The first guide I ever met

Hello, my friends! 🤗

I realized recently that, for all the years I’ve been talking and writing about spirit guides, I’ve never really told you the stories of how I met mine. How I first came to know that I had a spirit team at all.

These relationships are such an important part of who I am and how I move through the world. So, over the next few weeks, I thought I’d share some of those stories with you, beginning with the first guide I ever met.

If you know a bit of my backstory, you might remember that time I was impossibly sick. There was a period where it literally took me all day just to swallow a quarter cup of rice, grain by grain. My doctors were stumped, my body was giving out, and every single morning was a conscious choice to just keep going.

Around that time, I had this vivid moment where I heard a voice tell me I had a choice to make: choose to die, or choose to live and learn how to heal myself. I’ve told you that part of the story before. It’s the dramatic part. The kind of moment that divides a life into before and after.

What I don’t talk about as much was the long, exhausting, unglamorous blur that came after. The days of sheer fear, praying constantly, and celebrating tiny victories that nobody else would’ve cared much about. At the time, my connection to God/the Divine was my absolute lifeline, and I truly thought I was already accessing all the spiritual support available to me.

Turns out, there was more.

One night, I was lying in bed feeling miserable, sweating, nauseous, desperately begging for relief. The room was dark, but the moonlight caught the outline of a figure standing at the foot of my bed. He was tall, over six feet, wrapped in a dark hooded cloak.

What’s wild to me looking back is that I wasn’t scared at all. I just looked at him and said out loud, “I’m not scared of you.”

He let out this incredibly warm laugh and said, “Of course not. Why would you be? I’ve always been with you.”

Listen, I know how this sounds! Maybe I was delirious. Maybe my brain, pushed to its absolute limit, just conjured up what I needed to survive. I can’t prove otherwise. But what I do know is that whatever happened that night didn’t go away when I got better. It became one of the most stable, steadying relationships of my entire life.

He gave me his name, explained he wasn’t human (though appearing that way for my sake), and told me to think of him as a primary spirit guide. Then he moved to the space right behind me, literally at my back. And it felt so natural, like he was just settling into the spot he had held my entire life.

I didn’t magically get healed the next morning. I was still super sick and struggling to eat. But mentally, everything shifted. For the first time, I felt held. And not just metaphorically, but as a literal, tangible presence at my back that was completely trustworthy and knew me inside and out.

Going from “I’m doing this all by myself” to “Someone who loves me beyond words has my back” completely changed how I walked through the world. Fear was still there, but it was no longer my foundation.

Over the years, working with so many people, I’ve come to realize something: this kind of support isn’t rare. We all have guides at our backs. What’s maybe more rare is just becoming aware of it.

We don’t have to wait for a dramatic moment to meet our guides. It can be subtle, gentle. We can just slowly begin to notice a presence, a pattern, a feeling of being accompanied, and realize it’s been there the whole time.

When I teach about spirit guides, this is always where I start: with the possibility of an ancient relationship that began long before you knew to look for it, one that never required your belief to exist, but might just be waiting for you to turn around and notice it.

I’d love to know…have you ever felt anything like this?

Maybe not a six-foot hooded figure at the foot of your bed, but that subtle, quiet sense that you’re not as alone in your life as you thought? A sudden feeling of comfort, or a sense that something trustworthy was standing right behind you?

You don’t have to have it all figured out or even put a name to it. But if you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear about it. Just hit reply whenever you have a minute.

Blessings & love to you and your guides,
Jenna 💖💖

If this reflection on meeting my first primary guide stirs something in you, I’d love to invite you into our upcoming workshop: