My Spirit Guide, A Past Life or My Imagination?

I was enjoying the warm fall weather so much today that I decided to meditate out on my deck this afternoon in the sunshine. Now, I realize that we all have spirit guides, but I've never really had the urge to go about trying to figure out exactly who mine is/are, but today I felt compelled to try.

 There is a special place that I always go to in my mind's eye to launch my shamanic journeys from and I thought it would be a great place to start this meditation in. It is a beautiful spot in the woods beside the river just down from where I live that I visit regularly in real life, so I knew that I would have no problem visualizing it without having to use a guided meditation.

I started off by acknowledging the purpose I intended to focus on, then as I went into trance state, I visualized walking down the path to this place I love and I soon began to hear the rhythmic sound of drums beating off in the distance. As I came closer to my spot, the drumming seemed to be getting louder until I realized that it was indeed coming from this sacred area in the woods. I approached the mound of bare earth in the tiny clearing, sat down cross-legged and closed my eyes. The beat kept going and I felt so peaceful...then I could hear Native American men and women softly chanting. I somehow knew the words and began to chant along with them until I could sense a presence around me.

I opened my eyes to see a young native boy of maybe 8yrs old smiling down at me. He quietly sat next to me on the earth, not saying a word, and we closed our eyes and listened to the beautiful music together. Still without hearing an actual word spoken, I felt him say "Our mother's voice is so beautiful, isn't it?" I suddenly snapped out of this, wide awake to find myself sitting on my deck! Who is he? Is he ME...or my guide?!

Meditation and Your Innate Psychic Ability

A regular meditative practice will definitely open up your psychic ability, whether you're prepared for it or not. Meditation and witchcraft tend to go hand in hand, especially during spellwork, but from my own personal experiences, I never really needed to specifically meditate to allow my spells to come to fruition so I never practised it with my spellwork in the beginning for a long time. For some reason, I only needed to seriously 'think' about something to make it happen...mind you, I never abused that in any way by 'wanting' more than I needed. ;D

It's funny, in the early years when I started learning about all sorts of faith systems and exploring each of them, things would happen within each structure that would make me think "Aha! This one must be the truth!". In reality, a pattern was emerging for me that made me come to realize that the Truth comes from within. I distinctly remember this incident when we were about 20-21yrs old and our daughter was a young baby. My husband had just left his one job to take another to begin an electrical apprenticeship. This new company had a 'once a month' pay schedule, meaning he wouldn't get his first check for a month. We had run out of savings halfway through and we were worried about whether our groceries on hand would last the 2 weeks left until pay day or not. I was toying with Christianity at that time, so I prayed for help. Within 3 days....we received a check for a little over $300 in the mail from one of his past employers. What knocks coincidence out of this scenario for me is that this company just happened to be going through an audit and discovered a calculation error on some of their employees' vacation pay...from 3yrs earlier! 

For the next couple of years I bounced around the religion playground learning about everything from Jehovah's Witnesses to Buddhism, but it was always the craft that resonated with me and I would continually fall back to it. When I was about 23 or 24 years old and our daughter had turned 4, I began to experience flashbacks to a time when I was that age and being molested by a neighbor. My husband would come home from work to find me sitting on the kitchen floor, sobbing for no apparent reason. I always consciously knew about these incidents from my childhood, but because of the correlation to my daughter's age, specific memories were coming back more clearly. Shortly after this, I joined a Childhood Sexual Abuse group through our local FCSS to begin the healing process. It was in this group that I first learned to meditate...and I LOVED it! I meditated all the time...sometimes 3 times a day! LOL Even after I had healed with the group over a 2 year period and had moved on with my life, I continued to meditate. 

By the time I was 25 or 26, I realized that something really strange was beginning to happen. It started off as prophetic dreams and weird thoughts that would pop into my head at any random moment. After discussing a dream with a co-worker of mine...and after it ended up happening 3 weeks later...people started to wonder if I could be psychic. 

In this dream, the store that we worked in was closed because of the death and funeral of a local man in one of the pioneering families in our area. The strangest part of this dream was that this man's service was in the neighboring town, and not our own. The funeral in my dream was HUGE and had standing room only with the back doors open as well. When I told my co-worker about it, we thought it was funny because the man in my dream wasn't that special, it was actually his father and grandfather that would have been revered in our community. About 3 weeks later, I came into work and she just looked at me with such a serious, frightened look. Quietly she said "Please don't ever tell me if you dream about me or my family." I just looked at her all confused, then she said "Papere Aubin passed away last night." This was actually the father of the man in my dream, he'd died unexpectedly. What she went on to explain made ME feel need to sit down. Papere had had a long standing feud with the priest at the Catholic church in our town and that his service was being planned for the next town over...the one in my dream! On the day of his funeral, every store, including the post office, was closed in our town for the morning so that everyone could pay their respects. There were so many people there that we overflowed into the parking lot and the service had to be broadcast over a loud speaker out there. After this, I had a few more less significant dreams. I had dreamed that a friend's grandparents got into a car accident and I woke up before I could tell if they had died or not so I only mentioned it to my co-worker and not my friend. Almost a month later, they did indeed have an accident, but thankfully it was just a fender bender! :D 

At this point in time, I was starting to have more than just dreams, I was beginning to often experience nausea, heart palpitations sometimes and random thoughts and feelings would just pop into head when I was around different people. One Saturday morning I woke up feeling like I had the flu, but couldn't throw up no matter how hard I tried. I was like this all day, until 3pm when my father called to tell me that an old family friend had died and he was asked to deliver his eulogy. As he was talking, my mind wandered back to part of a dream I'd had the night before where I could see Walco smiling at me and he winked then disappeared, and my nausea disappeared with this memory of him in my dream! I also remember having coffee at a friend's house one day. She had 2 very active young boys. She knew what was happening with me and just asked me point blank "Will I ever have a girl?!" Right at that second, I saw a flash of her in my mind holding a baby wrapped in pink. Without thinking, I just said 'yeah'. LOL I had no idea she was going to purposely get pregnant! She did...and it ended being a girl...then she had her tubes tied! ;D

I started to make the connection between my meditative practice and these new found 'abilities'. Enjoying the excitement of it all, I began to do longer sessions every evening after everyone was in bed. Then in 1996, when I was 26yrs old, an incident happened that changed the way I thought about it for a long time after that. I had spent the spring that year getting ready for our wedding, which was to be on July 20th and this feeling of dread very slowly crept up on me over time that became like an illness...with almost daily nausea and headaches. Of course, there were jokes about my being pregnant again before the wedding, but every test I took always came back negative. It became sort of like a depression after a while. I remember my best friend and her mom sitting in my living room that June and saying "Rhonda, what's WRONG with you?! You're getting married for crying out loud!! You should BE HAPPY!" That's when I just blurted out that I felt like someone was going to die around me, someone special to me, someone close...like my dad, or maybe even her? They convinced me that it was all just in my head, but the feelings didn't go away. July 20th finally came and after our wedding, we left on a 14 day road trip honeymoon to Reno, Nevada. We didn't have a cell phone back then, so we just called in every 2 days or so to check in. When we got back into Canada and to my sister's place on day 12, there was a message to call her at work right away. She was in tears and said that my husband's best friend's new wife had been killed at work two days before and his brother was trying to find us to let us know. I was in complete shock, they were married two weeks before us...we were devastated. Once the grief and everything subsided after her funeral, I realized that the 'feelings' I'd been having up until our wedding were completely gone. 

This SCARED me to death...I NEVER wanted to feel that way again, so I stopped meditating altogether that year.  I also began to 'self medicate' so that I wouldn't remember my dreams when I'd wake up in the morning. I started off by smoking a little pot just at bedtime every night for a couple of years. When I got a position with Imperial Oil in 1998, I abandoned that habit fearing their drug testing policy only to replace it with cold medication and then eventually sleeping pills. In 2003, we lost my dad to cancer and I couldn't bear the thought of not being able to 'feel' him anymore. I knew what I had to do...start meditating again and toss the drugs! Now that I'm older and wiser...and more well read...I have since learned how to control the whole process. Now meditating has become a huge part of my craft once again.