How My Sprit Guide was Born to Me

In a previous post, How Can your Otherworld Spirit Guide Help You?  I talked about my strongest spirit guide, Esmerelda, who has been with me for over 24 years, In the blog, I explained how she always nursed her baby… 

…for the first fifteen years that I knew her, and treasured our relationship, I hardly ever saw her without that child. A boy, with a blond head of curly hair. His eyes are blue, but more strangely, his body is golden.  When I asked the name of her babe, she told me to call him the Golden Boy...

But ten years ago, something happened in a shamanic journey that seemed remarkable.

I was at a Shamanic Gathering, over a hundred people, at the Earth Spirit Centre in 

Earth Spirit Centre

Compton Dundon, near Glastonbury, Somerset. Nick Breeze, the writer and editor of Sacred Hoop, was showing us how he starts his day. He takes his drum and strokes it, then gently begins to tap the skin with the beater. He walked our circle, to open the quarters, starting in the South as he is of the Tibetan tradition, and then encouraged us to move, sway, walk, even dance to the beat of his drum. 

I began to circle. my arms slightly out from my body, my eyes closed. Quite quickly, Esmerelda was there, behind my trance-eyes, drifting down from a cloud. She took my wrist and pulled me upwards until we were facing each other. As always, she was nursing her babe. She smiled at me, briefly (she's not one for over-effusive greetings) then took the Golden Boy from her breast and held him out for me. He yelled, of course,  and wriggled, his podgy legs beating against her stomach.

"Take him," she said.

I was a little worried, I'd never held him in all those years. But I put my hands under his arms and brought him to me, cuddling him into my body, chucking him up and down. 

I asked when I could pass him back; I felt really uncomfortable with him wriggling in my arms. 

"Never," said Esmerelda. "He's yours now."

She disappeared, and I found myself in my sacred grove, the circle of native British trees I use as my 'safe home'. I was still holding the Golden Boy, but when I looked at him, he'd grown...a lot.

Rather like children in the Branches of the Mabinogion, the Golden Boy was already big  enough to put down on his little legs. He ran around my circle widely, as if he'd be desperate for this day, and as he ran he grew, until he looked about ten, or eleven. 

When I heard Nick's call-back sign, heralding us to stop dancing and journeying, I called out to him. 

"I have to go now. Can you get back to your mother?"

He was splashing gladly in the stream. "I'm okay here," he called. "I'm yours now. Besides, I can look after myself – I'm nearly fifteen!"

And later, when I worked out the dates, I realised that he was right. 

Since then I find the Golden Boy comes to me as much as any of my guides, but especially when the journey is fast. Golden Boy doesn't seem to be able to walk at a stately pace, like older guides. He runs – everywhere. He runs, and I run behind, following his naked, golden body where it leads me. The glory of going on a shamanic journey is than running doesn't make you puffed, and flying, and swimming underwater, are both perfectly safe. 

When Esmerelda came to me during a journey, I asked her about her her son. 

"I love that boy. I dedicated myself to his care. He's young – he runs – but he's your own guardian now."

Only then did it occur to me that she had brought the Golden Boy up just for me, to represent her, when she was no longer able to be my guide.

Nowadays, she does look older, greyer. She has always been a strong woman whostood in her own sacred power, but now, there is a sense of aged, even agelessness divinity about her, a  rapture in her face that suggests she is elevated in blessedness. 

In shamanic work, I've encountered and work with a variety of spiritual allies – animal  guides and spiritual guardians, formed deep personal bonds with many of them. 

I believe that these guides and guardians choose us, even when it feels as if we are chasing...or even creating...them. 

Through deep journeying, it is believed by many shaman that there are many sorts of guides within the spirit world. As well as the animal guides, often a person's totem animal, which I think of as the 'gatekeepers' (almost the bouncers!), keeping us safe on. our journeys, there are many layers of guardian, including ancestors, angels, nature spirits and, it is said, ascended masters; those spiritual teachers who once lived on Earth but, after much elevated work, have ascended to a higher level of consciousness. I think Esmerelda is now an an ascended master; nursing the Golden Boy for fifteen years certainly deserves some sort of award! 

I honour her greatly, but thank her profoundly for gifting me such a young and vibrant Golden Boy!

The yew tree in Compton Dundon Churchyard