divine guidance through signs

Divine guidance can show up rather bluntly through words, pictures, and songs from the outside. But it can also show up more subtly in signs which have a metaphoric meaning like feathers, pennies, numbers, and animals.

In summer of 2016, I sat on a bench in the forest and pondered how much of my life had broken down up to this point and how much I grieved the losses. And I wondered how life was going to continue with my current sense of meaninglessness. Then I looked down and saw a pink paper strip lying in the dirt with numbers on it “5!! 5!! 5!!” .

Number 5, for me, means “change is ahead”. That was a clear message. At that time, I did not know what kind of change it would be. But only a few months later in that year, there was a significant change in my family when our older child came out as a transgender boy.

Numbers (like 11:11 on a digital clock or a license plate), pennies and dimes, feathers, or anything else that we have assigned a meaning to (like a certain type of car or a particular color, for example) can be used as messages by our guidance.

Please note that the meaning of a particular number can differ from person to person. 5 means “change” (among other things) according to the information on several websites. But for someone else it can have a different meaning like “you are halfway there.”

Here my personal short list of what numbers mean for me (which I adpoted from one of Doreen Virtue’s books about Angel Numbers). But on the internet, there are more resources available which point to a much broader association of meaning with the numbers.

0 – God

1 – Watch your thoughts because they have manifesting power

2 – Have faith

3 – Ascended masters are with you

4 – Angels are with you

5 – Change is ahead

6 – Don’t worry about money

7 – Well done! Applause by the angels

8 – Abundance

9 – Completion

Animals which show up repeatedly either live or in dreams or as pictures can have a meaning according to the shamanic tradition.

For example, when I saw two articles about penguins within one hour, I looked up the penguin symbol (‘penguin symbolic meaning’ or ‘penguin shamanic meaning’). What came up was ‘Patience, discipline, endurance…’. At that time, I was busy procrastinating the creation of the workshop about divine guidance, a task which had been given to me by my spirit guides in 2015. The message was clear. ‘Continue with the preparation of the workshop with patience and discipline’.

One challenge with these signs is to notice them. The universe helps us with this and brings these things up over and over again until we do notice them eventually. What also helps is staying aware and alert. Just paying attention to what comes up repeatedly (and maybe writing it down in a journal) and being open to the possibility that these things might be communication attempts by guidance from Source / spirit guides or that invisible force behind the veil.

Another challenge with these signs is their interpretation. As usual, I need to ask whether it is to be taken literally or metaphorically. For signs, I have found that the meaning is mostly metaphorical.

For the interpretation, be aware of spirit’s play with words which sound phonetically (almost) identical. Having a small annoying stone in the shoe right under the heel could point to ‘heal’. (Other examples, jeans = genes, bald = bold, or sun = son). This also works across languages. I have had the German word ‘Kamm’ (which means ‘comb’ but is pronounced like ‘come’) show up on license plates and as a real comb lying on the forest ground on my biking way to work. It took me a while to get that these signs could simply be an invitation of my higher self to ‘come’ into its arms and into alignment, the call for surrender.

Sometimes, we can give a meaning to something and then it is used by spirit as a communication sign. One day, I decided that the color pink means ‘appreciation’ in my personal dictionary of meanings. And soon after that, I got many signs with pink from spirit. The wind placed a small heart shaped pink rose petal exactly in front of my driveway.

Sometimes, spirit selects a meaning to something and comes up with a sign repeatedly and I have to figure out what is meant by that. This scenario is a bit more difficult. Like learning a foreign language without having a dictionary. This can be annoying if there is no way to google it.

For example, I started seeing the color mint frequently a while ago. When I was outside for a bit of shopping, I would come across one or even two mint cars. Or a mint colored bike. And mint is an unusual color for cars or bikes. Or I coincidentally met my neighbor for a short chat and she had a mint colored handbag. Or the word ‘minted’ (for coins) showed up in a newspaper article.

Now what on earth does that mean? It was so frequent that it seemed to be a message of some sort. But I wasn’t able to figure out what the meaning was. Was I supposed to look up the healing properties of peppermint and maybe that would help me with my rheumatoid arthritis? Was I to use peppermint oil in order to antidote the homeopathic remedies I had taken? Was I to calm down and feel soothed? Was this a color of some archangel’s aura who wanted to work with me (-in the beginning of the recent channeling class in 2021, we as the students had to choose a divine being to work with)? I was not able to get any consistent hints on that. So maybe it does not mean anything. But because of the soothing quality of this color, I settled for the reminder to remain calm and have trust that everything will work out.

Signs can not only come from spirit guides but also from deceased loved ones who want to let us know that they are ok and nearby. They are known to use the following signs, for example, (among other communication attempts like dreams and touch).

• Manipulated electricity (flickering light bulbs, CD player turning on for no reason, phone calls coming in from nowhere)
• Cloud formations
• Animals. Animals in rare places (like a ladybug in winter, for example)
• Smells
• Lights (dots of light or orbs)
• Pictures falling down without reason

For me, playing with noticing and interpreting signs is a fun way to get divine guidance.

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For more information about divine guidance, you can download my workshop script (pdf) here: https://karinfinger.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/divine_guidance_workshop_script.pdf

Spiritual guidance through illness

Guidance from spirit can come through many different input channels like an inner voice or signs and synchronicities. And one of these possible input channels can be illness or injury.

A blocked throat chakra

Did you ever feel afraid of speaking up because of what others might think of you? I know that feeling all too well.

End of 2012, I wrote a post for an internet forum about my spiritual journey. About anger and burned-out light bulbs and the importance of inner peace. I even diligently corrected all the typos and the punctuation.

But after that, I didn’t feel like posting it anymore. I saved the draft in a folder and felt perfectly at peace with the decision to keep my mouth shut.

Don’t they always tell us in the spiritual literature, “All is well. Nothing needs to be done. All happens in awareness. No need to change the world outside”?

Afterwards, I got some dreams that were designed to nudge me to share. But I shrugged them off. In spring of 2013, I developed breathing trouble due to an inflammation in the throat. Some nights, I could hardly sleep.

I didn’t connect the illness to the refusal to post my writing. I thought it was due to residual anger attacks about the situation at work.

After some unsuccessful attempts to cure the breathing trouble with an alternative healing method (homeopathy) which had served me well in the past, I was referred to a spiritual healer. I didn’t actually go there. I just had a remote treatment.

And that worked. I was able to sleep again through the night without fear of suffocating.

But about two weeks after the healing, something unusual happened.

As I was reading a channeled book that suggested that we ask for guidance, I turned inside and asked in my mind, Father, what would you have me do?

Immediately, the answer came, as a voiceless voice in my head,

Write that book! You are late.

Then it became clear to me that the breathing trouble was caused by my resistance to sharing my story, and I sat down and wrote the first draft version and shared it with only one other person end of 2013. It took me till 2020 to share a more complete version. You can read the result here: https://karinfinger.wordpress.com/my-journey/.

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Not every illness is a sign of guidance. But sometimes guidance uses this input channel.

In order to use the sickness as guidance, it is important to find the reason of the sickness.

But what is the reason for it?

I once came across a blogpost which said something like, “If you want to figure out whether you have high or low vibration, then look at your health. If you have a chronic illness, then that means that your vibration is low.”

Seriously?
I don’t agree with that point of view.

Illness can come from a variety of reasons.

Emotions can directly affect the body. For example, long term anger can affect the heart.

If emotions are not felt but suppressed, they can show up as illness. For example, suppressed grief can result in chronic fatigue or addictions.

Sometimes, the body can get sick because of the resistance to our calling. There are many stories about shamanic sickness in the literature, mysterious symptoms that don’t go away until the sick person agrees to aline with their divine path. And I had breathing trouble in the throat (throat chakra blockage) due to resistance to express myself. This only vanished after I started writing about my experiences on the spiritual path.

After the birth of my first child, I got rheumatoid arthritis. This disease set me on a path of discovering the benefits of homeopathy which in turn opened me up to spirituality. So, even though it was and still is painful, the illness has had some benefits.

Spiritual teacher Adyashanti was sick for many months when the universe weaned him from the self-image of being a great athlete. So, here sickness was a tool to break the attachment of the ego to a former self-image (which is an important point on the spiritual journey).

Sickness can stem from a past life. For example, a woman had pain across both thighs throughout all her life. After she had found out in a hypnotic regression that she was run over both legs by a carriage in a past life, the pain stopped (book Journey of Souls, by Michael Newton).

Some illnesses were planned pre-incarnation in order to challenge the soul to grow. It could be growth of the sick person. It could also be for growth of the caretakers who want to learn about compassion and patience, for example.

There is also the possibility of having caused an illness or injury as an excuse for not having to do something.

For example, during a vacation when I always used to do the cooking for my family, I saw my husband relaxing on the sofa and reading, I thought, Why do I have to do the cooking and he can just relax? I also want to have time to lie on the sofa and just read. And, boom!, soon after that thought, I sprained my wrist, had to do everything with only one hand, and had the perfect excuse to not do the cooking anymore.

Another example was a former co-worker who had to travel to China for work. He hated the though of it and didn’t want to travel there. But it was for work and he grudingly had agreed to do it and the flight tickets were already booked. Then, his body manifested a serious sore throat and middle-ear inflammation so that he was not allowed to go on a flight for medical reasons.
Our thoughts are that powerful and can manifest.

Some types of symptoms can also be caused by rising Kundalini energy. Some are what is sometimes termed ‘ascension symptoms’. Dolores Cannon was a past-life regression hypnotherapist. In her book The Convoluted Universe – Book Three, chapter 32, I found the following statement:
” I have received much information about the physical symptoms that people are experiencing as their bodies adjust to these frequency and vibrational changes. Many of these include: tiredness, depression, irregular heart rhythms, high blood pressure, muscle aches and pains in the joints.“

So, there can be many different reasons for an illness. Having a “low vibration” may be one of them, but there can be many other reasons.

So, how to use sickness as a hint from guidance? First, figure out what the underlying reason for the illness is – which admittedly might not be easy to do. After that, the appropriate path forward might be clearer.

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For more information about divine guidance, you can download my workshop script (pdf) here: https://karinfinger.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/divine_guidance_workshop_script.pdf