The word “medium” is often used when discussing psychic abilities. It often comes up when talking about communication with the spiritual realm. Traditionally, mediums are people who communicate with others who have passed.
Mediums receive communication from the spiritual realm in several ways. Some receive information intuitively. Words and images appear to them as mental impressions, which they relay to the living. Some mediums experience actual auditory input or perceive actual images of the messages.
People who regularly communicate with spirits often find that the dead are quite the chatty crowd! When they have something they need to tell you, they’ll make certain you’re told. What you decide to do with the information from them is up to you. But many of mediums feel like somebody’s dead grandma is screaming right into their ears, and if they don’t receive the message and share it with you, she won’t ever shut up.
Mediums and Seances
During a seance, a medium will act as the conduit through which messages are passed from the spiritual realm to the guests that are present. Some mediums enter into a trance-like state, while others remain completely lucid and fully awake while receiving the messages and passing them along. Sometimes, especially if a group of relatively magically-aware people has assembled for the seance, messages may come through all over, in no semblance of order. This feels like the spiritual realm’s version of a chat room—everyone gets bombarded with information from all sides.
Even people who aren’t trained as mediums can receive communication from the spiritual realm. Seilah, a former skeptic from Iowa, reports that she doesn’t regularly receive messages from spirits. “But one day when I was with a friend, I suddenly knew, as clear as day, that I needed to tell her that her grandma wanted her to go home,” Seilah said. “When I told her, she told me that all four of her grandparents had passed.”
But the friend called home anyway to make sure that everything was okay. “She found out that her brother had been injured at work, and was being rushed to a hospital. I don’t know why my friend’s grandma picked me to pass her message along,” Seilah said. “Nothing like that has ever happened to me again.”
Celebrity Mediums
We’ve recently witnessed the appearance of “celebrity mediums”—people that are famous simply because they’re mediums. This has led, in turn, to some fairly intense scrutiny of other people who claim to possess mediumship abilities. People like Theresa Caputo of the TLC television series “Long Island Medium,” and Allison DuBois, on whom the hit television show “Medium” is based, are often criticized for exploiting their clients’ grief. Even worse, some are accused of being outright frauds.
As with other metaphysical practices, there simply is no scientific method for proving or disproving the presence or the absence of psychic abilities.
Reading with a Medium
Have you decided to seek the services of a medium? If so, there are several things you need to keep in mind to make sure you have the best experience possible.
- Try to enter the process with an open mind. You may feel skeptical, but if you let your feelings become an issue, your results will certainly be affected.
- Decide if there’s somebody specific you’d like the medium to attempt to contact. It’s okay to specify, “I want to contact my grandmother, who recently passed away.” Before you begin your session, don’t be afraid to ask your grandmother to stop by and participate.
- Understand that there aren’t any guarantees involved in mediumship. Many mediums consider themselves simply as vessels that can transmit messages from the spiritual realm. So, if the spiritual realm has nothing to communicate to you, you simply won’t hear anything. Getting angry about this would be like blaming your mailbox for being empty.
- Finally, be as honest as you can regarding why you’re there. If you are a skeptic whose sole purpose is to debunk the process and to expose the medium as a fake, admit that up front. It’s likely that if the medium is legitimate, they’ll still be open to working with you.
Other Psychic Skills
If you’d like to explore your own mediumship gifts and abilities, there are ways to practice and develop them. Mediumship is just one among many different kinds of psychic abilities. Others include intuition, clairvoyance, and empathy.
- Intuitives, sometimes referred to as clairsentients, are able to just know things, even though they haven’t been told. Intuitives make great tarot card readers because their intuition gives them a decided advantage when reading the cards.
- Clairvoyants are able to see things that are hidden to most other people. Clairvoyance sometimes is used in the method of remote viewing, which occasionally is credited for locating missing children and finding lost items.
- Empathic psychic skills manifest themselves to some people as the ability to sense the emotions and feelings of other people without them verbally communicating what they’re feeling or thinking about.