7.5 Spirit Guides

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right.

I continued seeing Cheryl on my own but less often, partly because I didn’t need her so badly and partly because she was becoming so busy. Everyone wanted her to sort their life out and it was hard to find a time when she was available.
    After the tarot group, she had started up other, much bigger groups, including an evening on crystals which I attended. But I didn’t like sharing her with lots of other people. It diluted her.

    When she announced an evening on ‘spirit guides’ however, I was intrigued and signed up.
      
As I explored the world’s major religions for the encyclopaedia, I realised that Christianity is one of the few that doesn’t recognise reincarnation. That legitimised my own experiences. After all, I’d known as soon as I first spoke to Frog that we’d been together in previous lives. I’d felt those lives stretching behind me in an echoing corridor. That knowledge, as well as the ‘blue sky voice’, had sustained me through all the ups and downs of our relationship since then. They were some of the most important events of my life. So I had no trouble in accepting that there is a spirit world.
    Karma too made total sense to me. It wasn’t punishment for bad things we’d done in previous lives. That was a total misunderstanding, like something out of the Bible’s Old Testament. It was the universe redressing a balance. It was us learning and evolving.
    Karma happened over multiple lifetimes as well as during each single lifetime, and according to Cheryl as we evolved karma happened more and more quickly. Life booted us as soon as we did something ill advised or unkind and I could see that so clearly too. The moment I mis-stepped, I crashed (not that I was a highly evolved human being – but I kept hoping).
 
In my research, I’d also encountered spirits in all shapes and sizes - animals, goddesses and gods, ancestors, elemental beings and nature spirits - and I had no problem with that either. Even if they weren’t part of Western culture, native people had complex metaphysical worlds of which they were part. Why should we think we knew any better than them? They knew more than us, if anything.

    And I'd had one or two strange encounters myself, such as the blue mist that both Frog and I saw, and the two men who materialised one night when I was in bed alone and then vanished.
    According to Cheryl, and according to my researches, we each have our own special spirit guide or guides, spirit beings – usually once human - with whom we have a special relationship. Those flashes of intuition, those ‘knowings’, those strange coincidences, can all be evidence of spirit guides at work.
    Now I was going to have a chance to communicate with my guide directly. I couldn’t begin to imagine what that would be like.
    I was slightly spooked at the thought of someone there all the time watching everything I did, but what the heck. Maybe the workshop would help with that.
 
There were some twenty of us in the group, some of whom I knew and some I didn’t. We arranged ourselves around Cheryl’s sitting-room one Friday evening, as the incense smoked and low side lights interrupted the darkness. Traffic rumbled past outside.
    Cheryl asked us to close our eyes and took us through some breathing and relaxation exercises.
    ‘In front of you’, she said, ‘you will see some stairs. Climb the stairs and you will see a door. Your spirit guide is waiting for you the other side of the door. Go through the door.’
 
Not much happened to me that evening. I’d done similar exercises during my hypnotherapy sessions with Pat and in some ways those had been more powerful.
    Slightly disappointed, I decided to try again on my own the next day when I was out walking with Brindle and paused for my usual session of what I called ‘meditation’ for want of a better word.
    Sometimes, I just sat, or thanked God for all the good things in my life, but often these sessions included breathing exercises from yoga, prayer, and ‘visualisations’ (imagining what I wanted) and affirmations (reeducating myself to be positive about everything) both of which I’d learnt from both Pat and Cheryl. Meditation itself however never featured as I’d never been able to do it.
    Because of Cheryl’s warning about the dark patches in my aura, I practised daily.
 
I stopped in one of my favourite places, high on a hill with views to both the sea and Dartmoor. Taking out the handy plastic bag I always carried with my on my walks, I parked my bum in the middle of three beech trees standing sentinel in a line across the field.
    It was a blowy January day with a mixture of sunshine and cloud giving a hint of the spring to come. I lifted my head and enjoyed the fresh air on my face.
    I was nervous, but determined to go through with the exercise, so closed my eyes and in my imagination walked through the door to meet my spirit guide as we’d done the previous evening.
    Suddenly information was streaming into my brain.
    When Jo and I were very young my father used to take us to his office on Saturday mornings. There we played on the manual typewriters while he caught up with some work. Every so often we would jump as the Telex machine in the corridor burst into life, clattering, shaking and spewing out thin strips of paper with words on them. We would watch it, fascinated and slightly alarmed. Where did the words come from? Was the machine alive? Did we need to tell a grown-up what was happening?

    Something similar was happening now, except that this time I was involved too.
 
As information streamed into my brain, I found myself asking in my mind about everyone I knew, about what their purpose was and how I could deal with them. Each question was answered in detail.
    Then I asked about our beloved Brindle.
    ‘She was human in her previous life,’ shot back the answer, ‘but reincarnated in dog form this time in order to learn continence and obedience.’
 
I grew frightened. Who was speaking to me? Would the words ever stop? Was I going mad?
    The stream stopped instantly.
 
I raced back down the hill, with Brindle at my heels. I couldn’t wait to tell Frog what had happened, even though I expected him to scoff at what had happened.
    I also wondered if he would understand ‘continence’. In this context, I understood it to mean not being greedy, either with food or with life - holding yourself back in the present when it was necessary for either yourself or other people.
    In spite of being dyslexic, Frog was good with words – he read the dictionary for fun - but he didn’t have my knowledge of word derivations (which came from my languages education) which helped so much in understanding precise meanings.
    I should have known better. As always, he surprised me.
 
He was in a t-shirt of course – he wore one all year round – and as usual he was wielding some tool outside. A rake, I think.
    He leant on his rake while I gabbled excitedly.
    ‘Well,’ he said, when I’d finished. ‘She’s not learnt much of either.’

To be continued . . .