“Mediumship is a journey into the medium,” Jackie Wright said on Saturday at a full-day workshop at The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre in Edinburgh. She meant that one must come to terms with hardship and trauma in their own life, and heal, before they can truly be of service to others. And healing, she said, is about coming to the truth within yourself.
She knows. As a medium who has worked professionally for 40+ years, a minister with the Spiritualist National Union, and the president of the Union, she knows the art and science of communicating with those who have passed. As a child who suffered a great deal of various types of abuse, she knows the steep, rocky, cutting road of life and surviving it. And she speaks with crystal clear clarity, conviction and care. She referred to no notes all day long, either. Quite a marvel.
The risk of a medium who has unprocessed, unhealed trauma is that he or she could knowingly or unknowingly harbor bias against messages about or from a person in spirit. For example, if a prejudiced medium connected with a subject of their racism, he or she might discriminate in the reading; if they are triggered by the situation of someone in spirit that mirrors their own trauma, he or she might be unable to articulate and convey the situation.
How can someone actively hurting provide healing? (My words, not Wright’s.) I’ve heard other teachers emphasize that the practice of mediumship, first and foremost, is a service of healing whether that comes in the form of transmuting grief to comfort, fear to hope, or loneliness to companionship (knowing passed loved ones remain connected).
Mediumship is about being a bridge for a reunion between someone here on the earth plane and another on the spirit plane, to use her key word. A missed opportunity, Wright noted (and I agree), is that mediums dwell on EVIDENCE of the person in spirit and don’t move on to the WHY of their participation to benefit their loved one who has come for a reading (the sitter). She said they come forth with a specific message ~ beyond They are okay, they love you ~ that is relevant to the sitter.
Note: A trained psychic or medium will never tell you what to do, and they will not give you reason to fear; if they do, get a refund and run.
As someone who has been to psychics and mediums my whole life because the esoteric was normalized and experienced in my family, I TOTALLY AGREE. Evidence is the starting point for a mediumship reading; tell me what I need to know at this moment to inform and enlighten me.
I didn’t sign up for this workshop, but the universe must have felt I should be there. So it arranged it. And, boy, am I glad it did! Reminds me of the Scottish saying, “Whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye.” What is meant to be will be.
Instead I had signed up months ago for an art and spirituality class where a medium was to teach her method of connecting with spirit to create a composition. I once saw a demonstration of this sort of thing during a taster session at The College of Psychic Studies in London. It was amazing ~ a medium and a mediumistic artist both tapped into the same person in spirit, and ended up describing the life and drawing the portrait of the deceased grandmother of a woman in the room. Wow!
Well, the teacher putting on this art class had to cancel it, and the Doyle Centre automatically switched me to Wright’s class. I trusted that.
It wasn’t my first intuitive development class. That was in February 2017 with June Field, another excellent medium and teacher, also here at the Doyle Centre. [Yes, the very same Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories because he was a devout Spiritualist. In fact, he quit writing at the height of his fame to travel around the world promoting this religion, which holds among its Seven Principles “the continuous existence of the human soul” and that the soul can communicate with the living. He served as president of The College of Psychic Studies, founded in 1883, from 1926 to 1930.]
In my own experience channeling — which includes psychic and mediumistic methods to perceive information in the energetic field — I get the message, not “who” it’s coming from or “how” I know. It could be just a minds’-eye impression in a nanosecond that springs a whole story bearing a message of a perspective (a way to think about a situation) and considerations for acting on it. The information I get is very grounded. I never realized I was channeling my whole life until I started taking classes to develop my intuition. Those classes gave me a vocabulary, a way to mentally organize the topics of this phenomena, practices to explore and apply what works for me, and a community.
Wright’s class did a great deal for me:
It affirmed that everyone has intuitive abilities and there is no single way to tap them. Information and insights can come through our perceptive abilities while on a walk, in the shower, and washing the dishes. It doesn’t have to be formalized meditation or “sitting in the power” as has become a way to describe “sitting in your power,” Wright clarifies. Hearing this released any self-imposed pressure that my way of expanding my perception to connect with non-physical intelligence and receive messages and meaning was lazy or not right.
It is right because it works: Generally I feel a point of focus above and away from the left side of my head. That when information just comes flowing. Other times I feel energy around my hands, swirling as it intensifies. And other times I don’t sense anything physically, but a perfectly succinct word or phrase is delivered as truth. I can feel that. Whether it is insight or wisdom from my higher self, a higher frequency or intelligence ~ loved ones, guides, angels, etc. ~ it doesn’t matter for me. It happens without trying. And not trying is key.She shared a bit on neuroscience and put it to use in partnered exercises. Getting paired with someone you’ve never met is both exciting, scary and right on: You want to provide some information and message of meaning for your partner, but a relaxed, non-performative approach is the way. It takes trust in yourself, the teacher, the fellow student, the process, and a safe learning environment, which we had. When you are in company with people who are earnestly motivated to grow, it is a powerful place.
I met like-minded people with shared values. There were laughs and tears among the “yes” answers to information gleaned through the exercises. We’re taught not to be afraid of the “no” answer when we relay an impression; sometimes we convey a detail too fast and need to dive deeper and translate it differently. We learned a technique to know when we have misinterpreted information.
In one paired exercise, we were asked to connect with a person in spirit for our partner, and share the kind of music they had enjoyed and share a saying that the person would say in life. My teammate for that exercise, who I had never met, said “jazz” and “Go for it!” when connected to my father, who passed in 2017. Nailed it! I was surprised that she didn’t act surprised when I told her that my father had had a custom license plate made for his car: G FR IT.Got what I needed. One exercise, again partnered with someone I’ve never met, was profound for both of us. We each gave a reading for the other, and it was relevant in our lives right now, demonstrating that my grandmother knows what’s happening in my life and her former school headmistress knows what’s happening in her life. My partner described the physical stature, fashion, character, and ailments of my grandmother, who passed in 1986. And she gave me the message I needed to hear: Get a move-on!
It was not lost on me that the message my father gave was Go for it! They are both cheering me ~ and giving me a kick ~ to move on my passion/work, which is writing and speaking on my message (spread across Navigating from Truth, Mindstream, Express Yourself with #Authenticity, books to come, etc.).
The Point: The ability to receive messages from my loved ones is meaningfully and positively influencing my choices. My cheerleaders have inspired me to take a leap of faith! I’m so grateful. Thank you to them and thank you to my partner in the exercise for enabling our “reunion.”Gave what was needed. I’ve felt a wee bit imposter-like in mediumship circles because I feel more of a channel who gets psychic impressions. (This terminology is redundant because channeling ~ receiving or tuning into information in the quantum field ~ includes psychic knowing and mediumistic communication.) In other words, I don’t feel I have a conversation with the spirits of those who have passed as other mediums do. Instead, I get a flash of visual impression in my mind’s eye and and felt sense of the meaning, or concepts start flowing, sometimes in metaphors or straight-talk; in very rare and powerful experiences, I hear, see and feel a word.
But we were in class to learn, practice and grow, so I closed my eyes and calmly breathed and asked for someone to present for a solid minute. Then I felt the idea of a woman who was not related by blood to my partner. That she might have been a teacher at school.
In my mind, I saw a classroom and an interaction between my partner and this teacher.
I winged it ~ as I always do, because that’s how it works for me! ~ and explained the scenario, relationship and the meaning I was sensing.
I was just hearing No from my partner sitting across from me.
I closed my eyes again and tried to get back to that feeling of that lady.
Then I had the quickest view of the back of this lady’s head: She had braided her hair and wound it up in a bun.
When I shared the hair-do, my partner covered her mouth, startled.
It was her headmistress from elementary school, and the unusual hairstyle was a physical cue to her identity.
After the rest of my evidence and the message, my partner confirmed the whole story. She was just as surprised to hear from the headmistress as I was about delivering this reunion.
Onward, Upward!
Learning to trust myself more ~ in many ways ~ is my biggest take-away from this magical workshop.
In a world where generations have been conditioned to believe divinity lies outside of us and we’re nothing more than machines, the realm of the intuitive arts and sciences demonstrates we’ve been told a well-constructed lie ~ a believed it for too long.
That time is over.
Now it’s time to bravely explore the world within, to connect with hardships we’ve experienced and allow healing in. That’s where the truth can be known. There’s every chance that that process can be enabled or eased with help from someone else. It could be a friend, a family member, a professional practitioner, or ~ through a medium or your own direct experience ~ a loved one who has passed.
The day after the workshop, Minister Wright delivered an address and a demonstration of mediumship during the Spiritualist Service on Sunday. Once again, she spoke openly about tough times, truth, love, and reunion. And she provided extraordinary evidence of people who had passed, along with poignant, timely messages to the lucky yet random recipients present.
Following the service, as always, a personalized healing service was provided by Spiritualist mediums and healers to anyone who wished one, and for those whose names had been written into a ‘healing book.’ This happened not only in that worship room of the Edinburgh Association of Spiritualists church based at the Doyle Centre, but at every Spiritualist church on the planet, as it does every Sunday.
Important: I did not intend to write an article on this workshop; it would have been unethical to go undercover and experience it for that purpose without asking permission of the host and teacher. However, I felt so moved to share this experience and the learnings, that I couldn’t not write it. I have since gotten permission to share my writing on this experience.
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