6 Types Of Spirit Guides & How To Communicate With Them

Some spirit guides have been with you for your entire life, even since before you were born. Others came on your team as you needed them at different times in your life, and you can use your free will to request more spirit guides still.

Spirit animals might be a pet you once had who passed away and is now part of your spiritual guidance squad. Spirit animals can also be any animal that has something to teach you, like the peacock teaching you the importance of beauty or confidently owning your gifts, or the wolf showing you the importance of getting your survival needs met.

Ascended masters like Buddha or Mother Mary were once human, living journeys of deep spiritual growth and influence. Now they have a special place as leaders in the spirit world and as guides/teachers to humans like you.

Loved ones or family members who've passed on may choose to be one of your spirit guides and actively support you from heaven by helping you in very practical ways, like sending career opportunities or nurturing relationships your way.

One of your grandmothers could be an important spirit guide for you, whether you knew her well in life or not.

Spirit guides will often enter your life by sending you signs, also called synchronicities. Carl Jung defined synchronicity as "a meaningful coincidence."

An example would be realizing you need to improve your romantic relationship after having a fight with your partner before bedtime, and out of the blue the next day you notice a book about communication in romantic relationships sitting on a co-worker's desk.

Spirit guides could also communicate to you through numbers or number sequences like 111, or you might have a lucky number, and when you go for a job interview, your lucky number is in the company's address.

Spirit guides could talk to you by sending musical messages, like a song that always inspires you playing on the radio when you get in the car after a rough day.

Spirit guides might send you a dream that gives you an idea about how to handle a situation, or a guide could even appear to you in a dream.

Part of getting more guidance from your spirit guides is recognizing the messages they are already sending. Many times the messages our guides send are lost on us because our lives are too busy or our minds are too busy.

The more you watch for signs from your guides, the more you'll recognize the signs they send. But something else magical happens too—as your guides sense you are more aware of them and their helpful messages, they will send more.

Get a special journal and devote it solely to increasing communication between you and your guides. This is a sacred place where you can write your guides a letter and ask them for assistance in specific ways.

While your guides know you and your life well, it can be powerful to use your free will to ask for help and guidance. You can also use this journal to record any important signs they send.

Action step: Write your guides a letter at the beginning of the week and express gratitude for a sentence or two about anything in your life you think they've helped with recently.

You might give one of your guardian angels a name you've always loved, like Emily. Or you could be thinking of your guardian angel as you read a name in a novel, like Javier or Gigi, and that becomes their name.

Giving a guide a name makes them feel more real and may encourage you to connect with them more regularly. You may also come to know the personality of one of your guides after working more closely with them over time.

Action step: See if a name comes to you for one of your guides via your intuition or a synchronicity, or get creative and give them a name.

When you're frustrated about a situation, confused about the best next step, or feeling that you don't have enough control, surrender an issue over to your guides. Even if it's just to give yourself a little break. This can allow fresh insights to come to you as well as let your guides have more freedom to do their thing and help. 

Just researching spirit guides will help increase your communication with them. Look for experts and information that resonates with you and is positive, empowering, and healing.

Everyone has intuition, and everyone can improve their intuition with study and practice. There are actually four main intuitive pathways that you can play with and develop. (This intuition quiz can help you decide which one is the strongest for you.).

You can hear gentle voices in your mind (clairaudience); see guidance as images in your mind (clairvoyance); know guidance as breakthrough thoughts or mental downloads (claircognizance); or feel guidance as energy, emotions, or physical sensations (clairsentience).

Action step: Practice using your intuition to make small decisions the outcome of which aren't a big deal, like where to go for lunch with a co-worker.

Spirit guides are of the spirit world and have a powerful ability to ground you in your own spirituality or help you discover it.

Having regular spiritual practices—like drawing an oracle card every morning for inspiration, taking a meditative yoga class once a week, or attending a spiritual gathering once a month with other people—will create more intimacy with your spirit guides.

Action step: Do something in the next few weeks, like a new moon or full moon ritual, to create more regular spiritual practices in your life.

This may sound like the quickest and easiest way to connect to your spirit guides, but it really works. You can make a formal prayer or blessing, or you can simply tell them what you need in your thoughts with a brief sentence or two.

Humans have been using divination tools to communicate with Spirit for as long as humans have been around. Oracle cards, tarot cards, runes...there are many divination tools. Try different methods and see what works best for you. 

If you're feeling disconnected from Spirit, don't worry. You have a connection to Spirit and always will. Your spirit guides are there, working on your behalf behind the scenes, whether you sense them or not. Sometimes it's during the most challenging times in our lives that we can feel disconnected from Spirit, yet this is when Spirit can and wants to help us more than ever.

When you're going through big changes, it can help ground you to feel connected to your spirituality and your spirit guides. Watch a documentary or movie with spiritual themes, listen to a podcast by a spiritual leader who resonates with you, or read an uplifting and inclusive book about spirituality for 20 minutes every night before bed.

Your spirit guides very much want to have a closer relationship with you. As you open up to and attempt more communication with them, you may be pleasantly surprised by how many messages you notice. Your spirit guides already send you so many messages.