[Slade]

You may wonder if you’re actually in tune with your guides or not, but the most important thing to remember is that if you get great results and you’re happier, does it really matter where the information is coming from?

About five years ago, my "channel opened up" - as a result of a stroke that paralyzed me on one side of my body. My guides got really loud in response to a life-threatening emergency, and became consequently less easy to ignore.

I believe that we forget and lose our ability to communicate with them, or we are taught that what we are clearly experiencing is "something else."

Imaginary Friends...? Or maybe Mental Illness...

My parents were able to confirm for me that I had expressed the presence of angelic entities as early as the age of 4. I had a relationship with them when I was small, but as I grew up, I began to believe that what I was experiencing when I channeled Spirit Guides were CHARACTER voices, and simply part of my creative process as a writer.

It was a literary agent, who was working with me on a fiction project at the time, that first pointed out to me the Story I always tell.

He cited Joseph Campbell, Jungian archetypes, etc, as the basis for his belief in Meta-story - that all storytellers are simply re-working and re-telling the same ancient Myths of the collective consciousness.

I had never even thought there was any kind of pattern to the fiction I wrote - but he quickly pointed out a theme running through everything I'd ever written, going back to short stories in High School - and my parents corroborated an early grade-school obsession with Joan of Arc.

I invariably wrote about people who receive divine messages and interact with spiritual beings, and are persecuted for it or perceived as insane.

If I am insane, let me tell you, this is a great mental illness, unlike any other I've heard of - it makes me more peaceful, more happy, more fulfilled, purpose-driven, it has helped me as a writer, it has encouraged me to share my stories on a global scale... I even learned a couple of programming languages along the way!

Pretty cool for a sickness...
Note: yes, I'm being sarcastic.

This was my greatest fear. And why the web site I currently publish, and the story I'm telling you right now, is a very big personal breakthrough for me.

Last year, Erin started writing about her experience with stepping into her purpose as a medium. It's not so much something you bring in as something you let out or let through.

A few months ago, in reply to one of Erin's posts about Spirit Guide Names, and in particular to the comments, I wrote about focusing on:

the Bigger Picture of why they are interacting with you in the first place. You don’t have to know a stranger’s name to be saved by him or receive a life-changing message.

I was just having this conversation via email with Jeff over at DruidJournal.net

Erin's writing about the topic, and the response of others, illustrates the point that Messages and Divine Guidance are often confirmed from a variety of sources.

Many of them simply human...