Your Spirit Guides are loving, supportive beings of light dedicated to your personal evolution. Some Spirit Guides are with you for your entire lifetime, while others appear to lend assistance during specific life events. You may not be aware of these allies in the spirit world, but that doesn't mean that they haven't given you encouragement, advice, and support—even daily.

Do you need help connecting with your spirit guides and receiving their messages of hope, love, and support? If so, consider that you may unintentionally block yourself from receiving their guidance. Don't worry—with a little self-reflection and a few minor adjustments to your behaviors and attitude, you can open yourself to divine guidance and support.

Below are three common blocks to receiving messages from your spirit guides and suggestions to overcome these obstacles, enhancing your connection to your divine allies.

1. You spend the majority of your day on "autopilot."
In our hectic, modern society, most people habitually go about their daily lives. It's the natural state of our minds to go into "autopilot" when we repeatedly perform behaviors such as tying our shoes or brushing our teeth. However, when we go about our day in this numb, habitual manner, we are unaware of our environment and feelings. Our perceptions may be dulled, diminishing our ability to receive messages from our spirit guides that would be obtained through our intuition and psychic senses.

Fortunately, we all have the ability to turn off "autopilot" and live in the present moment, increasing our ability to connect with our spirit guides. Dedicating as little as fifteen minutes a day to meditation can help you break the chains of habitual behaviors. Change up your routine and add more spontaneity to your daily life to add variety and help keep you engaged. Set daily reminders to pause, reflect, and check in with your physical body, emotions, and thoughts.

Adding one or more of these techniques to your daily life can assist with increasing your awareness of your inner world, physical body, and intuition. By turning off your "autopilot" and fully engaging in your daily activities, you are increasing your capacity to receive divine guidance and support from your spirit guides.

2. You have preconceived ideas about how your spirit guides should communicate with you.
Movies and books have depicted spirit guide communications as dramatic, theatrical experiences that include vivid visions and clear, audible messages. These depictions leave a distorted, unrealistic expectation of the methods employed by our spirit guides. Although a few individuals may receive these messages from spirit guides in very obvious, direct ways, most of us receive subtle signs and messages from our spirit allies. Our spirit guides may use signs in our physical environment and dream world to communicate with us.

Our physical surroundings may contain messages from our spirit allies. Common ways spirit guides communicate in this way include messages on billboards, repeating numbers on license plates, and the appearance of animals in usual settings. If you notice a sign that you feel may be a divine message for you, pause and reflect on its meaning. Observing our surroundings with the intention of receiving guidance from our spirit guides can open a doorway to receiving a wealth of encouragement and support from the signs around us.

The dream world is another method used by our spirit allies to send us guidance, support, and encouragement. By preparing to receive messages while dreaming, you may want to develop a sleep routine and keep a dream journal by your bed to record your experiences. A sleep routine can be very simple, such as turning off all electrics a half hour before bedtime, relaxing with a soothing cup of herbal tea, and setting a sincere intention of connecting with your spirit guides while you sleep. Upon waking, record your dream experiences in your dream journal by describing your feelings upon waking, the quality of your sleep, any insights you received, and a description of your dream(s). If you don't have a memory of your dream, record in your dream journal that you chose not to remember your dreams that night and will try again the next day.

3. You are disconnected from your intuition.
Your intuition is your "inner knowing," that quiet wisdom held deep within each of us. Many of us have suppressed this gut response, preferring a logical or analytic approach. Although there are benefits to using the rational mind to make many choices, our intuition can provide guidance that is relevant to our life path and personal evolution. By disconnecting from our intuition, we lose access to a wealth of information both from our internal insights and our spirit allies.

To reconnect with your intuition, relax and check in with yourself. Become aware of your gut reaction to circumstances and listen to your eternal responses. As you follow your instincts and internal guidance, your intuition will develop, and you may gain additional access to your psychic senses, which are born from your intuition. Your psychic senses are your "inner senses." A brief description of your psychic senses may be found below:

• Clairvoyance relates to our sense of sight and is the ability to receive information through a "second sight," either as a vision in the mind's eye or externally through the physical eyes.
• Clairaudience relates to our sense of hearing and may manifest as "inner hearing" or as sounds heard with our physical ears but without a physical cause producing them.
• Claircognizance relates to our sense of thought and is the ability to receive a download of information directly into your awareness without a known source of information.
• Clairtangency relates to our sense of touch and is the ability to receive previously unknown information by physically touching a person or object.
• Clairempathy is the ability to connect to the emotions of another person (or animal) as if those emotions were one's own.
• Clairsentience relates to detecting the energetic signature or "vibe" of people, buildings, and objects.
• Clairguistance relates to our sense of taste and is the ability to taste something not in your mouth.
• Clairalience relates to our sense of smell and is the ability to perceive the scent or odor of something not physically present.

Although these are common blockages you may encounter as you communicate with your spirit allies, your experiences may differ. The most important key is to relax and let your unique communication method with your spirit guides unfold without expectations. With a bit of patience and awareness, you may receive unlimited guidance and assistance from your spiritual helpers as they support your individual life path.