By Amely Greeven
I never thought I would be talking to angels. It started a decade ago, during my pregnancy. The veils are thin in that life stage, as the baby’s soul edges closer to taking physical shape. Serendipitously, and with my belly huge and round, I met Austrian spiritual guide Ingrid Auer, who creates subtle and beautiful tools like cards, essences and sprays for invoking angelic support. Sitting in circle with her one evening at Santa Barbara’s exquisite Alchemy Arts healing center, Auer invoked archangel Michael—one of the four angels who are “the closest to the Godhead,” and are responsible for creating the lokas, or universes of existence, according to my longtime spiritual teacher and mystic, Deirdre Hade.
My own sensory gates are usually shut quite tight, despite years of meditating. Yet I was aware of a distinct presence in the room that felt benevolent, and big, and safe. Archangel Michael is known to be the protector, the one who keeps danger and harm at bay. So I cherished that short experience, and vowed to keep the connection. As my mothering journey progressed amid a backdrop of shocking school violence, I invoked Michael’s presence often, asking him to surround my child’s school, and every educational facility, with his protective frequency, envisioned as a pyramid of cobalt blue rays.
“Angels are packets of light,” Hade teaches, citing the ancient Hebrew word malachim. “An angel is an awareness; a clarity, a wisdom to help humanity make it through this very difficult third dimension of life and death.” She continues: “Think of them like the tools of God—because God is so great and vast, God needs multiple tools to help every soul to unlock the heart, the mind, the intuition, and so on. These are the angels, and they are rooting for us, cheering for us, caring for us, and helping us whether we want to cop to it or not.”
Much of this was news to me. At school, I never learned that stories of angelic presences have pervaded every tradition and been told by humans since the beginning of recorded time. Even growing up vaguely Christian, I hadn’t been introduced to them. Many centuries ago, the Christian church rebranded the archangels into saints, and I hadn’t made the connection. My Jewish friends reported similar. Though the Torah and the esoteric text, the Zohar, are rife with angels, modern Judaism has largely left them out. Rational, linear thinking didn’t jibe with mystical packets of light.
But now there is a longing to go beyond what we’ve been taught, to enter into the mystery and fuse the sacred back into secular life. Auer says that healers and practitioners of all kinds are looking for spiritual tools because their existing ones don’t go far enough. “Imagine a person as a series of layers,” she says. “Practitioners have tools to treat the physical layer, and the emotional and the mental layers. Many also work with what I call the ‘energetic layer,’ or using vibrations from planet Earth, like sound bowls to balance the body’s chakras, or flower essences. But increasingly, something is missing; these things are too limited for the problems at hand. So they are seeking vibrational healing sourced in the spiritual realm, the next step.”
It’s more complex than this, obviously—Auer suggests Lee Carroll’s channeled book The Twelve Layers of DNA to explore it further—but this makes sense to me. We can feel like we are hitting what Auer calls “dead-end streets” in so many areas of life right now—in our health or relationships or parenting, or in conflicts that feel irresolvable, whether personal or global. Many of us feel on our knees and helpless, needing to source support from beyond any place we have before. I include structured invocations to the archangels in my morning prayers now, a practice I learned through Hade’s Radiance teachings, and I also lay circles of Auer’s beautiful angel symbol cards on my altar to help me with hard or upsetting situations.
Doing these things gives me comfort, inspiration and, often, support: Impossible projects have been achieved, worst-case scenarios averted and sometimes, better outcomes than I could have achieved on my own. But sometimes, I get nothing obvious—Auer counsels that angelic healing is not a “wish fulfillment exercise,” and that my angel circle may nonetheless be helping me learn the soul lesson from a difficult situation. Should desired outcomes manifest, she reminds me not to forget to show gratitude, through a gesture of some kind.
I still find it challenging to know exactly who or what I am relating to when I connect with these subtle helpers. Hade suggests I think simply. “An angel is the spirit of a thing—and there are legions of them. Every tree has an angel, every blade of grass.” It’s perfectly fine to ask the angel of, say, dogs to help your pooch, or ask the angel of books to help you finish that chapter draft. Auer suggests paying attention to little signs—soon after starting to connect with angels, I began seeing tiny sparks of blue light in response to certain “right” thoughts that helped to affirm my decisions. Will Arntz, who directed the quantum physics-informed consciousness film What the BLEEP Do We Know!? and has a robust angel practice himself, tells me that drilling down into the “what” isn’t the point. “Perhaps when we drop our bodies and get a little closer to what’s really going on, we’ll find out something we can’t imagine, like that a single archangel is a presence with a gazillion bodies scattered throughout the vast universe!” Trying to intellectually define the undefinable is the antithesis of mystical practice.
Instead, tuning in to the invisible realm of subtle spiritual support is an exercise of the heart, and of humility. Hade has worked with thousands of people who have experienced extraordinary phenomena by allowing angels to infiltrate their reality. She suggests not to worry about “believing or not believing.” Just start somewhere. Ask for help in situations from the mundane to the extraordinary. Be open to interventions in your psyche—shifts in your thinking, relief from pain—and also to miracles in your outer world. Know that your outreach may mean more than you even realize, because in what can feel like a terribly broken world, “We humans have the keys to open the gates between the veils of existence, and the more that people invoke the angels, the more their energy can be here with us.” Then pay attention to how you feel. Because when we take our healing into the metaphysical and invite the ineffable, there’s an unexpected gift. As Hade says, “Life takes on an experience of wonder and awe.”
Starting Your Angel Practice
Close your eyes and speak to angels like you would a friend. “Your honest feelings are allowed,” Ingrid Auer says. “Tears, upset, anything.” You can write a letter saying what you need help with. “If you don’t know the name of an angel you need, write to your guardian angels—every soul has at least two. They will get the message to where it is needed.” Or, learn about the four archangels and how they provide clarity (Uriel), protection (Michael), healing (Raphael) and redemption (Gabriel), and start there. A ritual involving candles or flowers can be nice, though it is not necessary. Auer’s beautiful Angel Symbol cards, available in the U.S. from Amazon, are intuitive tools that come with instructions for every situation. And for a deep and healing immersion into the metaphysical, discover Hade’s recorded transmission Receiving Bliss: The Prosperity of Gratitude & Healing with the Archangels, available from learningstrategies.com.