Connecting with Spirit Guides and Your Individuality

May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 Melissa Conkling1 Comment

Because all of us have different minds, different bodies, and different souls, our spiritual paths and how we connect to our guides will also be different. While I share my experiences, favorite techniques and exercises, and others I have tried but aren’t for me, I always encourage you to adapt and integrate any of this information and these practices as you feel called to. You can and should test out anything you feel called to and add it into your spiritual journey as you see fit.

Spirituality is Individual

I believe the individuality of the spiritual journey is something that often holds people back from fully exploring and embracing this part of themselves. As humans, we are herd animals. We have survived as a species by sticking together and by repeating what we have survived in the past. Many institutions, from organized religious to cultural societies to schools have used this aspect of humanity to instill in us the idea that we all must do the same practices, embrace similar beliefs,, and exhibit the same behaviors, and if we do, we will all have the same results in the end. However, spirituality is different because our souls are all here for different reasons and we’ve all had different experiences over lifetimes. As such, we will experience our spiritual journey differently. Do we all need certain things to survive? Yes. Food, water, and shelter. But do we all need the same things to thrive? Absolutely not…and it would be a very boring world if we did!

To me, to fully embrace your spiritual connection and to discover and engage with your personal spirit guides and angels, you absolutely must embrace your authenticity and your unique human experience. You much learn to know, accept, and love who you are at soul level, which is the human you came here to this incarnation to be. To do that, you get to do what works for you. In fact, it is essential that you do.

For years, I tried to connect with my spirit guides by following various methods, practices, and meditations. I would follow the instructions to a T. Dedicating myself to mastering this gift. Yet I never seemed to get anywhere. Knowing that I am a highly intuitive person, I saw this inability to connect with my guides as a failure or as a special gift I simply didn’t have even though deep down I knew we all had the ability to do it. I was troubled by the question of why, when so many other spiritual things came to me so easily, could I not seem to communicate with my guides? It made me question myself and my abilities. It made me almost give up on it. And it made me doubt spirit guides even existed.

It wasn’t until I started to follow my own rules – in other words, there are no rules! – that I realized my guides had already been sending me messages for quite some time. When it first began, I realized one had been sending me signs for nearly a year. Now I know I’ve been receiving signs since I was a teenager. The problem was that the communication wasn’t coming through in the ways I had read about and learned. It wasn’t what I expected. It was new and different. And I had been limiting myself to an imitation of others’ experiences with their guides. This is why I urge you to follow your intuition, your inner voice, those seemingly insignificant callings. Each one will be leading you to the correct next step for you on your spiritual journey.

While connecting with your spirit guides may take some time and some patience, and it may also require some trial and error, I can assure you that you do have a whole team of guides waiting for you to receive their messages. You can connect with them any time you choose, and you don’t need to go through anyone else to do it. We all do, and we all can. So please, give yourself some grace. Give yourself some time. Be patient. And most of all, allow yourself to get creative in this endeavor!

intuition · Spiritual Mindset · Spirituality

Insights on Developing Your Intuition

April 23, 2023 Melissa ConklingLeave a comment

Developing my intuition has been an amazing journey. I have discovered some very interesting things along the way. Not only about myself, but about how intuition comes to me. So I thought I’d share some of my recent discoveries.

#1 – Intuitive insights are a lot like dreams.

Even when I’m 100% positive I’ll remember it later because it was so clear in the moment, it often fades or blurs or I totally forget!

Writing things down immediately after my listening practice was part of the process when I learned. As I got better at doing readings, I neglected this part more often. Recently I’ve discovered just how important it is to continue doing it so I can continue growing!

So I’ve learned the importance of being intentional with my intuitive practices and writing it down, not relying on my memory alone…because that hasn’t always worked.

#2 – My position matters. A lot.

One night, laying in bed getting ready for sleep, I began my daily listening practice. Unexpectedly, I had the sudden call to sit up. As I did, my intuition started to flow in a whole new way.

I often feel my intuition through my whole body, so sitting upright rather than laying down allowed me to tune in with my physical body much more. Tuning into your intuition in an upright and untangled position helps a ton – so uncross those arms and legs!

#3 – Don’t overthink it!

One of the things I learned when I first started intentionally working with my intuition was to listen first, write it out second, and discern its meaning third. As my mind and intuition flow, my conscious mind loves to speak up and give her opinion during the process.

Allowing myself to simply acknowledge and then let go of the urge to discern while listening has been incredibly helpful. Because once I do, that’s when my intuition really begins to flow.

Sometimes I feel that thought of “Oh no! I need to write this down so I don’t forget!” But I’m continuing to learn to trust the process, knowing that I’ll remember just what I need to, and know that if something is super important and I forget it, it will present itself again!

Building intuition is an ongoing practice and it’s getting stronger all the time. And maintaining that beginners mindset is key! So often, we love to think we’ve mastered things and don’t need the basics anymore… But it’s kind of like exercise. Just because someone is an elite athlete doesn’t mean they don’t need to warm up, cool down, or practice!

spirit guides · Spiritual Mindset

How to Get Your Mind Ready to Meet Your Spirit Guides

April 5, 2023April 18, 2023 Melissa ConklingLeave a comment

Communicating with spirit guides is something everyone can do. In fact, your guides are already communicating with you…but chances are you are missing their messages. Why? Because your mind isn’t ready yet. Fortunately, you can prepare yourself to connect with your guides.

Here are 5 ways you can prep your mindset to connect with your guides and receive their messages.

1. Embrace the Power of Your Mind

There are three levels of the mind to be aware of when communicating with the spirit realm.

First is the conscious mind. This is the logical, doing part of our mind that makes us take action on what we set out to achieve. We rely on our conscious mind heavily, and it is essential to our existence, yet it only represents about 5-10% of our individual mind power.

Next is the Superconscious – the universal energy where all-that-is exists, including spirit. It is where this guidance is coming from and is accessible to everyone, containing all knowledge and possibilities. The superconscious is not individual to us as humans. It is a collective energy.

Between the two lies the subconscious mind, which makes up the other 90-95% of our individual mind power. It is the bridge between the superconscious and the conscious mind. It is where our intuition, emotions, and creativity lie, as well as our habits and beliefs. This is why getting your subconscious mind on board in your spirit guide journey is so important.

2. Strengthen Your Intuition

Each and every one of us is born with an internal guidance system that assists us in connecting with the spirit realm – our Intuition.

You are an intuitive person, whether your realize it yet or not…and you don’t have to sit back and wait for your intuition to show up. You can strengthen and develop it like any skill. Connecting with your intuition intentionally and consistently helps you make better decisions faster, helps you build self trust, and assists you in connecting with your spirit guides, receiving their messages, and trusting their guidance.

Feel like your intuition could use a boost? Check out this free hypnosis recording I made to help you with this!

3. Throw Logic Out the Window

Now that we know the subconscious mind is crucial to connecting with our spirit guides, we need to take what is often the hardest step. We need to throw logic out the window. Not entirely and not forever, but it can hinder your ability to recognize your spirit guides and to receive their messages.

Connecting with spirit guides – and living any type of spiritual life – requires us to let go of logic, let go of our need to analyze, and our preoccupation with concrete proof of our experiences. Plain and simple, it is spirit. It is not material. So hard evidence will never exist except as a deep inner knowing as you learn to trust your higher self and intuition in a new way.

In the beginning, it takes faith. As you connect more, what begins as a belief or maybe only a hope soon turns into a knowing.

4. Overcoming Ego and Listening to Higher Self

Our ego is designed to keep us safe. It loves our comfort zone and it will do anything in its power to keep us right where we are, playing safe, holding ourselves back, and doing what we have survived every day of our lives doing. Above all, it fears change. But change is essential when we want to move ourselves from the comfort zone of our current existence to progressing on our spiritual journey.

Our ego uses fear and logic not to intentionally hold us back, but to keep us safe. It keeps us in our comfort zone because it perceives change as scary and dangerous. And this keeps us from connecting to our guides.

5. Practice Receiving

One of the very first and most powerful ways to really embrace the guidance of your spirit guides is allow yourself to receive it! As I learned from coach Andrea Quinn in her book, The Quinn Essentials, we are so accustomed to doing all the time, getting as much done as we possibly can, checking everything off our to-do list, and often doing everything for everyone else that we forget to allow ourselves to receive.

That’s part of why we so often don’t hear the guidance of our higher self, from our intuition and from our spirit guides. We don’t recognize it because we’re not allowing ourselves to receive it fully.

We’re used to doing, giving and sometimes taking, but allowing and receiving are where the real magic happens. Here’s the thing about receiving…women are literally designed to receive. But after thousands of years of fitting ourselves into a patriarchal society, many of us have become the doers and the givers. Not the receivers.

Look for other opportunities in your daily life to practice receiving. This may be receiving compliments without immediately feeling the need to reciprocate (aka giving), or perhaps its in receiving help or favors from friends or family or even strangers. It can even be as simple as spending a few minutes each day receiving breath, rather than taking breath…and noticing how different it feels!

Find these opportunities and allow yourself to receive them. As you open yourself to the idea of receiving in the physical sense, you will also open yourself up to receiving guidance that your spirit guides have been trying to give you.

As you prepare your mindset to receive your guides, your guides will know you are ready to meet with them and hear their messages, and begin letting their presence known in a number of ways! And that is a post for another day 🙂

Want to go deeper into this? Check out my FREE Spirit Guides Masterclass!

Spiritual Mindset

The Higher Self, The Ego, and Connecting with Spirit

March 30, 2023March 30, 2023 Melissa ConklingLeave a comment

There are two important aspects of ourselves that come into play in our spiritual journey – the Ego and the Higher Self.

We each have our own personal bridge to the spirit realm, and that bridge is our higher self. Let’s quickly go over what your higher self ISN’T. Your higher self is not the best version of yourself. It’s is not something you need to strive to become. It is not your soul or spirit. And it is not ever separate from you

So…what is your higher self? Your higher self is the part of you that knows what is best for you. It’s the part of you that knows at any given moment what step you should take next. And it is the part of you that connects with spirit and your spirit guides so you can get clear on your goals and your soul’s purpose in this lifetime, and how to put it all into action. In fact, it knows so strongly what you are meant to do that it will pull you away from goals you may have that seem logical and safe, but aren’t allowing you to live up to your full potential. And it’s something each and every one of us has, has always had, and will always have. We are connected to it. Essentially, it’s the bridge between your spirit that is timeless and beingless, and your current human existence.

Now, one of the most common definitions of a life purpose is a message our soul decided upon – a certain thing we are here to convey – that was chosen before our birth. We choose our human experience – our body, our parents, everything – based on how these circumstances will best help us deliver this message. The tricky part is, as we take human form, we forget what this message is and why we made those decisions. Now, that may sound a little frustrating, but it’s actually a gift…because our life experience is designed to allow us to remember that message and to live it out.

Our higher self is the part of us that does know, and it guides us in our journey to remember through speaking to us and connecting us with our spirit guides and other aspects of the superconscious. Often we hear people talk about connecting to your higher self, and that phrase is a bit of a misnomer since it implies that we are not already connected to this part of us. You are, you always have been, and always will be. But let’s not get caught up in those semantics.

Your higher self likely guided you here as a step to help you remember your purpose, remember your spiritual nature, and to combine them as you live your life. Throughout history, we humans have learned to trust and rely on outside sources, logic, and our ego rather than our higher self. Our ego uses logic not to intentionally hold us back, but to keep us safe. It keeps us in our comfort zone because it perceives change as scary and dangerous.

Our higher self, however, simply knows what we’re meant to do. As we learn to re-establish and trust the communication lines with our higher self, we learn to safely move past that place where our ego has been keeping us. So, how do we do this? With intention. Through meditation, mindset practices, and hypnosis. Our higher self speaks to us through our subconscious mind, particularly through our intuition, which we will dive into much deeper in the following chapter.

One of the biggest questions I know I had when I started this work, and one I get often and see others ask is: How do I know when I’ve connected with my higher self? Unfortunately, there is no straight, easy answer on this one. It’s often that you just know on a deep inner level beyond logic. Fortunately there are some signals to look for.

The three biggest signs that a message is coming from your higher self are:

That the message is very matter of fact and rational, though not necessarily logical – sort of like in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when Harry takes the liquid luck and knows exactly where he should go to achieve his mission.
It’ll be absent of fear – because fear comes from the ego
It’ll be persistent, because your higher self is always nudging you in the right direction. If you’re getting the same inkling to do a certain thing over and over and over, chances are, it’s your higher self.

When I started connecting with my higher self more regularly, I keep getting these urges to go to the beach and to get out in nature, even though my ego was telling me I needed to work harder. Despite logic and that sense that it made no sense, it was in those moments at the beach and out in the woods that I had some of my biggest breakthroughs that led me to where I am today.

And just like everything else in life, you’ll get better at doing this, recognizing it, and trusting it the more often you intentionally connect with your higher self. Don’t get too caught up in doing this “right” because there is no Right…that’s your ego just trying to pull you back into the comfort zone.