Questions to Ask Your Spirit Guide
Questions for meditation, journaling or automatic writing when you sit down to ask for guidance, arranged from the gentle opening questions to the ones you may need a quiet afternoon for. Written on the assumption that the asking is the discipline and the answer takes its own time.
20 questions, each with the reason to ask it · includes a conversation guide
The questions
Open any question to see why it works.
- 1
What should I call you?
A name, an image or a quality tends to arrive before anything else does, and it gives the rest of the session something to address. If nothing comes, use that: sitting with an unnamed presence is a more honest starting point than borrowing a name from a book.
- 2
How long have you been with me?
The answer usually arrives as a memory rather than a sentence, often an odd one from childhood that you have not thought about in years. Write down whatever surfaces even if it seems unrelated, because the specificity is the point.
- 3
How do you usually try to get my attention?
Most people, asked this, can name their own pattern within a minute: a phrase that repeats, a physical sensation, a dream, the same stranger's remark twice in a week. Naming it makes the next month legible.
- 4
What have I been calling coincidence?
This asks you to reread recent events rather than request new ones. The useful outcome is a short list you can check against later, which keeps the practice honest instead of endlessly agreeable.
- 5
What did I miss recently that you were pointing at?
Expect something small and slightly embarrassing: an invitation declined, a message left unanswered, a body signal ignored. Guidance that arrives as a missed detail is easier to act on than guidance that arrives as a grand instruction.
- 6
What am I carrying that is not mine?
People often answer this one immediately and then argue with the answer. Watch for inherited obligations, other people's fear about money, and a job description you took on to keep somebody else calm.
- 7
What am I ready to hear today?
Asking for the appropriate truth rather than the whole truth keeps a session survivable. It also gives you a way back if the sitting starts producing more than you can hold in one afternoon.
- 8
What am I not ready to hear yet?
Ask it and then do not chase the answer. Knowing that something is being held rather than withheld often settles the anxiety that made you sit down in the first place.
- 9
Where am I making this harder than it is?
Answers here tend to be practical to the point of being disappointing: make the call, drop the second job, tell them no. Disappointing is a good sign, because wish fulfilment rarely sounds this plain.
- 10
Who in my life am I misjudging?
Expect a name you did not want. The follow-up worth asking is whether you are misjudging them upward or downward, since the two mistakes cost you in completely different ways.
- 11
What am I doing out of fear that I have been calling caution?
The distinction is nearly invisible from inside, which is why it is worth putting to something outside yourself. Look for the choice you defend most fluently, because rehearsed reasoning is usually protecting something.
- 12
What should I stop asking you about?
Some questions get asked weekly for years and are really requests for reassurance. Retiring one is a real result from a session even though it feels like being turned down.
- 13
What is the next small thing, rather than the big thing?
Guidance that names a decade is unusable. Asking for the next step tends to produce something you can do before the week ends, which is also how you find out whether the practice is doing anything.
- 14
What do I keep asking you for that I could give myself?
Permission is the most common answer, followed by rest. It is worth noticing how much of a spiritual practice can quietly become a way of waiting for authorisation.
- 15
What do you want me to notice this week?
This is the one to write at the top of a page and leave there. It converts a session into an experiment with a result, and the noticing is usually more instructive than the original answer.
- 16
How will I know it is you and not what I want to hear?
Ask directly, because the doubt will arrive anyway. Many people find the difference is in tone rather than content: guidance tends to be brief, unhurried and unflattering, while wishing is wordy and arrives already arguing its case.
- 17
Is there someone I need to forgive, and does it need to be said out loud?
The second half stops this becoming an abstract exercise. Some forgiveness is internal work and some requires a phone call, and treating the first kind as the second is how people cause fresh harm while feeling spiritual about it.
- 18
What is this hard season asking of me?
Ask this without assuming the difficulty was arranged for your benefit. The useful version of the answer is about what you are being asked to put down, not about what you are being punished for.
- 19
What would I do today if I were not afraid of looking foolish?
Fear of embarrassment does more steering than fear of failure and gets far less attention. Answers here are often trivially small and immediately actionable, which is what makes them worth writing down.
- 20
What is the question I should have asked instead of this one?
A closing question that reliably produces the session's real material. If your list has been circling the same subject all afternoon, this is where the thing underneath it tends to finally surface.
Sitting down to ask
Practical guidance for the conversation itself.
Setting up a session
Setting up a session
- 1Choose the time of day when your mind is least busy. For most people that is early morning or the hour before sleep, and it is worth testing both.
- 2Write the question at the top of a page by hand before you close your eyes. Holding it in your head turns into rehearsing it.
- 3Ask one question per sitting. A list of twelve produces one thin answer to the first and nothing after it.
- 4Sit longer than feels necessary. The first two minutes are usually your own commentary clearing its throat.
- 5Write down whatever came, including the fragments and the things that seem irrelevant, and date the page. Sessions are only checkable if there is a record.
Reading what comes back
Reading what comes back
- Answers rarely arrive as sentences. Images, a physical sensation, a memory, a sudden fatigue and a flat refusal are all responses.
- Be suspicious of anything that flatters you at length. Guidance that arrives fully argued and delighted with itself is usually your own voice in costume.
- Be equally suspicious of anything cruel. A harsh answer is generally an old critic you have known for years rather than anything new.
- Note what you feel in the ten minutes afterwards, not just what you heard. The settling or the unease tells you a great deal.
- Reread the page a week later. Some answers only make sense once the week has happened, and some turn out to be nothing, which is worth knowing too.
When nothing comes
When nothing comes
- Nothing is a common outcome and does not mean you did it wrong. Note the silence and the date and try the same question later in the week.
- Try asking a smaller question. What should I do about my life gets silence where what should I do this afternoon often does not.
- If you are asking for a decision you have already made, you will usually get nothing until you admit that.
- Change the medium. People who get silence in meditation sometimes get pages in automatic writing, or the other way around.
- If a question produces distress rather than quiet, stop the session. A spiritual practice is not the right place to work through something that needs a doctor or a therapist.