Angels 101: how to talk to your angels

The most common question I get asked after mentioning my work with angels is: “Do I have guardian angels?” The second question is: “Can I talk to them?”

The answer to both questions is yes. Which is fantastic, because it means we are never alone (yay). It also means we can access wisdom and knowledge to guide us through any challenge.

No matter who you are, what choices you’ve made or what your spiritual beliefs are, you have guardian angels assigned to you. Their job is to give you guidance and help you find peace in your life. BUT they can’t help you unless you ask them to. That’s because we all have free will – in other words, the right to make our own life choices. The angels can’t violate that (unless, of course, your life is in danger, and it’s not your time to pass on), so if you need help with something, you have to actually ask them.

So how do you speak to your angels? 

Some people choose to pray or meditate, but you don’t *have* to communicate in a formal way – you just need to express what is on your mind. You don’t even need to speak out loud – I often chat to my angels in my head.

Sometimes people think they shouldn’t bother their angels with requests that seem trivial. But your angels are there to help you – that’s their job. There’s really nothing too small or too big for them to tackle.

As well as your own guardian angels, there’s also an angel squad waiting in the wings (pun intended) to deal with specific sitches you might be facing. They have the power to help everyone at the same time, so don’t fear that you are taking them away from a more important task. Try talking to:

Archangel Raphael

He’s in charge of healing, so call upon him for physical or emotional health concerns. When you ask for his help, visualise emerald green light (that’s his colour) surrounding the part of your body or the situation that you want healed. BTW if you find the problem isn’t alleviated after calling on Raphael, that could be because it’s the symptom of a deeper emotional problem you need to address – for example, digestion problems are often to do with fears and stress; lower back is about financial stress (not feeling supported). 

Raphael is also associated with travel, so you can ask him to protect and guide your plane and aircrew, for example, when you’re on vacation. Whenever I’m driving long distances, I ask him to help me and the other drivers on the road to make good decisions.

Archangel Gabriel

This is the archangel associated with creativity and motivation. I ask Gabriel for help when I have writers’ block (for example, when I need a brilliant blog post idea!) and when I lack motivation to complete a task. Maybe you need inspiration for your son’s birthday cake. Maybe you’ve got an essay to write. Whatever your project, Gabriel’s your go-to angel.

Parking angels

Yep, there are angels to help you find carparks! You might wonder why angels would be interested in helping you with something so mundane, but remember that the angels’ job is to help you find peace. If someone could reserve a perfect carpark for you when you go out, wouldn’t that make your life more peaceful? Yes, yes it would. A warning: you do need to call upon the parking angels BEFORE you reach your destination (and ideally before you leave home), so they have time to make a space for you.

Archangel Michael

As the patron saint of police officers and emergency-service workers, Michael is associated with protection and security. I call upon him when I’m feeling physically vulnerable, such as if I’m home alone at night and fearing for my physical safety. I also regularly ask him to protect my home and possessions – especially if I’ve got cause for concern (such as when we had people coming through for an open home). He’s also associated with courage and strength, so I ask him to shore up my reserves of those on the reg.

Romance angels

They can help you find love, or enhance your romantic relationship. Call on them to manifest a meeting with your soulmate, help you strengthen your relationship or provide clarity about whether your partnership is serving you.

If you are single, keep in mind that asking the romance angels for help manifesting a new relationship does not mean Ryan Gosling is going to knock on your door tomorrow (soz!). Because relationships are such a fundamental part of the way we learn and grow as humans, there is often work we need to do to prepare ourselves for healthy relationships. In other words: results may not be instant. So if you have been asking the Universe for some time to bring your soulmate into your life and are feeling disappointed, it might be time to switch your strategy from asking for help to one of actively taking charge of the situation. This doesn’t mean you have to get ‘out there’ more, it means you need to look at what might be going on in your subconscious that’s blocking you from what you are trying to attract. If you’re constantly attracting partners who are not respectful or emotionally available, for example, that’s a sign you’ve got some healing to do before you’ll be able to attract the right partner. Read more about that here.

I know I’ve gone off on a tangent here, but I wanted to make it clear that – no matter what some spiritual people say – manifesting healthy relationships isn’t as simple as putting in an order and just remaining positive. If you ask for their help, the romance angels will work with you, but you’ll have to leave the timing up to them – and meet them halfway in terms of making sure you’re really, truly, ready for a healthy partnership. Above all, do not give up hope. There is always hope.

Read more about how we can inadvertently block ourselves from achieving our goals here.

The takeaway message:

Talk to your angels whenever you need help, and trust their answers. They can help you make better decisions and move forward in the direction of your dreams. Connecting with your angels is easy and incredibly reassuring. A good time to start that?  Yesterday. The second-best time? Today. 

The law of attraction. Does it work? YES. Well, most of the time...

When Jim Carrey was a struggling actor, he wrote himself a cheque for $10 million for “acting services rendered”, dating it 10 years from that date. He did this because, despite growing up in poverty (his family lived in a car at one point), he believed he could hit the big time as an actor. And he did. Within 10 years he was earning millions for films such as Ace Ventura and The Mask.

This story is a wonderful illustration of how much power we have to manifest what we want. That’s a message that comes up in angel card readings all the time, and a concept that I’ve used in my own life to get what I had my heart set on. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Alas, this approach is not guaranteed – which can be disappointing. Here are my thoughts on why.

If you read The Secret when it came out a decade ago, you’re probably familiar with the law of attraction (I didn’t; I found it too gimmicky). Here’s the concept in a nutshell: whatever you want, you can attract through your thoughts. If you focus on what you don’t want, you’ll block what you want, and probably attract what you don’t. 

Here’s how I’ve used the law of attraction to manifest specific things:

* When I needed a car in 2010, I was fearful of buying a car that would break down on me, so I asked the Universe to find me a car like my friend owned, which was cheap to run and super reliable. Within a few days I had spotted that model of car on the side of the road near my house with a ‘for sale’ sign in the window. My dad checked it out and said it was a good buy, so I put in a low offer and got it. Too easy! That car is now owned by my brother and despite being more than 20 years old, it has yet to fail a warrant of fitness.

* When I moved back to Sydney last year I was nervous about making friends. As an introvert, social situations are challenging for me. I visualised myself encircled by a group of friends and laughing – and I returned my thoughts to this vision time and time again. A month after I arrived, the angels drew my attention to a newspaper story about a new social group that had started. I joined the group and within two months I had found myself part of a group of friends who are awesome, and have made me feel like I belong here.

On the other hand, sometimes the law of attraction has not delivered. This can happen because sometimes things that we think we need are actually not right for us. I wouldn’t, for example, recommend focusing on manifesting a winning lottery ticket. Even though you might think a truckload of money is exactly what you need for a better life, the Universe knows better. (Yes, it worked for Jim Carrey, but his goal was more about career success than the financial payoff.)

I have focused on attracting a wonderful man into my life for about four years now, without success. However I can see now that the timing was wrong – I wasn’t ready for a healthy relationship, even though I thought I was. I had so much work to do on myself, in particular, bolstering my woefully low self-esteem (my neediness was hardly an attractive quality). If I’d been in a long-term relationship, I would never have embarked on the journey of personal development that has brought me to where I am now. Not only am I now a more independent, resourceful person who knows that happiness and love are derived from within me rather than in a relationship, I’ve also forged a more fulfilling career in the spiritual realm. I would never have taken this direction I hadn’t delved within to find answers to my own discontentment.

And that’s the thing about the law of attraction – while we do have the power to attract what we want, what we want might not be in our best interests. And we don’t have any say in the timing.
This is why I’m wary of self-help books and wellness bloggers that promise you can have anything you want if you just think positive. This philosophy can lead to disappointment and disillusionment. (I’ve written about the inflated promises dolled out by some sectors of the self-help industry before, read my blog post here.)

Keep believing, people. The law of attraction isn’t a perfect mail order system but it *does* work. (Eventually.)

I’d love to hear how the law of attraction has worked for you. Email me if you’d like to share your story.

Why we need more surprises in life

My brother and sister-in-law are having a baby later this year (sidebar: I’m going to be an aunty – yay!) and they’ve opted not to find out the gender. Initially I thought this was ridiculous – how can you prepare adequately if you don’t know what you’re having?! – but my normally ultra-pragmatic sister-in-law explained that they chose not to find out because “there are so few surprises in life”. I get that now.

When you think about it, the element of surprise is in desperately short supply these days. 

Everything we need to know is at our fingertips. We can find out the rough time a storm front will roll into town and saturate our washing line, the score of every game of hockey being played at any given moment and the names of game shows currently being watched in Uruguay. We’re used to having data at our fingertips so it’s quite disconcerting and mildly panicky when you aren’t given the information you want at any given moment. In the digital age, instant gratification is our MO.

On Saturday I went to this rad cool crazy event called Underground Cinema which is sort of like a murder mystery night. You buy a ticket a few weeks in advance and get told the theme – in this case, the 1950s and American politics – then you’re invited to a secret meeting where you get your first clue. A day before, you get told the location, then you turn up on the night with the instructed random items (in this case an A4 envelope and some earphones) then you have to follow a series of clues by questioning actors (who played their parts brilliantly) and each other, and making your way to the venue where the movie will be screened.

For a control freak like me, this lack of advance information is stress-inducing. How will I get there if I don’t know where I’m going? How late will I be out? What will I wear? I mean, is the venue going to be covered? Will I have to walk on paving stones in heels? And crucially, will there be food? I can’t go more than three hours without a decent meal – not even kidding.

Once I forced myself to take a chill pill, I realised it’s this lack of information that makes the event so much fun, and so memorable. The anticipation and the ‘what movie do you think we’ll be watching?’ chats with my friends in the lead-up make the night enthralling, and I think if I’d known the movie and the schedule of the night in advance it would still be enjoyable – but nowhere near as much.

Sometimes when I’m doing angel card readings I get people demanding specifics: when will I meet my soul mate? How many years will there be between my children? Will my best friend get deployed to Afghanistan next month? (Seriously – that is an actual question I have been asked.) This is problematic because the spiritual realm doesn’t think about timing in the same way we schedule-crazed humans do. Everything we need to know is revealed to us exactly when we need to know it, and not a minute before. For people used to being given deadlines and Outlook meeting appointments, this lack of clarity is outrageous. But the thing is, we’re not supposed to have all the information at once.

I’m one of those people who reads the last page of a book in advance. I also have a tendency to, while watching a movie, read the Wikipedia plot in full. It’s not that I’m not enjoying the story or the plot, it’s just that I want to know that everything is going to work out OK. But it always does work out OK – or at least, it works out how it’s supposed to – regardless of me knowing what will happen or not. It’s very difficult for me to let go of a desire to know the outcome.

I’m starting to realise that we need more surprises in our lives. There’s such beauty in not knowing where life is leading us, or how our story is going to play out.

More surprises, please. But only good ones, obvs.