[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]A weekly dose of dauntlessly dealt reality from the What It Is Wednesday Blog Carnival…

One thing that’s always driven me nuts in the modern shamanism community is the over-reliance on guides, to a fault. “Let me check with my guides,” “If Eagle says it’s permissible,” “When I get clearance from Isis…” I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard comments like that. Or the inverse, “I keep asking my totem about ___, and I get no response,” or “When I present so-and-so, my guide just stares at me.” I was guilty of it myself in the beginning, and I realize now that if a spirit guide is truly doing its job, the push-back on the shamanist is priority.

I’ve always joked from the beginning of my path that I have tough love guides, and I did. I do. However, in the beginning, they were always there. They always showed up, even if they were mute and presented me with puzzles. Now, though, the stakes are much higher, personally, professionally, and collectively. The advent of conflict in how we all live is higher much higher than it was 25 years ago, and that’s true even in the Dreaming. It’snot at all uncommon for guides not to show up, to force self-reliance–and that’s not just IMO.

That reality flies in the face of what many modern shamanists think the job of spirit guides is, which is to be at their beck and call. I find a great deal of angel overlap in that perspective, as if divinity is a messenger, a conduit, an errand girl. As if we have no role to be active in that relationship. The wakeup call with that dynamic is, that’s why specific guides come to us. Because through us they have expression. They have the opportunity to affect form. If we behave as if they have no need of us, as if we only need them, we weaken the relationship and forego the potential for reciprocity.

That’s all well and good–that the spirit ally street goes both ways. The challenge therein is we have to be mature enough to handle crossing the street. We have to be stable in our mundane lives, heads, hearts, and all, to do it justice. We must be mindful before emotional and sometimes instead of spiritual. The real issue that I see with passing the buck to guides is that we’re not holding up our end of the deal when we can’t choose food from a menu without checking in with them, first.

Too often in the modern culture we skip emotional and mental processes. We search for a reason instead of sitting down with hard reality. We mine meaning instead of digging out of the debris. We clutch at miracles instead of allowing the process that is. And when that process doesn’t yield the wanted outcome (a miracle), we insist that divinity needed it the other way.

Where’s the accountability in any of this? Who exactly is in the driver’s seat of these perspectives? Some things just are, and we will never circumvent dealing with that fact, really dealing with it. No spirit guide, totem, or divinity wilol foster that truth to be otherwise.

I know who’s in my driver’s seat, and it’s seriously uncomfortable. I’ve been on a progression of hard truths of late, from survival into adulthood, to tending that which parallels healing, and I’ve found no comfort. I recognize this challenging space too easily from my era of Gift of the Dreamtime, when comfort just isn’t on the agenda. There are times when comfort isn’t part of growth, and in the realm of walking the walk of shamanist, get used to it.

Guides don’t function without us. Exist, sure, but actively create, grow, and meet their needs? Not likely. Otherwise, why bother with this whole manifestation thing, anyway? We need physicality in order to grow. We need it to mature into the beings collective reality demands that we be. We need it so that our guides can remember how freaking hard it is to be here, so that together we find creative solutions for how to deal with the conflicts and fill our own needs.

And we need to remember that our ability to navigate the challenges of form ripple out effects everywhere, even to our guides.

How do you handle it when your guides don’t respond? What’s your recourse to take it deeper when you’re already alone in the depths? How do you demonstrate spiritual self-reliance?

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