Guidance for ourselves through what we say to others

Besides the many ways in which guidance can come through when we are receptive (just listening and watching what the universe is showing us), guidance for ourselves can also come from what we are telling others. I noticed that back in 2016/17 and mentioned it briefly here that advice to others can be advice for myself.
I often found that when I gave others suggestions about what I guessed would be helpful in their situation, that was the very thing I needed to tell myself in the next difficult situation.

This sounds like an amazing thing. But when I think about that we are consciousness and that our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions determine what will show up in our personal bubble of consciousness, then it is not that strange. We simply attract mirrors of ourselves.

I guess that is the background of the Bible quote “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3)

Yeah, well, it is so much easier to see the speck in our brother’s eye when we are detached and when our own ego defense mechanisms are asleep. We just need to remember that he can be a mirror for us and then go within and apply the insights to ourselves.

One guy who acted a bit like a spiritual teacher for me actually used this method as a teaching tool. He would talk to me and ask for advice about something. And I would happily and unsuspectingly engage in the conversation and suggest solutions which popped into my head. But then he would take an unexpected turn in the conversation and ask, “And why don’t you do that in your own situation?”

To profit from that type of guidance it is helpful to (A) be aware that guidance which we give to others can be for ourselves and (B) to pay attention and notice what it is we are telling others.

Synchronicities

The canary

In the winter of 2016/17, I was in the office and heard a bird flying against the window twice. I went to check whether he was injured or alright. Amazingly, it looked yellow like a canary bird with some ruffled feathers at the head. Usually, canaries don’t fly around here. He must have escaped from a cage somewhere. Outside it was winter and almost freezing. I wondered what the bird meant to tell me. It reminded me of my son who has blond hair. Later it turned out that during that very same time my son was locked out, because he had forgotten his keys, and tried to get into the house.

What was even more remarkable about this story is that it happened when I was wondering what to share as a story for the divine guidance workshop which I wrote at that time that fit into the topic of synchronicities.

The canary story was a synchronicity. Two seemingly unrelated events that are connected with a meaning. Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences which appear to be more than just mere happenstance.

The umbrella

I was sitting in the bus going to a workshop in Heidelberg when it started to rain heavily outside. Oh my! I had no umbrella with me and I would be drenched completely when I had to walk from the bus stop to the workshop room. I got off at my bus stop and what did I see there? A lonely umbrella, apparently lost there and not belonging to anyone. Now, I don’t normally steal umbrellas, but this situation seemed too perfect. The umbrella was meant to be used by me. What a blessing! I felt such awe and gratitude, took the umbrella, and arrived at the workshop with dry clothes.

Garlic

I once wrote a post about how I intuitively put some raw garlic on a skin burn and felt that the pain was eased immediately (-don’t try that at home because garlic is known to actually cause skin burns). When I was engaged in a lengthy discussion about the healing qualities of garlic in the comments section of that blog post, our TV was on and what showed up there? A documentary about a ship. And they showed a picture of the kitchen of the ship and in the middle were two huge strings or packages of garlic, each about 3 feet long. I have never seen so much garlic in one place before.

While the story of the umbrella at the bus stop was like an answer to a prayer and a lesson in faith, the garlic story seemed to be more about the lesson “Watch your thoughts because what you think about will show up in your reality.”

Synchronicities show the power of thought coupled with emotion and the power of attention. Wherever we direct our attention that is what we get.

Not only conscious thoughts can manifest reality, but unconscious ones can, too. If synchronicities are mirrors of something unconscious, they can bring the unconscious stuff to the light of awareness (for example, when I got clogged drains because I resisted sharing my journey).

Divine guidance through divination tools

Divine guidance can come in many ways like dreams, an inner voice, or signs and synchronicities showing up around us. But while these often appear to be more random and not so reliable for many people, there are other ways of getting guidance on demand. One of these ways would be to deliberately ask for guidance from the outside and then open book at a random page or draw a tarot card. And there are many more divination tools available (like pendulum, ouija board, tea leaf readings, etc.)

The process is like asking for inner guidance. Asking and then expecting and receiving an answer, and afterwards interpreting and trusting it.

Book divination

Here is an example of book divination which I wrote for the divine guidance workshop in 2017:
“As I am writing this chapter, my rheumatoid arthritis has flared up recently and I am in much pain and worried that this will go on. I go to the bookshelf and take out a random book. Love has forgotten no one, by Gary Renard seems like a good choice. I ask the book to show me a message which relates to my current state of mind. Then I open the book on a random page. The following quote immediately jumps at me:

“A truly spiritual attitude would be that there isn’t any difference between having a healthy body or a sick body.” p84
Well, that is not really helpful with my pain, but it is clearly related to the question of physical health.”

Tarot

Online tarot cards work amazingly well for me currently. The advantage over book divination for me is that I don’t stand a long time indecisively in front of my book-shelf pondering which book to pull out. I am usually stunned by the results with the tarot cards. How can this be possible? But at the fundamental level we are consciousness and everything is connected via consciousness. So, my deepest layer of being is connected to the tarot cards on my screen.

I find it helpful to use this more on-demand type guidance of tarot cards as a jumping-off point for getting more guidance. After getting the tarot card, I can then journal about what it might mean. Or as for a dream or signs for further clarification.

Currently (Dec 2021), I am taking a follow-up class to the recent channeling class and one of our excercises was to draw a tarot card or an oracle card for someone else and then channel something (or write something using our intuition) about what that card meant. This was a good way to combine divination tools with channeling and the results were amazing.

While the guidance-on-demand aspect of divination tools is great, there can be the challenge of how to interpret what we got. The interpretation of a tarot card can be according to what is written in the accompanying booklet. Or it can have a different meaning. I think, as with signs (like numbers, pennies, feathers) and dreams, it is not necessarily always the meaning in the accepted ‘woo-dictionary’, but rather the meaning that a particular sign has for ourselves. Each one’s personal dictionary of meanings can be different. For example, for me in dreams ‘dancing’ means ‘to communicate/share about my spiritual journey’. And for me, number 5 means ‘change is ahead’, while for someone else it means ‘you are halfway there’. And the same can apply to tarot or oracle cards. Go with your personal intuition or gut feeling about the card and not necessarily with what the booklet says.

Divine guidance by remote control of the body

An inner urge (see last post) can be one way how the higher self guides us. But this isn’t the only way that we can be put on remote control, so to speak. There can also be a direct steering of the physical body without the accompanying feeling of an inner urge. In regard to this, I want to share two stories I have read:

Here is Pamela Parnell’s story of how she was waiting at an intersection with her car, but she did not drive even though the traffic light was green. It was unexplainable. She did not feel an urge to keep still. She just did not move and stared at the green traffic light and noticed that she did not move. But it turned out that this saved her life, otherwise a huge truck which came from the side would have hit either her car or the car behind her (or both).

In Sonia Choquette’s book Trust Your Vibes (in chapter ‘Secret #25: Make Direct Contact’), she shares how she asked her higher self to overrule her lower ego mind and what kind of situations originated from this. For example, late one Sunday evening, she tried to get on a flight on standby together with her husband. But when they arrived at the gate, they were told that their chances of getting a seat were nearly zero. Her husband suggested that they give up and book a hotel room for the night and this made sense to Sonia, except her body wouldn’t budge. She kept sitting there waiting to get on the airplane. Just like in the example above from Pamela Parnell, she did not move but didn’t know why, even though all the other waiting passengers had left already and even though her husband got annoyed with her. Then the plane left.

But a little later, the plane returned. Three passengers were led off the plane, two adults and a five-year-old child. And the agent said, “We made a mistake – there were only two seats left, and these people didn’t want to split up.” Since all the other waiting passengers had already left, Sonia and her husband were the ones who could take the remaining two seats on the plane.

Personally, I haven’t experienced anything like the examples above. The closest I came to this phenomenon was the story where I walked with my two young kids around the fields in the evening and it was already getting dark and there were no streetlamps on the way. Then a sharp pain in my ankle made me step to the side of the way and wait there together with both children. Suddenly, a guy on a bicycle without any lights drove by fast. He would have injured or even killed us had we not stayed on the side of the path. After the danger was over, the pain in my ankle was gone and I could walk normally again. This story is not a complete remote control of my body, but comes close to it.

This 3d reality is not what it seems. There is a bigger invisible something (or rather ‘no-thing-ness’ ) behind the scenes steering this virtual reality game. And if we can surrender to that bigger force in trust, then it can be beneficial for our lives.

Divine guidance by an inner urge

Divine guidance can come from an inner voice or from getting signs and synchronicities. It can also come from an inner urge. For example, Eckhart Tolle felt an unexplainable inner urge to move to the West coast of North America. Eventually, he gave in to that urge and moved, and then began to write his first book The Power of Now. And he shared that having moved was beneficial for the process of writing his book.
(Source: a youtube video by Eckart Tolle about how to make descisions which must have been uploaded before May 2017, but which I cannot find again now.)

An inner urge is like the inner knowing directly from the heart bypassing the mind. While the inner knowing is more about assessing a situation correctly, the inner urge is about action. It can come unbidden even if we have not asked before.

This can show up as an unexplainable inner urge to do something (for example, I sometimes experienced the urge to turn to the alarm clock in the morning and switch it off just one minute before it would go off by itself. Or the urge to look at the clock just when it displays special numbers like 11:11).

This urge is the orchestrating force of Source at work which will guide us to meet just the right person at just the right time.

In a former blog post, I shared the story of how my older son and me lost my son’s keys at the supermarket. And then unexplainably my husband found himself walking into town (even though he had just been running before and hadn’t taken a shower yet) where he met us. We told him about the lost keys and he went to the supermarket to look for them and actually got them back! Here is the full story about how we got the lost keys back.

The book Absence from Felicity by Kenneth Wapnick (which is a biography of the scribe of A Course in Miracles, Helen Schucman) contains another beautiful story about this type of guidance. One day it was cold and rainy outside and Helen was concerned about Kenneth’s health in case he should go out and not be dressed warm enough. So, she asked her inner voice, Jesus, to make sure that Ken would dress properly and not get a cold. Jesus assured her that he would take care of it and she could stop worrying. Then Ken reported that he left his appartment, but felt a strong inner urge to go back and put his gaiters on over his shoes. He recalled that this urge struck him as unusual. But he followed it and turned back and put the gaiters on.

I found that was interesting. The invisible force begind the scenes, the consciousness place where we are all connected is able to plant an urge or desire into our minds and bodies and to steer us on a certain path this way. It is a bit as if this higher force has the ability to put us on remote control.

Discernment is important. Not every inner urge is from the higher self. The inner urge to numb uneasiness or the lack of connectedness to the higher self with addictive behavior is an urge which comes from the ego. So, my urge to eat a piece of dark chocolate whenever something stresses me out is very likely not from my higher self, unfortunately.

The inner urge can be best felt when we are in a state of inner calm. If it comes from Source, it will not go away but stay over a longer time.