Guiding Lost Spirits On Options

I have been able to journey successfully for a long time but I often find it hard recognising spirits (other than simply feeling their presence), and I have absolutely no idea about how I would guide them on peacefully to where they belong. I feel some trapped spirits have attached themselves to me and family members, causing anxiety, negative emotions, fatigue and general low health - they have also caused all my recent journeys to take on a very negative vibe.

Last week I attempted to "banish" these spirits, not knowing that this would cause them harm and offence, and make my situation worse. I ended the night covered in bruises, shaking, feeling drained mentally, physically and spiritually, and very empty and cold.

This time I'd like to take the more appropriate peaceful approach of the shaman, to guide the spirits on to a better place, or - if they do not want to leave, to show them that I mean no harm and that they are harming me and my family.

Does anyone have any techniques that would help me? Should I offer something to the spirits? Communicate with them verbally - or simply inside my head? How do I know if there is just one or if there are multiple spirits? And how do I know where their rightful home is?

Thanks a ton in advance (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I was trying a simplified LBRP that requires no tools, as really, I'm quite new to shamanism (studied it for 2-3 years now but practised it for much less) - I saw two alternatives, guiding the spirit on, and banishing it, but as for some reason I assumed it was a negative spirit of some kind I wanted to banish it, and LBRP was the only quick and easy ritual I could find for that purpose.

During my deeper journeys I take entheogens, particularly Psilocybe mushrooms as they aid me in travelling deeper, with great ease, and they free me of the ego which often prevents me from accepting what I'm experiencing. As I felt this spirit was quite strong I decided to up the dose, I ate around 10 grams of dried mushrooms - which, if anyone here has entheogen allies, they will know is a very large ego-destroying dose, almost double what I usually take for deep journeys into the lower world. In hindsight I should have taken such a dose without journeying first to get to know the plant at such a high intensity, as I wasn't prepared for what happened - particularly after I angered the spirit.

In my recent journeys I have been unable to avoid the presence of this spirit and it has been weighing me down, making me feel depressed, scared, anxious, I would spend many hours trapped, trying to run from the spirit rather than talking to or helping it. This journey however, after I performed the banishing ritual, started off very blissful, I could feel peace in the house once more, I realised I had fixed the problem.. what I did not realise was that it was only temporary. Within 2-3 hours the spirit returned and it was angry.

If any shaman has "stopped the world" before they will know how peaceful this experience is, but this time it was not, I could feel the presence of the spirit, it embedded itself in me and my family, causing insanity, terror, fear, and hate in all of us - not just me, the person who had taken the mushrooms. It was not angry as such, rather hurt by what I had done, and as a lesson it showed me what it felt like to be in it's position - I don't know what it did, whether it trapped a part of my own spirit, or simply gave me it's perception temporarily..

I was dead, I was in a sort of limbo, I wanted to return to life, or to move on and rest at last, I wanted someone to destroy my presence somehow or help me move on, because I was trapped there for what seemed like eternity. During that time I did some stupid things like throwing things around, breaking things, running into walls, spitting, and talking in gibberish, similar to what I have seen when someone has been possessed (whether intentionally or by accident) by a spirit.

Thankfully the entheogenic ego death is a temporary thing, and as I came to, while something was missing - I was no longer in that horrible limbo that I had experienced. Afterwards I asked my family if I had said anything meaningful during the time and they listed off a bunch of things I said. The two I kept reading most were "It's my grandmother" and "Where's God?"

-- Sounds a little irrelevant, but my Grandmother was living in that house when she died 6 years ago. She was a Christian but doubting her beliefs before she died, scared that she would never go to heaven. I'm not a Christian and so the mention of God is not something I would do, as I don't see God as a being at all, and particularly do not like using that word as it just conjures up the male dominant image society has used for the past several centuries.

Anyway, apologies for the long post but I feel explaining the entire experience might help a little. I also believe now that the spirit may be my grandmother, as the negative feelings and such associated with it's presence have been noticed by people in the house ever since a week or two after she was buried. Would I be right in saying that if that is the case, as a Christian she should be guided on to what she sees as heaven? How would I go about doing this? Particularly when I believe that the closest thing to the Christian version of heaven is the upper world - which I was not aware that the dead of the lower world could access.

The LBRP was probably NOT the correct ritual to use in this context - it's usually used to clear ritual space, which is already charged enough with your energy that it's easier to move things off; my room is so imbued with my vibrations that the malevolent spirit in my house doesn't even attempt to enter any more because i can kick it out without doing much of anything. Try that; if you have a ritual space with lots of power within it, make a construct and cage the spirit inside. Then make it your bitch.

Alternatively, make some powerful allies on the lower/upper levels and have them take care of it for you.