Spirit often brings you messages in the form of symbols. These symbols can be anything — the smell of a rose, seeing a dragonfly alight on a bush, or hearing a snatch of music.
Sometimes these symbols are obvious — turning on your car radio and hearing the words to a song that are clearly a message for you.
But often they’re not.
Was that waft of rose scent as you walked up your driveway a message for you? Was the dragonfly meaningful in some way? And, if so, how?
You need to figure out what the symbols you encounter mean so that you can understand the message that’s coming to you from your loved one, your higher self or your guides.
Just how do you do that?
Well, every teacher I’ve had and all the books I’ve read about working with spiritual symbols have instructed me to create my own symbol dictionary.
Your own personal symbols
Here’s an important thing to know about the symbols you get from Spirit. What a certain symbol means to someone else, may not be what it means for you.
You can look up the traditional or archetypal meanings of thousands of symbols in dream and psychic dictionaries. There are some good ones out there. The Book of Psychic Symbols by Melanie Barnum and Animal Speak by Ted Andrews are both excellent references.
But even those books will tell you that you need to find your own personal meanings of the symbols that Spirit brings you.
Most folks, like my teachers, recommend starting a journal, dedicating it to spiritual symbols, and writing things down as they come.
I’ve done this too. Multiple times.
I have dutifully dedicated notebooks intended to contain all the symbols that Spirit brought to me, along with their intuitively-derived meanings.
Organizing your symbol definitions
The last time I earnestly started a symbol dictionary journal, it was with the best of intentions. I wrote down all the colors I could think of, then definitions for each (while asking my intuition for information).
I worked on it for about 3 weeks. Then I abandoned it and never used it again.
Why?
I got overwhelmed. I couldn’t find anything.
Even though in the very front of the journal I wrote, “I will not worry if it is neat or organized, but will give what I get and trust in Spirit along the way,” I knew that once I’d filled out a few more pages, I wouldn’t be able to easily find the meaning of each symbol. So I stopped using it.
That was in 2004.
Fast forward a decade or so and, during meditation, I was struck with the inspiration to create a spiritual symbols workbook, organizing all the different categories of symbols and listing them alphabetically — much like the good psychic symbol dictionaries.
But you get to fill in your own personal definition for each symbol.
It contains more than 1,500 common spiritual, intuitive and psychic symbols encompassing everything from nature and plants to food, buildings, clothing, and different archetypes of people. Everything that Spirit uses to communicate with you for your highest good.
There are also instructions on how to use the workbook as well as some suggested ways of meditating, to get into that quiet place within so you can hear your inner, intuitive voice.
It may take the same amount of work as using a blank journal to learn about your own meanings to the symbols you receive, but it gives you the ability to later find the definitions you’ve written down. Either through the categories or the index in the back.
Plus, having all the categories and symbols in front of you may spark your intuition and give you definitions for symbols you hadn’t yet considered.
There’s no magical quick and easy way to learn the symbolic language of Spirit. But this workbook gives you a place to start.
Learning more
If you’d like to learn more about symbols, why you receive them, the ways they show up and how to create your own symbol dictionary, I have a few resources for you: