Continued from Successful Self Employment News subscribe

My Law of Attraction coaching clients sometimes ask me if they’re “making it up” when they begin to receive messages from spirit. “How do I know it’s really spirit and not just my own mind?” they ask.

Here are 2 tests.

Test 1: Spiritual guidance feels good, generally in a calm way. Sure, you may feel inspired or eager or passionate – but take time to feel also for an underlying sense of peaceful knowing or “this is right,” or “this is true for me.”

One of my clients compares it to connecting with Hometree in Avatar. Guidance comforts, enriches and expands you.

Note: if your guidance feels good in an unusually elated way – you feel high or giddy or you have an impulse to take a spontaneous and perhaps thoughtless action – definitely sleep on it and ask again.

Rash action that gives you a kick now often leaves you worse off later – that pattern is more how the ego-mind, with its tendency toward cravings and addictions, might work.

Test 2: true spiritual guidance feels empowering.  It feels like a huge YES in your heart.

If you’re hearing messages of self-criticism, you can know they’re not true spiritual guidance, because they leave you feeling drained and powerless.

Law of Attraction explains that drained experience this way:

Whenever we feel good, it’s an indicator we’re in alignment with our Inner Being, the part of ourselves that’s our spiritual essence. Alignment feels empowering and enlivening.

Whenever we feel bad, it’s an indicator we’re thinking something that our Inner Beings do not agree with. Mis-alignment feels dis-empowering and draining.

It bears repeating: messages of self-criticism are not true spiritual guidance.

Is inner guidance always quiet and gentle?

If you’re in immediate danger, guidance can be very loud. Abraham tells the story of Jerry Hicks hearing a voice command him to “drive on the sidewalk.” He obeyed and moments later avoided being rear-ended in a multi-car collision.

But usually it’s more of a “still, small voice” experience.

Why spirit often communicates through your mind

We forget that our very own human mind is part of the divine mind as well. The idea that spirit “touches through my hands” or “speaks through my voice” makes sense to us because intuitively we know that we’re here as physical expressions of spirit.

Well guess what. Spirit thinks through your mind. What else would it think through?

As long as the the message you hear feels peaceful and empowering to you, trust that it comes from the part of your mind that’s aligned with spirit.

Looking for “proof” that your inner guidance is really sourced in spirit?

Our ego-minds often demand physical-world proof of what’s not physical.

Think about it, though. If spirit’s words came to you through a 20-foot tall angel manifesting in right in front of you with flowing robes, huge wings,a halo, and a booming voice would you believe the message then?

Most of us would probably run! (Which is not to say that visions don’t happen.)

The ego-mind thrives on dissatisfaction and keeping us insecure. Looking  to it for “proof” is looking for love in all the wrong places.

Take time to ask for guidance and listen for answers. When your answers pass test 1 and test 2, experiment with acting on what you hear.

Then you experience for yourself the richness of your spiritual connection. Once you have this experience, your worries about “making it up” evaporate.

“If I do not go within, I go without.” — Conversations with God, Book I