How to Ask for Guidance

How do you ask for spiritual wisdom? Whom do you ask, and when? And when you finally get it, what should you do with it? Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., a Harvard-trained scientist turned mystic, speaker, and consultant, addresses these questions and more in the new book she wrote with her husband, Gordon Dveirin, "Your Soul’s Compass, What Is Spiritual Guidance?"

The pair interviewed 27 spiritual teachers from myriad faith traditions over three years—from "

Quakers to Sufis, Rabbis to Shamans, High Priests and Priestesses"

about how to request and apply divine and earthly guidance. In this exclusive talk, Borysenko discusses their major discoveries, how we can use them to change our lives—and how they profoundly altered hers.

How did talking to all of these "sages" change you?

It was just extraordinarily inspiring. We both learned a great deal about following spiritual guidance. It's caused me to change my way of listening, my way of working, my way of being in the world.

The big question when it comes to spiritual guidance is, "Is this spirit speaking, or is it me?" My tendency in the past was every time I felt inspired by something or when I came across lots of synchronicities, I would think, "Oh, that must be guidance," and I would quite impulsively follow it. I'm not impulsive anymore. [I have] the understanding that it's an invitation to further inquiry rather than a sign that it's a done deal. This is huge. Not being impulsive means developing a spiritual maturity that I didn't have, a willingness to wait.

The two things I learned from listening to the sages, is that, number one there's no sense having a conversation about spiritual guidance unless you believe that there's some force that guides you—whether that's wisdom or God. And the second thing that what we heard again and again is that spiritual guidance can only operate when you're willing to say, "It's okay that I haven't the vaguest idea where I'm going or what I'm doing."

Why is that?

Because our own ideas about things are bound to be much smaller—we're only seeing part of the picture. And often, part of the picture we see is our own fears, histories, desires. To open to a larger flow, there has to be a willingness to say "I don't know."

What's your advice on how to ask for wisdom?

The main thing is to ask in a way that is authentic to you. Because this is a very deep inquiry about your own spiritual growth, there is no set way of doing this. It really comes down to what aligns you to the source of your being—the three movements for following spiritual guidance are: alignment with wisdom or God, discernment, and then putting into action what you feel you have received.

So it varies from person to person. There are people who pray like I did to a personal God. There are people who take a Buddhist approach. There are people like the Quakers who sit in stillness, and then maybe discern as a group what's most important.

That's the excitement of it. You ask the question, "What aligns me with the source?" And if you're serious about following guidance, it makes you much more aware of the subtleties of your own belief system, of what serves you, of what doesn't, and how you can feel yourself come into a sense of presence.

Continued on page 2: '...there's such a sense of peace, gratitude, contentment.' »