Spiritual Guidance: Meaning, Benefits, & Tips​

While spiritual teachers can help you learn about spiritual techniques and methods, and spiritual healers can help you work through mental and physical issues associated with the spiritual journey, the benefits of working with a spiritual guide may revolve around navigating the journey. 

A spiritual guide may understand the spiritual landscape and have special skills, tools, or insights that they can share with you. They may also offerer spiritual transmission—that is, they may help you resonate at more calm or conscious frequency. Thus, working with a spiritual guide may help you stay on track, understand where you are (and where you’re going) in the journey, and enable you to more easily overcome common obstacles like loneliness or fear.

If you think of the spiritual journey like a video game, the spiritual guide is the one giving you the tools to fight enemies, build structures, or figure out puzzles. A spiritual healer, on the other hand, is the one giving you the power-ups you need to sustain your energy. And the spiritual teacher? They are the ones training you throughout the game.

How a Spiritual Guide Helps With Spiritual Growth

While a spiritual guide can not ensure your spiritual growth (that’s up to you), they may be able to direct you to practices, thought exercises, or meditations that help you advance in the areas where you are stuck. By empowering you to take charge of your own evolution, the spiritual guide not only provides useful insights or resources but may also help fuel your motivation or self-efficacy so that you continue moving forward more easily. ​

There are many lines of spiritual growth. Within each line, growth occurs in waves, stages, or spirals (Wilber, 2001). We’ll discuss these more below.

A spiritual teacher will usually develop expertise on specific lines or stages. For example, Eckhart Tolle, an excellent spiritual teacher, focuses on the stages of Awareness and Acceptance. Suzzane Giesemann, a spiritual medium, focuses primarily on the Awakening stage. Other spiritual teachers may focus specifically on topics like shadow work (Shutan, 2024), limiting beliefs, or self-inquiry (Maharshi, 2000). If these specific stages or areas of focus are stalling your spiritual growth, the deep expertise that spiritual teachers hold may be exactly what you need to progress.​
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If you are unsure exactly why you are stuck, this is when a spiritual guide may be most helpful. A spiritual guide looks at the spiritual journey from a broader perspective. They generally recognize that no one technique will be right for everyone and that people can get stuck all along the path, not just in one spot. So spiritual guides may be able to direct you to the specific topic areas or stages that are most likely to help you. Or, they may direct you to the spiritual teachers who focus on the skills you most need to learn. 

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Because spiritual guides do not have the deep expertise of spiritual teachers, they may be more likely to evaluate your overall pattern of growth and/or help you understand where you are in your spiritual journey.

The Spiritual Guidance Landscape

Because spiritual guidance is broad, it may involve many aspects of personal growth. Here are 7 primary lines that might be included: 
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• Stability. Grounding, connection to the physical body, financial stability, sense of safety, etc…
• Emotion. Emotion regulation, nervous system activation, fear, physical movement, sexuality, etc…
• Self. Identity, self-esteem, ego, self-expression, achievement, etc…
• Other. Social connection, love, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, etc…
• Self-Other. Communication, listening skills, voice, boundaries, leadership, etc…
• Mind. Thinking, learning, analyzing, imagination, intuition, etc…
• Soul. Play, surrender, oneness, spirituality, etc…

​Although I have separated these lines, think of them more like a braid—they are separate but they overlap and are interwoven. A braid cannot exist without all lines supporting it. And, although we move forward in each line separately, moving forward in any one of these lines will affect our progression in the other lines. Rather than focusing on one line, a spiritual guide is likely to consider where you are in all lines and how to best move forward in all lines.

It is my belief that therapy, counseling, and AA are the most helpful resources for beginners. Basically, working on any aspect of yourself is likely to help you progress. These resources also can help you work through foundational challenges that prevent further spiritual growth. AA, in particular, is free and uses spiritual techniques to help you overcome many challenges.

As you get further in your spiritual journey, spiritual teachers likely become more helpful. Their deep expertise in developing specific spiritual skills can help you further progress in your spiritual growth. Although very helpful, this often isn’t enough to reach awakening or enlightenment.

This is when you might bring a spiritual guide in. Spiritual guides may be most helpful at later stages of growth. Rather than supporting you directly, spiritual guides empower you to act on your own. So if you don’t yet have the foundation to engage in self-directed spiritual activity, spiritual guides may not benefit you. 

For example, perhaps you feel like you’ve already done everything yet you still aren’t finding the inner peace, love, and joy that emerge later in the spiritual journey. This may be when a spiritual guide can help you identify blocks or point you in a new and beneficial direction.

The stages below can help you get a better understanding of whether you are a beginner or more advanced in your spiritual growth. We generally progress through these stages in order.
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1. Sensing Stage. This stage involves fully using our 5 senses. The guidance that may be part of this stage includes breathwork, somatic experiencing, grounding, nutrition, etc… All of these techniques help us become more embodied. Trauma and adverse childhood experiences frequently disrupt development at this stage and can lead to addictions.
2. Learning Stage. This stage involves initial learning. Guidance that may be part of this stage includes reading self-help books, going to therapy, and beginning to practice skills like emotion regulation, gratitude, cognitive-behavioral techniques, etc…
3. Expressing Stage. This stage involves self-expression related to the lines of development. Guidance that may be part of this stage includes exercising, kindness, interpersonal communication, and showing our true selves in other ways.
4. Awareness Stage. This stage involves a heightened level of awareness and understanding about ourselves and our world. Guidance that may be part of this stage involves self-reflection, noticing limiting beliefs, being present, forest bathing, and other awareness-based activities. 
5. Allowing Stage. This stage involves acceptance and letting go. Guidance that may be part of this stage involves letting go of the past, forgiveness, developing trust, and surrender.
6. Awakening Stage. This stage involves a greater understanding of our place within the whole. Guidance that may be part of this stage includes deeper development of compassion and empathy, channeling, mediumship, self-integration, and seeking Truth. ​

To get a general idea of where you are in your spiritual journey, use the self-assessment below. 

The goal is to try to identify the most advanced stage you’ve reached in each line. You may still be developing skills related to earlier stages even if you have begun lessons from advanced stages. But filling out the chart below can be a useful starting point in understanding where you are in your spiritual journey. You can check out my Secret Keys workbook here to learn more about the lines and stages.​

To further identify your spiritual roadblocks, ask yourself the following questions:
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• What are your primary life struggles? How might you try to resolve them in a new way?
• Are there any areas of your growth where you feel stuck? How might you get unstuck?
• Are you having any challenges with particular lines or stages? What activities might you try to grow in these areas?

Based on the information you provided previously, try to figure out what to focus on next. 

To address your problem areas, you might:
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• Read spiritual or self-help books
• Do activities
• Focus on specific topics
• Find online resources
• Create a general plan for developing these skills
• Create a timeline and check in with yourself to assess progress.

A spiritual guide can likely aid you in identifying and addressing problem areas.​

Spiritual awakening may be a time when spiritual guidance is needed or desired. It can be weird and scary not to know what’s happening or where you’re headed. If you are awakening, you’ll likely go through a series of processes for which spiritual guidance may be helpful. We’ll briefly discuss these processes below.

Spiritual Guidance for Self-Integration

Self-integration involves integrating all aspects of ourselves—the unconscious self, the body, the conscious self, and the higher self. Most of us shove all kinds of dark scary monsters into our unconscious (or into our body, as in the case of trauma)—and self-integration involves facing these monsters. It is during this phase that our conscious self begins to see the shadows, traumas, false beliefs, and everything else that we’ve been hiding from ourselves. 

We may begin to realize the ways in which we were in denial, experience the pain that we repressed as children, and go in and out of depression (dark nights of the soul) as our unconscious becomes conscious and we release attachment to these old stories. During this time, addictions—to alcohol, drugs, food, media, etc…—may actually get worse, because we use these behaviors to avoid past unconscious pain, and this material gets increasingly difficult to avoid. However, your experience can be vastly different from another person’s experience depending on how much unconscious material you have, how much you resist its integration, and when specific material becomes conscious, etc… 

Body-Integration

​​When the body begins integrating with the rest of the self, you may experience intense physical symptoms, illnesses, sensations, itching, twitching, vibrations, sounds, or a variety of other weird experiences that can not be easily explained by modern science (Shutan, 2015). Even though these experiences may have spiritual causes, it is essential to get checked out by a doctor and utilize conventional healing approaches (especially alternative medicine). Conventional advice, like eating healthy, exercising, and taking time for self-care can often be helpful.

Turning to a spiritual guide during this time may further help us better understand what is happening to us, gain resources to help us get through it, and reduce the feelings of loneliness that can emerge from having experiences that others do not understand or deem as socially unacceptable.

Spiritual Guidance for Adaptation

After self-integration, the body, unconscious mind, conscious mind, and soul are (mostly) integrated. However, the body and mind may take a while to fully adapt (Tolle, 2006) to the soul’s presence. The soul is like a new kid on the playground, and the other parts of us may be hesitant, at first, to play with it. It takes time to adapt and feel comfortable with our new sense of self.

Eventually, we know our soul and it’s fully part of us. As a result, we may make big changes in our lives—our soul’s personality may be vastly different than our own and it may rush at the opportunity to express itself, finally. It is at this stage that many people discover that they are channels, mediums, or clairaudient, and life can start to get really intense, fun, and crazy.

Spiritual Guidance for Ascension

During self-integration, we let go of many of the layers of self that we identified with—for example, perhaps we shed the victim self, the wounded self, the self as achiever, or other definitions of who we thought we were. We now know we are none of those. But during adaptation, we most likely added new self-identities. Maybe we now identify as spiritual, a physic, a clarivoyant, by our soul name, or as spiritually evolved in other ways. Unfortunately, these identities are still not the full Truth, with a capital T (Shutan, 2015). 

If we’re willing to keep going and fully let go of all layers of our individual self, we enter the next phase, which is ascension. This phase involves yet another perspective shift on who we are. As we continue to broaden our perspective and further shed our identities—we begin to get a flickering sense that even though we are a soul from one perspective, we are also simply a small part of something bigger—the All, the Universe, God, or whatever it is (Shutan, 2015). When we fully let go of all identities of the small self, we can finally reach self-realization—or enlightenment.