interact with them – and they with me. For many months I experienced a mixture of exhilaration and confusion, until it all settled down. Once I was able to keep the voices at bay until I needed assistance, the relationship became peaceful and utterly comforting.
More than anything I want people to understand my own experience of working with guides, so that they can benefit in the same way. I had a significant process of adaptation in adjusting to the spontaneous way of spirit, which contrasted with the structured physical way we normally operate.
I wondered if guardian angels and spirit guides are the same, or are they distinct entities? Throughout the ages, angels have been pictured wearing wings, which, as a child, I found to be a comforting, sheltering image. I presumed the wings were meant to represent the traditional role ascribed to angels as messengers of God, the means by which they flew around delivering the messages. I like the quotation from G.K. Chesterton which says: ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.’ I now know that they do; this is something we all need to do. We can only truly soar when we are light enough to do so.
My understanding, in accordance with the information I have been given by my spirit guides, is that we are all soul – part of God, or ‘unconditional love’. In that sense there can be no distinction between angels and guides. Although I prefer the description ‘guardian angels’ myself, I got into the habit of using the word ‘guides’, partly because it was shorter but mainly because it had no obvious religious connotation. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine Margaret Anna flying around with wings attached to her! The word ‘guide’ is fitting, too, as their role in our lives is to guide us through both our darkest and our brightest days.
Way back in the 1960s, I was one of the first training officers in the Irish Civil Service. Essentially, my job was to teach effective communication, including writing, talking, negotiation, and explaining the workings of the different institutions of government. I needed to use whatever technical aids were available to me, such as blackboards, flip charts and overhead projectors. I also used to prepare ‘how-to’ handouts on a variety of subjects for distribution. That all added up to a structured form of working, with clearly defined objectives.
When my life was transformed and I began to develop my communication with guides, I had to adapt to a totally different style. In the early stages I was inclined to try to pin things down in the ‘how-to’ formula with which I was familiar; however, I soon found that this was like going down a blind alley. My usual organisational skills were useless; for example, I discovered that there was no point in trying to prepare for individual meetings or talks by making notes. I needed to use a different form of preparation that involved relaxing as much as I could, and then asking for help from my guides. Each individual meeting had to be totally spontaneous, and I had to be absolutely relaxed and open-minded for them to work.
When I spoke to the public, my talks lasted about ninety minutes. I might have some ideas in my head – or a story or stories that I could tell, if I found they were relevant – but I never used notes. At all stages I needed to be in tune with my guides and with the audience. I’d have made that impossible if I had a prepared agenda. Accordingly, my talks were always spontaneous within the realm of communication with guides and how the members of the audience could be helped to do that for themselves.
Systems and detailed planning and organisation are needed in day-to-day life on earth. However, trying to extend that approach to direct communication with guides will inevitably leave us open to frustration and disappointment. One of the most important and wonderful features of life is that we all have our own individual styles. It is through those ‘styles’ that our guides try to communicate with us. For instance, in my own case communication mainly happens through feelings or impressions, rather than pictures or words.
An undiscovered land
A participant at one of my courses shared this little story with the group:
‘An explorer found a beautiful, undiscovered land. When she returned to her home, she told her friends about this country, describing the valleys, hills, rivers, trees, animals and plants. She told them: “You must go there for yourselves. My words cannot do justice to that land.”
Her friends were excited to hear about the land, and were keen to investigate for themselves. They asked her to draw them a map to guide their journey and to show them exactly where the land was. She refused, saying: “No, you must set out and find the way for yourselves. There are many different routes and I only know one of them.”
However, they insisted and, after a time, she relented and drew a map for them. Her friends were intrigued by the map and spent days planning for the journey, discussing which route they would take, and what the land would look like. But they delayed, deciding that they had first better prepare thoroughly for the trip. Perhaps, too, they needed to know more about maps, how to read them, how to understand what picture the map showed. Years passed, the map was studied, then copied and passed on to others. Schools were set up in map-reading.
The explorer was sad and went away. No one visited the land.’
In my opinion, this little story highlights how we allow an over-organised approach to life to overwhelm and even obliterate our spirit of adventure. Our conditioned analytical processes get us nowhere in our efforts to achieve the intrepid open-mindedness needed in effective communication with guides.
I like the following quotation from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Man who listens to reason is lost. Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.’
Handing over
At a relatively early stage in my communication with guides I was offered a simple way of giving and receiving help. This was the gist of it:
Imagine yourself in a circle with your guides, who are channelling into the circle all the unconditional love of the universe. Suppose you’re concerned about relatives or friends or people who are either living or have passed on, or material matters, or whatever. Imagine them all in the middle of the circle with all that love flowing around them. You feel yourself in alignment with that love. Imagine it also flowing all around your immediate environment, your country, all the continents, spreading peace and harmony around the world. Stay with the feeling as long as feels comfortable for you.
When I do that exercise, which can be done anywhere, at any time, I can feel loving energy flowing around the circle, and it usually rocks me gently backwards or forwards or round and round. In doing the exercise I release all need for worry, and I’m cooperating in sending unconditional help to whomever and wherever it’s needed in the simplest and most effective way.
I’m told by Shebaka that if only one person in a thousand was to do that exercise or something similar on a regular (i.e., daily) basis, the effect would be so powerful that within a relatively short time span – say, about fifty years or less – there would be no wars, no crime, the freedom of the individual would be respected, and planet earth would be a wonderfully harmonious place. Why? Because of the flow of unconditional love around the universe and the consequential raising of global consciousness.
Since I was given that exercise, I have been doing it with the people I have met in individual sessions, in courses and in talks. To me, it’s the best form of communication I can recommend. One of its most appealing aspects is that it involves no effort at all. I’m all for making things easy. An important feature of it for me is that I can feel the presence of my guides and let my analytical side take a rest.
One of the most common pleas that I heard from people during individual consultations and working with groups is that they needed to change their current situation and didn’t know how. The first, and most important, answer is that there is nothing – no situation – that cannot be changed. The phrase ‘thinking
