The following article was featured in the latest Tarosophist International magazine. I have posted the article in its entirety so that my readers may get an idea of how to use automatic writing to connect with their spirit guides.

There are many interesting articles about other forms of divination in this special issue of the magazine as well as articles about tarot. If you would like to purchase a copy of the magazine for yourself, you can visit the store here for the black and white version, and here for the color version of the magazine.

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Connecting to Spirit through Automatic Writing

By Hazellie Wong

I have experimented with many methods of divination; Tarot, palmistry, I Ching, Oracle cards, numerology, astrology… the list goes on. I didn’t stick with all of them, choosing to use just a few that worked best for me, but one of the most interesting methods of divination for me is a form of automatic writing I learned when I was in high school.

Automatic writing is pretty straightforward. You hold a pen or pencil to a blank piece of paper and just let your hand write whatever it wants. Some people say that they hear the words in their head and then just write down what they hear. Sometimes I do that, let the words come to me and write them down in my own hand, but when I started doing this more than 17 years ago, it was somewhat more primal and hands-on for me.

In the same way you would put your fingers on a planchette on a spirit board and allow spirit to move the planchette, my friends and I would hold the pen and allow spirit to guide the words onto the paper. The pen usually never left the paper, and in the beginning, none of us dared to let go of the pen. Words would be messily scrawled across the pages, sometimes the paper might tear because the words were coming so fast and furious.

My friends and I did this for fun, but we also received a lot of very interesting messages. We communicated with many different entities. I don’t remember most of them, but one of them became a friend – I would even call him a spirit guide, and I loved him very much. I choose not to disclose his real name at this time as it is a very unique name and very recognizable, so we will just call him John for now.

John was present in our automatic writing sessions in the first place because one of my friends knew him when he was alive. The first time we made contact, he had passed away three years earlier in a motorcycling accident, and the messages he shared with us were very profound. After we had asked screening questions to confirm that he was really the spirit of the person my friend knew, she asked him, “Why did it take you three years to make contact?” We’d been communicating with spirits for quite some time by then, but she had been doing it longer and had tried contacting him before.

I don’t remember everything John said, but some things I will always remember. He said Satan did not exist, and that his (Satan’s) real name was Karma. He also said, and these words I remember exactly, “Karma was my enemy, but it’s over now.” Apparently, it took him three years to face his Karma. It was profound to me at that age, when I was still asking questions about heaven and hell and karma.

Later on, as we invited him back to our automatic writing sessions over and over again, we didn’t talk about  spiritual matters as much, focusing instead on what teenaged girls are interested in; friends, school, and boys. Going back to the topic at hand of using automatic writing as a form of divination; although the messages about Karma were interesting, we didn’t have an easy way to verify them. The answers he gave us for our mundane questions were more easily verifiable.

I would ask him for advice about schoolwork and exams; he would tell me which topics to focus on and study, mark specific problems I should go over, and those same topics and similar problems would actually come up in the exams! Mind you, he never gave me the answers, just the topics to focus on.

The questions about boys were way more fun and interesting, and one in particular is so accurate and hilarious at the same time that I just have to share it. Oh, where do I begin? This story may be a little TMI, but it illustrates John’s personality so perfectly and how comfortable I was with him.

So this one time, my friend and I decided that we would skip school and hang out at her house. I had just started dating a new boyfriend and was still silly and curious about him. My friend and I were, as was usual for us, just chatting with John through automatic writing, and I said, “John, tell me something about (my boyfriend) that I don’t know.”

There were so many things John could’ve told me about my boyfriend, any number of things – his favourite food, books, perhaps funny childhood memories, or what he was doing right that moment in school, but John chose to tell me this: “He’s wearing a red underwear right now.”

My friend and I burst into hysterical laughter!

John went on to describe the red underwear in detail: It wasn’t bright red, more like a dark maroon red, there were black and white stripes on each side of it, it was a particular brand very popular among guys at the time. I took notes, giggling all the time, and when school was over and I went home, the first thing I did was call my boyfriend.

I wasn’t a shy schoolgirl but I was careful with my line of questioning. I didn’t ask if he was wearing a red underwear, I asked instead if he had a red underwear. He was of course, curious why I would ask him such a question, but I told him I would answer his questions after he answered mine.

So he told me, yes, he had a red underwear, in fact, he was wearing it right then.

And I asked, is it like a dark maroon red, with black and white stripes on the sides? And that particular brand?

And he went, um… yes. Why?

I told him about John and automatic writing. At the time, it was really common and many of my classmates were doing some form of spirit communication too during our free periods in school, so it wasn’t a big deal, and my boyfriend shared his own stories as well. However, John’s accuracy and my relationship with him went deeper than most.

We have been often told that we need to have respect when working with spiritual entities; I completely agree with that. However, I don’t believe that showing respect means being completely serious all the time. Just like with spirits in human bodies, there are many different kinds of ethereal spirits. Some get offended easily, some have a really great sense of humour, some are loving and kind, and some you just don’t want to mess with.

I like to build relationships with the entities I work with. Over time, we build trust and love, and we work on serious issues but we also laugh and joke around like friends would. After John told me about my boyfriend’s red underwear, we would often make jokes about red underwear and how I should buy him one too. We were just that comfortable with each other.

I continued communicating with John for a long time after my friends had moved on, and years later, when John finally moved on too, I continued communicating with other entities through automatic writing. I have built new and loving relationships with some of them, but John will always have a special place in my heart.

As the years went by, I learned more about automatic writing, although there’s still not as much information about it out there compared to the various other more popular forms of divination. I believe that’s probably because it’s such a straightforward form of divination. Take a pen and some papers, hold the pen in your hand and just write what comes to you. Instructions don’t get any simpler than that, yet automatic writing still remains a mystery to many people.

I’m sharing my experiences with automatic writing here so that anyone who’s interested or who have wondered about it may get a glimpse into how it works and how it can allow you to connect with spirit. I started writing the communications in my own hand so that the messages will be neater and I can read them again later, but occasionally, I still enjoy letting spirit take control and guide my hand because I feel a deeper connection that way.

For those who prefer not to work with entities, you can still use automatic writing to connect with your higher self. Allowing your hand to move the pen across the page without judgement on what is being written or stopping to check your grammar can bring you into a meditative state that opens up your intuition. You may find yourself being surprised by how insightful the messages you write are.

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Thanks for reading!