How does one Become a Spiritual Guide?

.
An acquaintance asked me:

How does one become a spiritual guide?
What did you do? How does it all work?

This is a Big question, I can offer a quick answer, from my perspective: What I notice about it when I look right now, reminds me of ‘the Mountain’ image so many use to speak of spiritual life…

Like a Mountain Guide, one devotes large swaths of life to exploring– not in theory, in reality: the main paths the side paths, the deer paths; getting lost and getting found; braving the elements. Doing the Mountain. Being the Mountain. One starts to Know the Mountain, and then one is chosen/chooses to share the Mountain with others.

The guide sees who each traveler is, where they are, where they want to go and offers assistance along the way. The guide works with the traveler to build muscle, to deepen into the practices and abilities needed to go to the next level on the Mountain. The guide encourages, informs and tries to share perspective with the traveler.

One cannot in any way do anything For the traveler. IF and when they are willing to hear, they still may or may not actually apply what they heard. Sometimes folks get in challenging positions, and that is necessarily fine: people get what they get on the Mountain, just as the guide does. Sometimes the traveler enjoys it and sometimes they don’t enjoy it: often both. Regardless, being on the Mountain is its own reward; there is no ‘winning’, anyway.

Being a guide is often hard, uncomfortable, expensive on many levels, and relatively thankless:

When the best leader's work is done the people say,
'We did it ourselves!' — Lao-tsu

And if these kinds of experiences on the Mountain sound like the most exciting way to invest one’s life, then being a guide can be the best ‘job’ on earth!

.
Everyone is different; I share a very short, very externally-focused, overview of some of the paths I took to become a spiritual guide, here.

in Life, wendy

PS - And the above is more of the physically-focused answer. My belief is, here is really the spiritual answer:

It is all about Matching - one could say our process is to Resonate, to Harmonize more and more with Spirit, and less and less with our old way of being: letting pass the vibrations that are not Self and allowing the vibration that is essential Self. You or your tradition may call this by other names... But basically, we learn from each other by spiritually Matching each other: by matching how we run, hold, deal with our energy spiritually.

When I have the chance to play with kids I see this so obviously - they learn most everything through 'monkey see, monkey do'.

That is how all of us learn from each other energetically: Matching.

So the most important of the spiritual guide's 'jobs' is to continue to do our own 'work': heal, deepen, learn, grow, be present, keep practicing, match Masters... allow our vibration to rise:

Allow in:
Gd,
enjoyment of Spirit,
invitation of high & light vibration.

Allow out:
anti-Gd,
attachment to physically-focused/hooked energy,
invitation of low & heavy vibration.

When WE: BE ourself, and do our WORK: Everyone profits from these shifts, and can more easily shift because of them.

As an example, my favorite Christian teacher, Dr Bruce Morgan, used to talk a lot about morphic resonance, which is one way to try to explain this: (one of many possible links)

; ) w