Hey there, Melissa Seaman here of Channel Your Genius. A lot of people are confused about what’s the difference between ghosts and spirits and spirit guides. Well, there’s a huge difference. I remember when I first had my intuitive awakening. I had been a Stanford educated lawyer and a Catholic, and then suddenly I was seeing spirits. Spirits, ghosts and spirit guides.

I was seeing all of it at once. And yet, I had always been a woman of faith in my Catholic Church, and I’d always been able to feel the difference between what is sacred, what’s holy, and what’s shenanigans. So that is the main way that you know when you can feel an energy coming to you that is pure love.

Maybe it comes with the voice of your grandma who’s departed. And you can feel it’s not creepy. It’s not making you scared. It’s not making you question yourself. You know that you’re being visited by an ancestor, by a guide. Similarly, if you are calling out for help and you’re praying and you’re aligning yourself with what’s in the highest good, with your intention of wanting what’s best and what shows up, it is this quiet, supportive feeling and maybe even messages that, is not.

It’s not demanding. It’s not threatening. It’s just loving and gentle and guiding you. That’s the spirit guide that might be an ancestor, what I would call a spirit guide. If you’re feeling something that is kind of off kilter, a little off base, but it’s not embodied. It could be a spirit. It could be an elemental spirit of the land.

It could be, spirit that’s created by humans, but from humans. Believing in it for a long time. It could be troublesome. It could be mischievous. Look, not all spirits are happy. Go. Lucky. Nice to meet you. Super supportive beings. Just like not all humans are. It doesn’t mean that, Doesn’t mean that you should just look at every being or energy that doesn’t have a body and imagine that it’s negative or evil or troublesome.

Just like you shouldn’t look at all humans that way. Okay, now how about ghosts? I call them ghosts. That is, spirits that, were in the death process and didn’t really fully cross over. And then they float around here haunting people and places, and, you know, it’s a ghost because they feel kind of confused. They’re very floaty. If they do have a message, it’s something kind of simplistic, sometimes emotionally charged, but without any real rationale.

Most ghosts truly are kind of feeling lost. And, in my Wisdom Collective, we talk about the fact that as a as an embodied person, as a living human, you have the power of intention that’s embodied, which is stronger than anything that doesn’t have a body. So use your intention to encourage the ghosts to go home. Yeah. What I like to do is to call on the power of the Divine Creator, call on angels to guide that spirit across.

I might imagine a portal or an archway with like a fantastic buffet on the other side to encourage that ghosty to cross. And when all else fails with my intention, the way that I would chase a squirrel out of the house, I just, go on now because I have the body. This is my space, and I can kick out, a ghosty or something like that.

Because my intention being an embodied person kind of trumps theirs. So I hope this helps you understand the difference between just all spirits and ghosts who are kind of lost souls who didn’t quite cross over when they had the chance after they died right away. How to maybe you can cross them. And then the difference between that and spirit guides, which is a metaphor, it’s just a term that we can use to personalize these, these energies that are divine.

They’re part of the big God. This. And yeah, your dearly departed grandma, who is nothing but love for you, falls in that category. She’s not just some lost spirit ghosty. You can lean into the spirit of your spirit guides and you’ll know that you can, because their energy is loving, only loving, wisdom, gentle and here to help enjoy this spirit of the season.