unexpected ways you're being guided by the universe
A large part of my journey was leaving behind a traditional path. I was a social worker with multiple degrees, multiple years of that path, and every part of my inner being knew it wasn't for me — and a lot of what I talk about and teach on throughout my blog, podcast and courses is the process of pivoting and repositioning myself into a life I wanted. Not the life I was expected to want for myself. Pulling away from social work and deciding to start a blog and then deciding to turn that blog into a business was only possible because I followed my intuition and learned to trust the guidance I was getting from my spirit. In this blog post I’m talking about that process and the six ways we communicate with our higher selves and intuitively receive our next steps. Some people call these signs from the universe.
If you too are looking to build a relationship with your intuition and how the universe talks with you, here is a list of the six most common ways our intuition talks to us:
Synchronicities & Repeating Numbers
One of the first ways that you will probably encounter signs from the universe is synchronicities or things happening that feel strangely related to what you’re going through or thinking about. For example, if you start to see something like repeating numbers, and you think to yourself, “Wow, that was really strange, I just saw three repeating numbers in a row. That must mean something. I should look that up” then the universe is communicating with you as that’s how the universe catches our attention — by making things so obvious that we can’t help but be curious.
One of the ways this happened to me was early in my awakening when I was going through a breakup. I didn’t know how to handle how broken I felt so I called a local therapist and booked an appointment. I also ended up booking a Reiki session with another person later that day as well. In the morning on the drive to the therapist’s office I couldn’t help but notice a car with a “555” on its license plate sitting in the parking lot. That 5 would become important because during that therapy session was when I first heard the word “empath” — the therapist told me she thought I was one and that I should look it up. That night at my Reiki session I heard the same words. Like the Therapist, the Reiki Master looked at me and said, “Honey, I think you're an empath.”
Twice in one day, two people I had never met before had told me about a term I had never heard of. Also interesting was that the 5s continued. Anywhere I would go over the days that followed there would be a 5,5,5. Eventually I decided to look up what “555” meant and realized it meant undergoing big changes and transformation.
The universe was being obvious with me. Two people on the same day telling me the same thing — because knowing I was an empath was something I couldn’t ignore because it was to play a large role on my path and life’s work and how I understood my skillset.
Messages Through Other People
Though I hinted at this one with the example above, people are one of our greatest forms of guidance. When you are guided to someone and they are saying exactly what you need to hear, in the exact moment that you need to hear it, know that being around them was orchestrated by your higher self.
Dreams
Another way the universe gives us messages is through dreams. The transformation I'm undergoing right now took me getting very vivid dreams for me to make the shift in the next direction I’m meant to take.
In the first dream, there were three hands holding up three different parts of my old business structure. In the dream it was obvious that two parts had died and only one was left — one I knew I needed to focus on. When I woke up I thought, OK, that was very powerful imagery but I’m not ready for that change, because doing so would mean killing off work I had a connection to as well as a large portion of my livelihood. So I resisted the change I knew I was supposed to make and because of that was sent another dream.
In the next dream, I was in a car and the person next to me represented the ways I thought about the world, the limiting belief systems I had that were keeping me cycling in that business structure. In the dream, she was driving and I was in the passenger seat and she sped up and went right off the side of a cliff. As the car was falling off the cliff, I felt this voice in my heart say, “you need to transform” telling me that if I didn’t, I was going to die. I knew it was a decision I needed to make; go down a path that was going to lead to a negative outcome or decide to make a different decision.. NOW. In the dream I used all my might to turn myself into a bird so that I could fly away. When I woke up I thought about the dream and the person who was in the driver’s seat beside me and saw vey clearly how I wasn’t in the driver's seat of my own life and that if I continued to sit in the passenger seat and not change, I was going to end up in a situation I didn’t want to be in.
So often we think if we make a change, we're going to “die” (have something bad happen to us) because changes activate our comfort zone and the part of us that wants to keep us safe. Yet we forget that staying the same can lead to our death. Not necessarily our physical death, but the death of our potential, which is just as bad as reaching our potential is what we are here for. I woke up and I knew I had no choice but to transform.
Dreams have always been one of my main ways of receiving messages and have been a driving force in my life in seasons of major transition and change. I highly recommend if this is how you receive guidance to start keeping a dream journal.
Colours
The third dream I received in this sequence of dreams had an added element of guidance because in the dream a voice told me that I was now “the colour of fuchsia.” Colour and colour symbolism has long been a part of my path, but this time it was very direct. I've never associated myself with the colour fuchsia, but in the dream it was clear that the colour fushia was now a strong part of my personality/role/lifepath. When I woke up from the dream I looked into the meaning of fuchsia and as I scrolled through different websites and found a description I resonated with I couldn’t believe how accurate the colour fuchsia was in relation to the version of myself I knew I was being asked to grow into.
Colors also carry frequencies, and so when we're drawn to certain colours, it is a form of guidance that the universe will use to send us messages. For example, I've always loved when I'm working with my designer to create my websites because the colours we choose are always very aligned with the energy of the particular thing I’m creating. For example, with Empaths in Business, the colours used to brand the program are the frequency of the healing the students undergo.
Physical Symptoms/The Body
Another way the universe will send us messages is through the physical body in the form of body aches and physical symptoms. When the universe needs to get my attention, it will make me sick. For example, last summer I had a major earache in my left ear — because I was in a space where I was listening way too much to all the noise of the external world and what other people were saying “I should do” that I wasn’t listening to myself. The left side of the body is our receiving side, our feminine side, so the universe gave me this earache so that I would have no choice but to notice how much I was receiving/taking on from the outside world and start to tune back into my heart and hear my spirit.
Desires
A final way that I'm going to share here is that we can also get messages through our desires. We often downplay this one because we’ve been taught that desires make us selfish and that it’s unsafe to trust ourselves. For that reason, desire as guidance isn’t often how you begin your journey trusting your intuition, but if you're in a space where you understand that repeating numbers are a thing, and you understand that colours have frequency, and you understand that people can give you messages, an advanced level of working with your intuition is knowing that your desires themselves are guidance. I teach this in my free life purpose course, Pillars of Purpose because one of the components of finding your purpose is giving yourself permission to want what you want because those wants are guidance.
When my spirit wanted me to build a business, it gave me desires, desires that I couldn't afford because I wasn't willing to charge for my work. Desires that became needs until I started to make a change. With the transition I'm going through now, I really want to help more animals and for me to be able to do that, to afford that, I need to make changes with my work. So the desire to create sanctuaries for animals is what is pulling me forward, driving me to make different moves now. Desire can be one of our most powerful forms of guidance, but it requires we have a certain amount of trust in ourselves.
Enjoy this article? I go even deeper into this topic over on The Empath Podcast. Click to listen to Episode 47 | Learning to Trust Your Guidance.
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Robin
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If you’re new to my work:
I'm Robin —
The diarist behind the Diary of an Empath and creator of Empaths in Business, a six week course teaching empaths how to turn their good work into a business that works, with strategy, healing and support.
