A Breakthrough in Evidential Mediumship, And Some Things I Learned On The Way There

Those of you who follow my posts on a regular basis may know that as a medium and psychic, my specialty is channeling readings through my spirit guides, who read my clients’ energy fields and communicate their insights to them through me. Though I’ve always held my work to a high  standard of evidentiality, in the sense that I only consider my readings legitimate if I can intuitively communicate specific, verifiable details about my clients’ lives, more “mainstream” evidential mediumship (i.e. communicating with people who have passed on) has been more challenging for me. My theory is that the reason for this is that my guides dwell in a slightly different frequency band of the spirit world than the one from which the deceased tend to communicate. I attune myself energetically more easily to my guides.

Because of this lopsided affinity, in the interest of maintaining the best possible track record on accuracy, I have only offered human-to-deceased-human mediumship incidentally to my other readings. However, over the past couple of weeks, I have been led to clients who have had a very pressing need to communicate with the dead - in some cases, due to life-and-death situations at stake with those who have been left behind. As a result, I seem to have had a breakthrough in this area of my practice, with a personally unprecedented amount of specific evidence coming through. It has been an exciting, moving, and humbling experience. I have been astonished by some of the things that have been communicated. The fact that the need for it was especially urgent in these two cases supports my guides’ assertion that a strong motivation to establish contact, or “move the energy of information,” will contribute to mediumistic success.

The sessions have been fairly intense, since being a channeler, my most consistent method for connecting with Spirit involves a deeper, somewhat more physical state of trance mediumship than evidential mediums usually employ.  I use similar states of consciousness for this work as I do when channeling Ves and listening for clairaudient dictation, in which the individual ego takes more of a back seat than, say, in psychically reading people’s energy. However, because recently incarnated souls communicating about their lives on earth will often use physical responses in the medium’s body to relay information about things such as health issues and emotions, channeling them can be a less comfortable experience than working with guides who have been blissfully floating in the ethereal realms for much of their existence. (It remains to be seen whether I develop past this method, and get similar results from light meditation, as most evidential mediums do, but this is it, for now. I am embracing the journey!)

As in my channeling work, reports on these readings are based on transcripts of  the recorded sessions. Once the recorder is on, I set the intention for the reading, connect to my spirit guides, and have an initial conversation with them, until they tell me we are ready to go ahead and make contact with the deceased soul. Then, I greet the departed person, and wait for a clairaudient response, as well as a physical awareness of their energy (usually felt as a warmth.) When contact is established, I work to communicate and retrieve information by cycling through various lighter and deeper states of meditation, verbalizing what I hear, feel and see. It’s kind of like diving into deep, murky water (the unconscious), fishing for pearls (the information), and  then coming up to the surface just long enough to collect them into a basket (describing or expressing what I am experiencing) before diving back in. 

The communications are a mix of directly channeled text, physical sensations, clairvoyant and claircognizant impressions, individual words clairaudiently introduced as evidence, and sometimes even words that seem to be channeled through an almost purely physical mediumship. Generally, the deeper the trance state, and the less I am consciously aware, the more specific and accurate the information. During the reading itself, the focus is less on understanding the information with the active mind, as it is on communicating the subtlest of details of the psychic impressions as they come in. The analysis is done later. The lovely thing about conducting mediumship in this way is that the directly channeled text offers a chance for the deceased loved one to communicate their personality, emotions, and signature expressions, which help the client recognize the spirit in question, whereas the more specific words and concepts provide concrete evidence that contact has been established, beyond the more subjective elements. This anchors the emotional healing of the communication in the reassurance offered by proof of continuity of consciousness after death. The results have been some of the best I have ever experienced in my work as a medium so far. 

I do still want to build up my consistency in this practice, and am going to continue to wait a while longer before offering these services separately. My guides, Salvador and Natalie, assure me that it won’t be long before I am ready to do so. In the meantime, however, I  thought I might share some tips on evidential mediumship that I either learned through experiencing these recent readings, or that were communicated to me by my guides while we were doing them.

First, some basic principles that bear repeating: 

1. The most important thing to learn in evidential mediumship, or any kind of channeling, is how to quiet your mind and step out of the way. Meditate, meditate, meditate. Practice shifting your consciousness into an altered state on a regular basis, until you are able to do so at will. The more easily you can access a state of openly receptive relaxation, or even a hypnagogic half-dreaming state, the more easily you will be able to receive information. Personally, much of my best information comes through when I am in a semi-deep state of trance: deep enough to have very little awareness of self, but present enough to be able to verbally express what I am seeing, feeling and hearing.

2. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Soothe your inner critic into silence. Celebrate every small success. Surrender to the process. Give every subtle detail of what you are experiencing your full attention, and make a note of it. What I have found is that even little “throwaway” utterances can be crucial when putting together the complete picture of a reading. No impression is too big, no hunch or hint is too small. Make note of them, and worry about their meaning later.

3. If something you feel, hear or see repeats itself several times throughout a reading, it’s probably important. In my latest readings, for instance, I heard the words “Lazarus” and “Queensland” over and over. I even heard “Lazarus” as I was going to bed the night after the reading, before I had confirmed its significance with my client. These turned out to be some of the most specific pieces of evidence I was able to channel: “Lazarus” was a song that had been played for the deceased person’s loved one every morning for the past several weeks, and the person I was communicating with had spent years in that part of Australia.

4. If something you are being communicated in a reading strikes you as unusual, and repeats itself in slight variations, or through different clair-senses, pay attention. In one of my readings, the person coming through kept reiterating that speaking was difficult for him. At first, I thought he was simply referring to an introverted personality. However, as I was channeling him, I began to notice a physical sensation of having difficulty verbalizing what I was saying. This struck me as strange, because I could hear his clairaudient communication as easily as any other spirit I had worked with. Later in the session, the word “Huntington” jumped out of my mouth with quite a bit of urgency, and the difficulty with speech connected all the dots.** Upon looking  up “Huntington,” I realized that the man was probably trying to tell us that he had undiagnosed Huntington’s chorea (which I couldn’t recall ever hearing of before): a hereditary illness that eventually leads to a loss of speech. In light of other details that were communicated to me after the reading itself, amazingly, it now looks like I may have actually hit on a correct diagnosis of this very rare condition. If this can be verified, it will be one of the most baffling examples of evidence I have been able to bring through so far.

5. If you can’t figure out exactly what you are seeing or hearing through your clair-senses, focus yourself, relax, feel around, breathe deeply, and keep describing verbally what you are experiencing. A general shape of a triangle might eventually reveal itself as a bale of hay, or a pyramid. If you are getting a snippet of a word, verbalize what you hear, then play around a bit with how it feels in your mouth, until it feels right. This is how I usually hit on exact names in readings. “Lazarus” repeated itself in my reading a few times in its correct form, but subsequently also came through as “Lazer” (the Yiddish version of the name) and at one point, what I thought was “lazy.”* (Ironically, the first attempt was the correct one. As my guides are fond of saying: “The first truth that comes to you, is the truth.”)

The last reading I did was especially interesting in that it was punctuated by shorthand conversations with my spirit guides, Salvador and Natalie, who not only encouraged me to trust what I was receiving, and gave me some context for what the person being channeled was communicating, but also offered suggestions on how to connect better with the subject of the session. A new concept Natalie introduced was that of connecting to the deceased through their emotional energy. Here is a passage from one of the sessions.

Natalie: “Try this: Call in his feelings - the energy of his emotions. Keep listening to what he says in full sentences - every word he says. Try, and you will be surprised! Raising your energy, and giving joyful greetings to Spirit, enable psychic knowing.  Beautiful, clear information comes through in small details. Please smile, and focus your mind. Use your psychic protection to lift yourself out of negative emotions, exciting now the energy of the heart. Please allow a warm meeting of the minds. Let go of your nervousness. Hear the misaligned wrongs that happened being blessed. Feel the energy of joy, and let the guides speak. Trust in this wonderful discipline! Let go of your preconceptions of what you should be hearing. Please ask open-ended questions, and smile! Feel the energy of joy.”

Salvador: “Yes, dear wife. Look to a manifestation of greater joy than you expected in this predicament, being communicated here. Look ahead to the future easing of the situation. Trust the advice. Just try to believe the wonderful, unexpected developments that are happening. Understand that the events are in the process of transforming. Just expect the future with psychic openness.”

Emily: “How did I connect to the departed gentleman, just now?”

Salvador: “Wonderfully! Just trust your intuition, and when you begin to feel doubt, smile! It is important to hear Spirit with pleasure, and speak together with confidence. This was a legitimate conversation. It’s time to find hope, and forgive everyone. Expect a clear change in the joylessness. Surprising manifestations. Believe it, and and expect happiness and love to win out. Speak great truth. Respond to this new gift of intelligence: The unexpected instructions you are receiving. Return your focus, and concentrate on the future trajectory. Just come to the conclusion, together, that positive success is definitely accessible again in this situation.”

Emily: “Should we try to channel him directly again?”

Salvador: “Yes, dear. Bless the trust. Thank him. He will now speak of future expectations. Bring in quickly the trajectory of future success.”

From this passage, you can see the guides once again emphasizing the importance of taking joy in communicating with Spirit, to strengthen the connection. They were also trying to draw my attention to the fact that even though the session was being conducted in hopes of helping a person linked to the deceased who seemed to be in a dire situation, I should come to the reading free of any preconceptions about their future. This was, in fact, quite important in helping to piece together the information, because much of it was coming through in purely visual impressions that were later confirmed to be describing the future plans of the person in question - none of which I had been informed about. My guides were extremely helpful in framing those plans in positive terms. 

If you have studied mediumship, what are some of the most basic principles you use to help yourself connect? What would you add to my list? Let me know!

_____________________________________

*In yet another example of Spirit using synchronicity for reinforcement, right as I was reviewing this sentence in the post, in a cafe, mulling over this name, someone a few feet away from me uttered the words “Lazer vision!” 

** And yet again, the word “Huntington”  - in the form of a location - popped up during a completely unrelated work task, on the day that I confirmed that there was a possilibility that the deceased’s family had a history of this disease.