Spirit Guides: Who's Actually With You, and How to Talk to Them

For the first ten years of this work, I didn't care who my guides were.

My teacher told me not to focus on them. "Your spirit team is there, you don't need to know who they are." So I didn't ask. I followed the book, because I was scared that if I did something differently, it wouldn't work.

Then my clients started asking. "Who are my guides?" And I'd hear the answer. A grandmother. A teacher. A child. An animal I'd never have guessed. The more I listened, the more I realised it matters. Not because knowing their names makes you special — because a relationship with someone you can't name is a monologue.

This page is everything I teach about spirit guides. It's the same framework I use in my workshops and in Psychic Badass Level 1. Take what works. Leave the rest.

Read the Spirit Team Map here first →

What a spirit guide actually is

A spirit guide is not a little person standing behind you. I know that's the picture. It's not how it works.

Think of a radio. You're tuned into different channels — different kinds of consciousness. Some people call them high intelligences. Some say it's the best version of your own soul, living in another dimension. I describe them as a support system that comes from different dimensions and works with your awareness, to help you grow.

There's also a bigger layer. Everything humans have ever known and felt sits in a kind of collective consciousness — I think of it like a cloud. We're all plugged into it, whether we notice or not. Your guides download from that cloud, and they use your own data to reach you. If you're an engineer, you'll get engineering pictures. If you're a teacher, you'll get classrooms. They speak to you through what you already know.

And here's the part that changed everything for me: your guides are the bridge. I used to believe I was the one travelling to the other dimensions, visiting the dead in readings. I'm not. My mind doesn't have the capacity to go there while I'm awake. They bring it to me. So when a message isn't clear, I don't try harder. I ask them for a clearer communicator.

Your spirit team: seven roles, one team

The traditional mediumship schools describe seven roles on the spirit team. I'm going to give you all seven. Just know this is for your brain to chill — don't take it literally. I've never once felt my guides as separate. They always work as a team.

Before the seven, there's your main guide: the one who has been with you since you were born. Usually the one who leads. Usually the first to show you a sign.

1. The communicator

Carries the messages. When you give a reading or receive one, this is who's talking. When I sit with a client and the message is muddy, I say: "Please bring me a clear communicator." It works.

2. The advisers

The old books call them controls. I prefer advisers. They're with you every day, organising your mind and keeping you steady. They're the voice in the car that says "you forgot your phone" — and you check, and you did.

3. The helpers

They help you focus when you meditate or practise. Every time you work with other people, they show up to hold your mind in place. When I invite "the healer" in a meditation, it's a helper who brings the healing through.

4. The mentors

Very refined intelligence. Ascended masters, messenger angels. They're in it for the long term and they talk about the big things — the soul, surrender, how to live ethically. I find them very wise. They don't do small talk.

5. The spiritual teachers

They always have to give you a lesson. I don't love that about them, honestly. But they're there every time your awareness expands and you suddenly see the pattern you've been repeating for twelve years.

6. The doorkeepers

Your guardians. They decide what comes into your field and what goes out. They don't block you — they make you feel when something isn't right for you. They often show up as animals: a dog, a crocodile, a dolphin. You can ask them for more protection any time, and you can ask for them to change.

7. The chemists

They blend the energy of the spirit world with your frequency so you can actually receive it. They work hand in hand with the doorkeepers. They're also why you don't need to be calm to do this. My mind is chaos — my thoughts are fast — and it turns out the chemists can use that speed. That was a relief to hear.

And the kids

This one is mine. There always have to be kids on a spirit team. They make jokes, they don't take anything seriously, and when you're in something heavy they lift the room. I love it when they show up.

Where guides come from

The roles are the jobs. Who fills them is a different question. Any role can be filled by any of these:

People who've passed

Grandparents, aunts, a friend, a lover, a cousin, ancestors you never met. When I started, my grandmother and my cousin were on my team. They kept turning up in my sessions until I understood they weren't visiting — they were working. People who've died are in what I call the fourth dimension, and they are still themselves. Same character. Same opinions. They didn't become saints because they died.

Teachers and famous people

Einstein. Jung. An artist. Mother Mary. Their consciousness can reach a lot of people at the same time. Having Einstein on your team doesn't make you special — it means you can reach his way of thinking, and he'll feed you information. You're still the boss.

Angels and guardian angels

Angels sit in the seventh dimension in the way I map it. What most people call their guardian angel is, in my language, the doorkeeper — the one who guards your boundaries. Call it what you like. The relationship is what counts.

Star beings

Some guides come from other planets — light beings from the eighth dimension and up. If that makes you roll your eyes, fine. Some of my most down-to-earth students get them. They tend to have a sense of humour and very little patience for overthinking.

Animals

More on this below. Short version: a spirit animal is the consciousness of the animal, not the pigeon on your balcony.

Living people

Sometimes someone alive acts as a guide for a short time. A stranger who says exactly the thing. A friend who suddenly talks like someone else for one sentence. I'm practical about this: meet them in real life, like a person. Don't build a Barbie house around them.

How many spirit guides do you have?

Seven roles, plus the kids, plus your main guide. That's the frame.

But some people have more. If you're working with spirit, or you're on a big project — and it doesn't have to be spiritual, it can be engineering, a business, a book — more support gets assigned, with the kind of experience that work needs. Don't lock yourself into a number. Some of you will feel them as individuals with names and faces. Some of you will feel one collective intelligence. Both are valid.

How to connect with your spirit guides

This is the method I use myself and teach in every workshop. Five steps.

1. Call them in

Close your eyes. Breathe from your stomach — loud, it helps. Imagine a small version of you stepping into your heart. Inside your heart there's a tree of light. Its roots grow down through your body, through the floor, all the way to the centre of the earth. Its branches grow up through your chest, your throat, your head, past the clouds. From there, invite them: your main guide first, then your healer, your doorkeepers, your communicator. You don't need a face. You don't need a name. Just ask them to come closer.

2. Ask for a calling sign

Ask each one to show you something that means "we're here." Then take whatever comes, even if it's embarrassing. (More below.)

3. Write to them

Pen, paper, a question. Let them answer. This is the one I trust most. (More below.)

4. Let them prove it

Believe what comes in the moment. Don't argue with it. Then watch your real life for the next days — that's where the evidence turns up. In a group, we check it another way: everyone draws the same person's guide without talking, then we compare. When five strangers draw the same face, the doubting usually stops.

5. Switch off

Go back to your heart tree and shrink it, smaller and smaller, until it's just a little light inside you. Then make the small you bigger until you're back in your body. Your Wi-Fi can't be open all the time. That's how you get tired, jumpy, overwhelmed. Set office hours. They love structure.

The calling sign: how your guides say hello

A calling sign is a symbol your guides show you in your mind's eye first, and then keep showing you in real life. It's how you know they're around.

Mine is a smiley face. That's it. Very silly. One morning my daughter brought me coffee in a mug with a smiley face on it. She had no idea. That's how they do it — casually, like nothing happened.

One of my students saw a duck in the meditation and was too embarrassed to tell me. For the whole next week: ducks. Everywhere. In my last workshop people got a bell, a hummingbird, bluebells, a lantern with a star inside it, the sun. None of those have to be real 3D objects. Graffiti counts. A logo counts. A stranger's t-shirt counts.

If yours hasn't shown up, you're probably looking too hard. It took me a long time too. I was the person in the practice group who felt warm and saw nothing while everyone else saw everything. It comes.

Writing to your guides (inspirational writing)

People also call this automatic writing. I call it inspirational writing, and it's the only tool I really trust for myself.

I don't like writing. I'm lazy about it. And now I have booklets and booklets of conversations with my guides. It's you talking to yourself in your head — except on paper, and then you wait, and an answer comes back. Your handwriting might change. The words might not sound like you.

How I do it:

Give them office hours. Ten minutes in the morning, ten at night. When the Wi-Fi is always open, anyone can connect.

Start casual. "Hey, what's this about?" "I'm bored, what should I do today?" "Where are you?" No candles needed.

Test them when you doubt. English is my third language — Arabic first, then French. So when I don't believe it's them, I write: "Tell me a word I don't know." They give me words I have to look up.

Don't reread straight away. Leave it two or three days. Look for the one line that matters.

Then act. Don't just sit there and write.

One day I asked them what was important today, because I wanted a day off. They wrote: "Go park your car." My car was parked. I felt stupid. The next morning I found a ticket on it. In Berlin, all the cars on one side of a street have to face the same direction. Mine was facing the other way. Nobody had told me that rule. They did.

Small things. I share the silly ones on purpose, so you know how close they are — even with details, if you let them.

Is it them or is it me?

Everybody asks this. I still ask it.

Guidance is calm. It suggests. It doesn't push, it doesn't panic, it doesn't scream at you at three in the morning. If it's urgent and frightening and it makes your chest tight, that's usually you. Irritation is different — sometimes they tell you something you don't want to hear, and you feel annoyed, but underneath there's still a quiet kind of knowing.

You understand guidance backwards. The clarity comes after you follow it. That's the hard part. Very often the next step is obvious and you don't want to take it — so the clarity disappears, and your mind fills the space with wishful thinking. I learned this the stupid way: I didn't follow guidance I didn't like, and afterwards I understood exactly why I should have.

Some of it is imagination. Maybe ten, twenty per cent. That's fine — that's the door they come through. What matters is what follows.

Don't say "I don't know." When you're giving a message, or even just talking to them, act like you're a hundred per cent sure. Every time you say "I don't know, maybe it's nothing," you weaken the signal.

Check your intention. Guides don't lie. If you ever feel your guides are lying to you — especially about love — check whether you're lying to yourself. It's usually that.

Spirit animals vs. the animals in your garden

A student who swims in the sea every morning asked me this: if a seal is there every single day, is the seal her spirit animal? No. The animals you see every day are just your life — lovely, healing, worth talking to. A spirit animal is the consciousness of that animal, working with you whether you ever see one or not.

Real animals can still carry messages. The rule: pay attention to the ones that turn up when they shouldn't. Then ask what they want to tell you.

I'm not a horse person at all. For a while I kept seeing horses. I looked up what the horse means — persistence — and that was part of it. Then my guides told me the man I'd fall in love with had something to do with horses. He turned out to have a stable. In a low period of my life I kept finding cockroaches — in a book, in a friend's shower in Spain — and when I asked, it was a warning about dark thoughts I was feeding. Rats, for me, mean: look at the details.

Yes, I google "spirit animal dolphin meaning" like everyone else. It's a starting point. The real answer comes when you ask.

Are spirit guides dangerous? Are they demons?

I grew up in a conservative Muslim home in Cairo. I know what it's like to be taught that anything talking to you from the other side is dangerous. A lot of people carry that fear, from many different traditions, and I don't laugh at it. I left my religion. I never left God.

Here's what I've seen in years of this work: real guidance doesn't frighten you. It doesn't threaten, rush, flatter you into feeling chosen, or make you feel small. If something does, one of two things is happening — it's your own fear wearing a costume, or it's something you don't need to keep talking to.

Either way, you're not helpless. You're the boss of your spirit team. Your doorkeepers are there for exactly this — ask them for more protection, or ask for new ones. Close your Wi-Fi. Set hours. Say out loud: "Only what is safe, clear and supportive comes close." That's how I open every meditation.

Fear-based beliefs exist. They don't have to run your practice. If you want to go deeper into how different traditions see this, read my guide to jinn in Islamic spirituality.

Why your guides change

Guides aren't gods. They don't have to stay forever. When one has done their part, they step back for a different mission, and someone new comes in — someone with the experience you need for the next stage.

In a workshop, one woman connected with an ancestor — a businesswoman who kept a family company alive for decades when every man around her kept dying. My guides were clear: she's done her service. Thank you very much. Who's next.

It works the other way too. When you talk to a grandmother on the other side, she isn't just giving you her time. She's learning through you. She probably never had this kind of knowledge when she was alive. You're giving her a gift.

And some days you won't feel them at all. I write to mine and ask where the hell they are. Once they answered: "When you move forward, we move with you. When you pause, we pause with you. We do not push you. We do not control you." Low energy makes the signal harder to reach. It doesn't mean they left.

Don't go high and forget the 3D

This is the most important thing on this page.

The point of this work is not to escape your life. You don't want to meditate with star beings and dolphins in the morning and then go to a job you hate and snap at your partner. The point is to bring what they give you into your third-dimension life. To enjoy being a human being.

When I started, I asked my guides everything. Which bank. Which city. Which flight. I got paranoid — I felt I needed their permission to breathe. It changed when I understood that I'm in charge. They suggest. I decide. Sometimes I surrender to guidance. Always, I stay the one driving the car.

The spirits will not pay your bills. You still need a plan.

And if you want to practise every week with people who take it seriously and laugh a lot, come to the Practice Circle on Tuesday evenings. Or book a private reading and I'll tell you who's on your team.

Frequently Asked Questions