Spirit Guides
Do we have a helper on the way?
I’ve just finished reading a book. ‘Spirit Guides for Beginners: How to Communicate with the Afterlife, Interpret Signs & Manifest a Happier Life’ by Sophia Grace. In all honesty, it’s not the best book I ever read. Indeed, it is instantly forgettable. But I mention it because it deals with the subject I wish to talk about today:
Do we have a spirit guide?
According to Ms. Grace, we do. All of us. They can be dead ancestors, enlightened beings, animals or a host of other entities. They are there, unseen but caring, a constant presence to guide us on our way through life. If only we care to reach out to them.
Nor is she the only one who believes. Damaris, the lady whom I go to for spiritual guidance is adamant that I have one. “He’s a monk, somewhere in the Middle East… I’m getting Jerusalem or Jordan, they’re the Middle East aren’t they…? Yes, he was a monk, a Christian one, but not like the monks you get here. A different kind of Christian. Are the Christians different there…? He is. He doesn’t like Rome, doesn’t like authority.”
To be fair to Damaris, by her own admission, she’s not expert on Middle Eastern geography or religions, but she could be right. Christians there tend to be Orthodox and the Orthodox are none too keen on Rome.
So, do I have a spirit guide?
The problem is, I’ve never seen this Middle Eastern monk. He has never appeared before me in shimmering robes and told me that I need to dump Hermione and date Ginny. Or something like that.
According to Sophia Grace, spirit guides communicate with us in four fashions, all conveniently starting with ‘c’:
· Clairaudience — the voice in your head
· Clairvoyance — messages received by spirits through mental images or a short clip playing in your mind
· Claircognisance — the feeling of just knowing
· Clairsentience — having a clear feeling about something or someone, the ability to detect or absorb knowledge that has not been revealed to you by anybody in any way.
Now, things begin to look a bit difference. I believe I have received messages through three of those mediums. I’m not a clairvoyant, but audient, cognisant and sentient I may well be.
Grace goes on to say that these messages can come through in a variety of ways, namely:
· Dreams
· Animals/Nature
· Songs/Sounds
· Sensations — feelings, smells, invisible energy
· Numbers — for example angel numbers
Now dreams are something that I have looked into. Indeed, I have written two essays on the subject. But I never seem to have had those meaningful dreams where a message from the other side is conveyed to me. Instead, mine seem to be some sort of Freudian processing facility for my mind’s worries and detritus.
So, then there are the animals and nature. I like nature. I love walking in it and when I do, I often receive some of my most powerful revelations and spiritual experiences. Once, on Camino, I sat in an albergue watching the swallows swoop and dive in the evening sun and was powerfully moved to tears. But did I receive any messages from a spirit guide through them? Erm… no.
Songs and sounds resonate more. I often feel moved by music; sometimes it can crystallise something in my mind more powerfully and directly than anything else. I recall when I first became friends with S and she revealed some of the abuse she has been suffering to me, ‘Percy’s Song’ by Fairport Convention (written by Bob Dylan), came to my mind and the parallels of that story of someone being sentenced unjustly to life in prison for something that was not really their fault brought me to tears.
And, when I was walking to Jerusalem, the words of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ kept running through my head, puncturing my soul powerfully. It became my anthem for the walk and, spookily, as we approached the Old City itself, the culmination of the walk, the notes could be heard on the air, faint at first, getting stronger and stronger. And there, sitting by the street, a beautiful young lady was playing and singing it. Again, I (and my fellow pilgrims) was moved to tears and, when she had finished, we explained why to her. And her response? “Sometimes I get a feeling that I simply have to play a certain song. This was one of those times. ‘Hallelujah’ is not usually one that I play but I got the feeling that I just had to play it then.”
Nor is that the only time I have witnessed this phenomenon. On Camino I encountered a fellow pilgrim named Holger who had walked all the way from his home in Cologne with a mandolin on his back. And he would play it in the evenings, singing with the voice of an angel. I was lying in my albergue bed recovering from the day’s exertions when I heard the strains of ‘Blackbird’ from the Beatles wafting up through the window. And the French lady in the next bed began to cry. “That was the song we played at our wedding,” she explained. She was walking to get over the loss of her husband. And Holger had felt the urge to play that particular tune.
As for the feelings and sensations, the invisible energy. Have I felt that? Maybe; I do get gut feelings, strong urges that attract me or repel me to or from certain people. But they are vague and hard to pinpoint. A spirit guide or something else?
And then the numbers. My friends E and F go in for these in a big way, forever seeing angel numbers in numberplates or phone call times. But there are a lot of other numbers all around them which they don’t see. Are they really messages from the other side or just the fact that human beings are creatures programmed to recognise patterns and they are picking out the ones that suit their needs? In all honesty, I don’t know but I remain sceptical.
On example of someone who definitely does seem to have a spirit guide is my friend F. Before we walked to Jerusalem she had a vision of a building with yellow walls and a red-tiled roof surrounded by palms. I showed her a photo. “Is this the place?” I asked.
“Oh my God, how did you know? That is exactly the place!”
The photo was of Latrun Monastery, one of the stops on the walk. It turned out to be where F would spend her first night of the pilgrimage (she joined us later), and where she had a strange experience. “Who is this man?” she asked one of the monks, pointing to an image of a bearded saint.
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“He is St. Charbel,” the monk told her.”
“He is talking to me. There is some connection between me and him,” she replied.
Which is weird because F is not even Christian. Also curious is that I was uniquely positioned to be able to tell her all about Charbel since I had visited his home only a few years before. He was a shepherd in 19th century Lebanon who became a holy man and healer and who is much revered by Christians across the Middle East. I had a spare image of him which I gave her that I’d bought on my trip to Lebanon. And it was through his guidance that she reconnected with a Lebanese friend of hers, also not Christian, but who has a deep reverence for Charbel. Recently, I was in my loft sorting out stuff and came across another image of Charbel that I’d forgotten I’d bought. “What do you want?” I’d wondered. I mentioned it to F, and she confessed that on the same day, she’d reconnected again with the Lebanese guy.
But she also believes that she has another spirit guide, Fatima, the Lady of Light. Fatima was the daughter of the Prophet and, whilst respected by Muslims, she is particularly revered by the Shia (F is not Shia). Since receiving messages from her, she has started attending a Shia mosque and has deepened in her friendships with the Shia.
Which brings me onto something else I read. In ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt: The case for supernatural phenomena in the modern world’ by Gordon Smith, a book primarily about mediumship, the author also discusses spirit guides, yet his take, based on decades as a medium, is different to that of Sophia Grace. He believes that they are archetypes, the same guide can appear in different guises depending on our need and culture. So, firstly we might hear from a Chinese Buddhist master, then a Native American shaman but, in actuality, dig down and the message and the individual are one and the same, just adapted to our needs at the time.
This seems to me to make sense. It makes sense that a Lebanese holy man should wish to connect with F, an interfaith enthusiast, and to bring her closer together to another Lebanese man. But, a Muslim woman would be what she needs to help her bridge the Sunni-Shia divide and deepen her own Islamic faith.
Archetypes are important and they pervade so much of our world. I have read what Jung has to say about them and see them at work in the Tarot or in the saints or gods and goddesses of the Pagan pantheons. Would it not make sense that any spirit guides — who are, by their very definition, always going to be beyond human comprehension to a certain degree — should appear as archetypes. Indeed, should we expect anything less?
Which brings me onto my own, definite spirit guide experiences. I’ve talk about them all before separately, but now I wish to revisit them in this new light.
And there are two.
The first came on my first full day of walking the Camino de Santiago. I was really struggling on the harsh climb up to Orisson and was considering turning back. Then a lady called Jacquie came to me and befriended me, encouraged me, and stayed with me for the first three days until I needed the support no longer. She was a real lady and no visitor from the spirit world, but later, when I was writing up my pilgrimage and lamenting that, despite its brilliance, I had never encountered St. James on the way, I realised that I had… but in a human, female form. For James had worked through Jacquie with me, appeared to me through her. Even the name was a clue that I’d otherwise missed: Jacquie is a female form of Jacques, James.
So, my first spirit guide was St. James.
And indeed, the entirety of that pilgrimage revolved around contacts with strangers, female strangers, and the overwhelming message I got from it was that I needed to reorientate my life. After years of a predominantly male-dominated existence, I needed to trust to let female energy back into my life. Which I have done, and it has transfigured me.
The second experience came in 2022 whilst I was on holiday in Cyprus. This was similar to the encounter on the climb up to Orisson yet also radically different. I was in the city of Nicosia, sightseeing with my friend Alex, when we stopped for lunch in a café. There I met a young woman who wanted to engage in a conversation. I traded pleasantries. She looked like someone who had had a hard life, perhaps a working girl. We left and went to visit a couple of museums. On the way back, she was still there and waved enthusiastically, wanting to talk. But I was busy. Yet from the moment that happened, I had the feeling that I had missed an opportunity, that I was meant to talk with her, that I needed to stop and make the most of chance encounters like that.
Reflecting on this, I decided to try and make up for that lost opportunity by revisiting a chance encounter that I had previously not made the most of. The result was my friendship with S which, in turn led to several more friendships with women and having the opportunity to really support them in turning their lives around as well as enriching my own.
Trying to make sense of this, I consulted a Sufi friend and he believed that I had encountered the mysterious figure Al-Khidr who comes to those in need of guidance, often in the form of a woman who has had a hard life. I researched him further. According to the account of him in the Quran, he appears where “the two seas meet” and makes clear that which is hidden. Nicosia is a divided city, half-Muslim, half-Christian. Through my encounter there I bridged the gap not just between man and woman but also between the Muslim and Christian worlds, much like St. Charbel and Fatima have helped F bridge the Sunni-Shia divide.
My second guide is Al-Khidr.
Yet further reflections caused me to explore in other directions. I explored past life regressions and had startling revelations about the life of Ummashtart, a young girl brought up in the temple of the Lady of Byblos across the sea in Lebanon, but who then travelled to Cyprus and then Egypt and what is today Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In all of these places she encountered the goddess in her local forms — Astarte, Aphrodite, Isis, Asherah. And Aphrodite is an interesting one. The goddess of Cyprus but also, according to Bettany Hughes, a deity associated with working women. Had I also encountered her as well as Al-Khidr?
Thus Aphrodite/Astarte is perhaps my third spirit guide.
Or perhaps, if the theory of Gordon Smith is correct, all three are, for they are all one. For, if one reflects on their separate messages, they are all, at their core, the same: embrace the stranger, open yourself up to the stranger, support the one going through a tough time and give yourself space to grow.
Three are actually one. Surely that is something that any Christian should understand?
So, in conclusion, what is my position on spirit guides? The answer is, as always, opaque, one sees through a glass darkly. Certainly, I struggle with Sophia Grace’s rather formulistic and unimaginative view. If I do have a spirit guide, it is not simply a case of calling upon him or her and they shall appear. Or at least, not in the obvious sense.
Damaris might be onto something. Maybe my spirit guide is an Eastern monk. But, call upon him as I may, he has never appeared before me in that guise even if many of my hunches, gut-feelings and spiritual urgings have both a Levantine and a monkish flavour to them.
But if one considers that we humans are all unique creations and that the Divine always appears to us in the manner in which we are most able to comprehend Him, Her or It, then perhaps the spirit guide thing is real? I may not hear the voices or sense it in animals or angel numbers, but then I am a natural sceptic who is not especially close with animals and is dubious about number patterns. Conversely, I am a traveller, an embracer of the stranger, an explorer of ideas and, increasingly, a reflector and listener.
And so yeah, maybe my spirit guide is St. James, or Al-Khidr, or Aphrodite… or all three at once.
And all who come to me, not as mystical projections but in the guise of real people, flesh and blood.
If that view of a spirit guide is acceptable then, hey, why not, count me in.
Written 23/03/2026, Stoke-on-Trent to Birmingham New Street, Birmingham and Acock’s Green, UK
Copyright © 2026, Matthew E. Pointon
