If childhood was full of invisible companions helping you navigate playground politics, adulthood offers spirit guides — invisible companions who apparently help you navigate life, taxes, bad Tinder dates, and questionable decisions made after two glasses of box wine.
Spirit guides are described as angels, ancestors, totem animals, or “light beings,” standing ready to offer gentle nudges, profound wisdom, and suspiciously convenient advice — advice that, more often than not, sounds suspiciously close to whatever you already wanted to hear.
At a “Spirit Guide Connection Workshop” (capital letters mandatory), I was guided through a meditation session conducted in a candle-lit room thick enough with sandalwood smoke to qualify as a minor fire hazard. After twenty minutes of drumming tracks and whispered affirmations, participants were encouraged to “meet” their guides.
Mine, apparently, was a wolf named Zephyr. Zephyr’s great cosmic message?
Get tacos.
Helpful, certainly. Mystical, not so much.
The genius of spirit guides is their infallibility. They validate. They encourage.
They reflect your hopes, not your realities. Your spirit guide will never tell you to go back to school, apologize to your sister, or stop dating emotionally unavailable drummers. They’ll just lovingly nudge you into doubling down on whatever life choices felt good five minutes ago.
And therein lies the real danger.
Having a spirit guide isn’t dangerous. Mistaking your own wishful thinking for divine guidance is. Because once you believe every fleeting instinct comes stamped with cosmic approval, you lose the ability — and the responsibility — to question yourself.
If your spirit guide’s biggest advice sounds like your own inner monologue with a feathered headdress, it might be time to stop blaming the universe and start listening to the little voice inside you that doesn’t need incense, drumming, or an elaborate backstory to tell you when you’re being an idiot.
And if Zephyr ever tells you to buy cryptocurrency? Run.