The Guide Who Challenges You #266

You know that message... the one that keeps circling back no matter how many times you've tucked it away. Maybe it showed up in a reading years ago and you're still thinking about it. Maybe it's just this strong knowing that won't quit, about a relationship, a career move, a health thing you've been sidestepping.

Change is hard, even good change, even change we want deep down.  This episode is for the person who has been feeling a push from Spirit and maybe isn't sure what to make of it.

Christina digs into why some guides show up to comfort us and others show up to hold our feet to the fire (loving fire, but fire). She unpacks how to tell real guidance apart from plain old fear when they can feel so tangled together, and why that repeating message  isn't going anywhere anytime soon. 

You'll walk away understanding your Guides better and also their real purpose in your life.

Christina Wooten helps you access the wisdom and support of the Spirit World to elevate your life.
She is a Certified Psychic Medium and Reiki Master Teacher.  Christina is the owner of Sedona Medium and co-host of Modern Life and Spirit podcast.

She offers Psychic Medium Readings, Soul Readings, and teaches how you can start communicating and receiving messages from your Spirit Guides - through her program.
Learn more about her offerings here

Want to develop your intuition?  Visit SedonaMedium.com and take our free Intuition Quiz to receive free tips and support in developing your intuition.

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Transcript

Christina Wooten: 0:04

Welcome to the Modern Life and Spirit Podcast, where we explore spiritual topics relevant to today's world. Your hosts, certified psychic medium Christina Wooten and Reiki master teacher Robert Wooten, break down how to work with spirit to create more positive growth in your life. Consider this podcast your go-to spiritual resource for navigating the modern world. Hey there, kindred spirits! Welcome to Modern Life and Spirit Podcast. I'm Christina Wooten, certified psychic medium at SedonaMedium.com. Welcome to our episode today. We are going to be talking about the guide who challenges you? Which is every guide, by the way. Although we also have some guides that have different personalities and different commitments that they have made while we are Earthside, and we will talk about that as well. So we're going to also share about a misconception that a lot of people have about what a message is supposed to feel like, and we're gonna break that down because it's not always what people expect it to be. Now, before we get started, yes, I know we are in summer here in Sedona, and it's hot. It's definitely hot. But I was going through my list the other day of things that I just love about the summertime in Sedona, things that just make it truly magical. So, if you've ever thought about visiting in this in the summertime, one you can get some really great hotel deals because it's off season, so it's a great time to come if you're not necessarily a huge hiker and want to spend all of your days outside, if you're here, if you want to enjoy the spa, if you want to enjoy healing experiences, that is a great time to come, and you can still get some of those deals sometimes in August as well. So some of the things that I really love about Sedona in this time of year is that we are right underneath the Milky Way. The Milky Way goes right overhead of us in the summer, and it just kind of parks there. And this is pretty unique, I feel, about Arizona. Most of, except for if you're going into the northern areas like Payson and Flagstaff, a lot of areas in the low desert have very small trees, and what that means is that we're able to see miles and miles and miles away. The sky just has this expanse to it that is incredible. And so, at nighttime in the summer, when things are cooling off a bit, you can go outside and you can see the glorious Milky Way overhead. You can actually see where it's milky and kind of blended at the edges. It's stunning, and it's a great time. Also in August, we have some meteor showers that come through, and you can because you can see miles away, you're pretty much likely going to see one if you wait long enough, which is really special. You might also see some other things, seeing some very strange things in the sky here in Sedona that were not explained. But so if you're into that, also a good time to come. And another thing is, we're just getting the monsoons finally got started, which has been so helpful with the pocket fire. We are now at 90-5% contained. For those who are wondering, and the monsoons will bring in these massive clouds during the day, huge, towering, like as tall as skyscrapers, just billowing. You know, and normally we don't have that. So it's so beautiful to see these massive, glorious clouds, and to see them for as far as the eye can see. It just is something that always takes my breath away. I know that there's no like cloud hunting tours, but if you're into clouds, definitely Sedona. And once the monsoon has started, is an amazing time to come. And then my last thing that I will say that I just love about this time is once the rains start, there are certain areas that get these waterfalls only when the rain starts. It's like there's these grooves. You can see them if you know what to look for when you're out hiking. You'll see these kind of grooves with a little bit of desert varnish and stain to it, where the water will drip down. In fact, on Courthouse Butte, there's two little waterfall areas where, when the water is coming down very hard on the top of the butte, when it comes down, it comes down in two streams and then meets together in one space and comes down. It's beautiful. And those are always really neat to see if you're lucky enough to get a rainy day in Sedona, which people don't appreciate enough. It rarely ever rains here, so when it does, we are all really excited and like kids and run outside and literally play in the rain and throw open our windows. It's pretty exciting. Anyway, I've gone on and on about summertime, but I just wanted to put that out there because I was feeling so grateful about it today, and I know a lot of people don't know that if you haven't been out here during this time. So I just want to pass it along. If you're a star person, if you're a sky watcher, this is the place to be in the summertime. Okay, so let's talk about our topic, which is the guide who challenges you, and let's take this conversation a little bit deeper because there's something I don't think that gets talked about enough. We tend to picture our spirit guides as this warm and comforting presence, someone who shows up with the intention to make us feel better, to reassure us, to encourage us, to tell us that hey, everything's going to be okay. And a lot of times, that's exactly what they do. Especially if you're really meeting them in the beginning, you're getting to know them, you're getting to know their energy, you're getting to feel into their intention and how they show up, which is always in the underneath, is very very loving. So they'll always introduce us in that way, but it's not always about letting us know that everything is going to be okay and to be there to give us the warm fuzzies. Sometimes a guide's job isn't to comfort you. Sometimes it's to just tell you something that you really don't want to hear. Maybe it's something that you have been ignoring. But understanding this is something that can really shift and deepen your relationship with your guides. So here's what we're talking about. This is the guide who comes in, who challenges you instead of comforting you. We're going to talk about why that happens and how to recognize it when it is present in your own life. So first of all, let's start here. Most of us grow up with this idea that anything spiritual should be peaceful and light. So when a message from our guides, when it comes through, when it feels heavy, when it feels maybe it hits us in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable, or honestly it's kind of annoying, we assume that it can't be guidance. We think, you know, real guidance. It's supposed to feel good. I'm supposed to feel my heart opening. It's supposed to feel, you know, loving and gentle and compassionate. And if we unpack those messages, they are those things. But a challenging message from a guide has a certain feel to it. We have to understand that their job is to help us to hold us accountable to the growth that we committed to when we came Earthside. So they're to help us to really make sure that we are putting our best foot forward, that we are not allowing us to fall asleep. That we're not staying in the comfort zone and refusing to awaken to our potential, to who we really are, to our capacity. They're here to help us make sure that we're following through with sometimes the difficult commitments that we made. That is going to feel hard and going to feel scary, but is part of the growth and the journey that we need to take. Some ways you can recognize a more challenging message is that it tends to repeat. Maybe it shows up again and again in slightly different forms until you're finally receptive, or you finally start to actually pay attention to it, and it doesn't disappear just because you push it away or tell yourself, you know, I'll get to it later. That message will stay consistent with you for like sometimes years, and I mean that literally, where you just feel like I keep getting this over and over and over again, and it usually points to something that you already suspect or know to be true when you hear it, even if you've been avoiding it, and this can show up in any part of life. They can be talking about money or finances, relationships, health, work, old habits that you've outgrown but you just haven't let go of yet. Wherever there's something that you need to face, that's often where this guidance really tries to show up. Now our guides all. Have different personalities too, so some are we may have contracted with because they are good at pushing us without answering the questions for us, and I notice that when I'm doing readings is the different personalities of the guides, and sometimes they will ask instead of answering a question directly, they respond with like a direct question for that person, and I've always found that interesting. Sometimes they will say, "I have been telling you X, Y, Z, and then they'll make a specific statement, and this isn't going to clear up until you respond to this information, and that person goes, "Yeah, and then comes the excuses of why they haven't been following that direction. But you know, sometimes things are set up in our life where it's a little bit like dominoes. We have to cross one bridge before we can move on to the others because it's all connected. So let's walk through some of the places that I do see this more often. You know, relationships is a big one. I had a client not too long ago who had had a reading with me a few years ago, and in that reading, was getting some pretty clear evidential messages about their relationship, and then there was some messages from her guide about the particular person that she was in a relationship with and had been for a few years. That wasn't what she wanted to hear, and so she came back just not too long ago and and reported back and said, you know what, you said these things from my guide, and I really didn't want to hear it. I got off and I was kind of miffed and like you know I I just don't see that I don't understand, but it turns out that that's exactly what happened and exactly how it went. And I'm grateful that you told the truth to me in that moment, even though I didn't want to hear it. We have so much attachment that's connected with relationships that that can be maybe a blind spot for us, and sometimes a guide can really help us point towards a truth about someone in our life, whether or not you're ready to see it. Maybe it's a friendship that's just run its course that you've stayed connected with out of obligation, but really you can feel that it's it's not right for you moving forward, or it's not right for them either. Maybe it's a partner that just is not showing up the way that you deserve. So the guide isn't trying to hurt you by pointing this information out. It's really trying to support you in learning how to recognize what might be coming. Learning how to recognize the energy itself, and sometimes they're helping us by to not stay somewhere longer than you really need to be. Now it's our choice as whether we want to respond to that message or not. You know, we get the choice to, and the free will to say, "Am I going to let this play out and just see where it takes me because I need the learning, or are we going to go? I recognize this is truth. I recognize this is energy, and I'm going to allow myself the gift of responding before you know it all has to come crumbling to pieces. Usually, that's people who've really had this experience where they haven't listened to their intuition or they haven't listened to the messages a lot. Things have kind of fallen apart, and they've just learned. You know what? As hard as it is to sometimes make changes that we don't want to make-it's really harder to do things out of alignment, and that that has big consequences as well. Now, another place I see this is money and career-that comes up a lot too, because this might look like a decision towards something that feels scary, but it's really necessary. Maybe you've gotten the guidance that I need to raise my rates. Maybe you're leaving a job that's comfortable that has a lot of security, but it's draining you. Maybe you're ending a partnership that isn't serving you anymore. These decisions can feel enormous in the moment, and a guide pushing you towards one of them can feel less like inspiration and feel a little bit like pressure when we're scared, when we're afraid. Yes, you might hear it and and know the truth of that moment, but it's still big and it still feels scary. And sometimes that's where. Guides have to show up a little bit more. They have to help us to not just say,"Oh, this well, this is going to happen. You know, they're not trying to be know-it-alls. Like, well, well, well. See, I told you so. It's more of they're trying to help us to recognize what we need to be learning and what's going to help us with our awakening to not rest on our laurels, to not get comfortable-that the whole purpose we're here is to grow and to awaken and do the work. We committed to come here and to do the work and to explore ourselves in these beautiful ways. And so, if we're resting and just hanging out, and we're not doing the work, then it's our guide's job to say, "Hey, let's light a fire under this and get moving. Let's go. That's their commitment to us, right? Health and body is another common one, and for some reason, I've been seeing this a lot more recently. So I think that body awakening, body awareness, is a theme that a lot of people are going through right now in this particular era of human history. Sometimes you might receive guidance around something that you have been avoiding to look at directly whether it's a physical symptom or a pattern of neglecting yourself, you know, because you're in one state of consciousness and you're just not sure how to look at it from an outside state of consciousness, and so our guides sometimes will challenge us to, well, how are you going to figure out how to meet this need. The need isn't changing. You're going to have to figure out how to create the bridge, and just sometimes that awakening of this isn't changing until you are shifting something internally. That's something we need to hear. There's so many people, and I can certainly relate to this in the past, who have that experience of well, I'm just going to wait out this inconvenient message. I'm just gonna dig in and stay here and keep it just like I want it to be, and then we'll see what happens, right? Thinking we can outrun the message, and lo and behold, it still keeps showing up. And next thing you know, we feel like we're in the swamp because all of our growth has stopped. All of the momentum we've had has just kind of fallen out of the bottom, and what we're left with two years later is having to face the original thing. I've also seen people fall into like a deep place of feeling really down because they haven't been willing to make the changes that they know that they need to make. There's so much fear, resistance, or whatever it is, preventing that. Once you get out of alignment, it's like there's a cascade of we're missing opportunities, we're missing experiences, and it all just seems to fall, begin to fall out of alignment. The longer that we stay in that place of resistance and fear, until we take a big step forward and say, "I'm stepping out in trust in what I know to be true and responding to that. Right, and so it's it can be very hard, but I think a lot of us have all had the experience of trying to wait out a message that just doesn't go away. And then there's things like old patterns. You know, this is when a guide is going to repeat that message over and over and over again, not because they're trying to be redundant, but because you haven't fully absorbed it yet. So you might have had that experience if you've had a reading and a topic comes up again, and you're like, "Oh yeah, I remember that from last time, or, "Oh yeah, I've had three other people tell me that as well. It's like, well, what are you doing about it? That's what I want to say. I'm like, what are you doing about it? Because clearly, you keep needing to hear it. So, in each of these areas, whether it's you know money and career relationships, our body relationship resistance tends to feel similar, you know. There is a moment of recognition of there's a message and a kernel of truth here, followed by a wave of wanting to look away from it. Of no, thank you. I would like to choose my own adventure in another direction, please. So why do we push back against guidance, even when we know in the depth of our being that it's right? Or why do we even delay it? Because we know most of the time we're going to eventually have to cross this bridge. As I said, a lot of it comes down to fear. There's fear of change, fear of being wrong, fear of what. It might cost us to actually act on what it is that we're being shown. Change asks something of us, and that can feel like a lot to take on, even when the change itself is a good one, one that we want or excited about. It it can feel overwhelming, but I want to normalize this for you. Resisting a message doesn't mean the message was wrong; it just means it's hard. Almost every meaningful shift I've seen in my own life or in the people I work with came with some amount of resistance at first, and that resistance is just part of the process. That's how you know you hit something significant or important? It's not a sign that you're failing. And here's something that is also worth

remembering: 21:36

a lot of the time, it's not a dramatic sign or this huge bolt of lightning moment that proves a guide was right. Although I will say I have had some really cool thunderstrikes and lightning that came in specific important times in readings. That was like ma chef's kiss, but most of the time it's just the passage of time. It's watching a pattern continue to play out until the original message finally makes sense in hindsight. So we have to learn how to tease out the essence of the guidance itself from the fear-based resistance or the emotional response that you personally are having. So, one marker to pay attention to is how the message feels underneath the discomfort. So, the guidance itself feels calm and steady, even when it's what it's telling you is uncomfortable or it's bringing up uncomfortable feelings. Fear, on the other hand, the more you keep pulling back the layers, it just spirals, spiral, spiral, spiral, spiral. It jumps from thought to thought. It escalates. It feeds on itself. It's catastrophic. It's not telling you you can do this, or you're strong, or you're okay. It's going ah. Another marker is consistency. So guidance tends to repeat itself over and over again. It's steady. It's patient over time. So fear-based doubt tends to just it swings back and forth. So one day it's convinced of one thing, the next day it's convinced of the opposite. It's taking you in all these different directions. It has all this emotion wrapped up in it. It's not solid. There's no sense of like here's the foundation of it. It the foundation just keeps shifting and changing and moving in different directions. Okay, that's just our resistance and fear. Here's what I want you to

understand: 23:35

you don't need certainty in the moment to trust what's coming through. What you can do instead is to watch for the pattern. Does this keep showing up? Do I consistently feel inside of myself that this is what I'm going to have to face, even if it feels hard and scary. So those are the clues that we want to pay attention to. Now, some guides are personality-wise gonna maybe we contracted with them to be more challenging to us or to help us. So I've had some examples where I was doing one thought comes to mind a reading where that person had a past life where they had given all of their decisions over to other people, or they had had other past lives where they were not able to express themselves and their needs well, and so part of their healing and their work in this lifetime was to not have somebody tell them what to do, for there not to be a map that somebody else was doing that they were creating, that they were engaging, that they were knowing what they needed to do, and it was coming and emerging from themselves. So their guide's approach, instead of "I'm going to tell you these things coming ahead, was more about "Let me help reveal what you truly want already. So it was asking questions or going deeper in a way that was really masterful, and that person had committed with this guide to help them in that healing work. And that guide was not going to show up by you know being another authority figure who was just telling them what to do. That isn't helpful, and it's not appropriate for that person, or really for anyone. You know, our guides are not in a position to just tell us what we have to do. They're not going to give us the map completely with every single step on it. We have to build that. We have to create that. But they can point us in the direction and say, if you want this to change, this has to come. You got to work here. This is where the focus needs to be. That's a guide message right there. They're going to give you the direction to move with. Now we can also have guides who maybe you've had deep meditations where you've connected with them or work that you've done with them, and it's come with this, you know, very gentle, compassionate, passive energy. And then you're going through a challenging time, and you feel that you're getting more of a firm direction. This needs to happen, and you're like, "Huh, that's different. And it's because your guide is challenging you. They're saying,"Let's go to the next level. It's time. You're ready for this, and that's part of what our guides do too. Is mirror back that we are ready for this. That you are capable. That you are strong. That you are powerful. It's time to awaken to the next level. To take the next step. To take the next journey. We can't just keep hanging out in this one level of comfortable consciousness, or what's ironic, uncomfortable consciousness, because most of the time people will hang out in very uncomfortable spaces because it's familiar, because it's secure, because we know what to expect, and there's a lot to be said for the weird calm that comes knowing what to expect, even if it's not good. Okay, or we might trade something that's really truly valuable for something that maybe isn't as valuable. Here's what I hope

that you walk away with today: 27:19

you don't need a perfect sign or a dramatic moment to know that guidance is real when your guides are coming through. Sometimes the clearest, cleanest proof is simply time passing and a pattern that just repeats over and over and over again until you finally see it. And then when you act on it, it's the power of noticing what does it change in your life. Those are huge teaching moments when you see wow! I finally I've resisted, resisted, resisted. I got to the crossroads where I could not resist anymore. It was not the option. I had to move forward, and when I did, oh my gosh, things really shifted. That education, that having that experience, is critical because it helps you to learn how to trust that guidance to begin with. You'll trust it once you've seen enough of these moments in hindsight, where you've resisted to begin with, and then in time, the beautiful thing is you'll come to the place where you don't have to play out the entirety of the energy to get to that brick wall, and have to push and drive through it because you got the message to begin with, and you knew the pain of having to walk the rest of the way out of alignment, and you knew what that was going to look like, and you said it is better for me to respond at the time that I've received this message, and I think that's where we make a lot of growth because we cut out years of resistance and we cut out years of not doing stuff and not growing, and that's when we make really accelerated change and accelerated growth in our lives. And I think that that comes when people really build your intuition. Really start paying attention to what are the messages that are coming through, and how does that play out? That really helps you to trust responding earlier. So before you go, I'm going to leave you with this: Is there a message that you have been pushing back on for a while now? Something that just keeps resurfacing, even though you've tried to put it on the shelf, you tried to set it aside. It might be worth just sitting with it this week and asking yourself honestly whether it deserves a second look. And maybe it's just sitting and feeling your own resistance around that message, maybe it's acknowledging the fear that comes up, but look at it for what it is, and thank the guide who is coming to you and challenging you, and saying,"There is more for you. There is more for you here. There is more. Thank that guide because they are truly doing the most important work that you contracted with them to do. They are helping you to commit to the fullness of your growth. That is the kind of work we need. Those are the coaches that you know we see it in our human life. Coaches that really help us to develop and to grow. It's not always fun to look at it, to look at it the mirror, but that growth is what makes the huge difference in our lives, and it makes the biggest difference in your spiritual awakening and your journey in this lifetime and your. Sense of when you look back on this life, how pleased you will be at having truly taken all of the opportunities you had for the deepest levels of growth and awakening. All right, everyone, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. It was wonderful to be here. Thank you for sharing with me. Sending you lots of light and blessings. Until next time.

Robert Wooten: 31:15

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