Most people (and you are probably among them) have had some kind of contact with the spirit world, from just the sense that someone is present to direct messages and advice from loved ones who have passed to the higher side. Perhaps you want to make contact for yourself, or to use your mediumistic abilities to make contact for others.

Mediumistic skills are like any other skills: You start with a basic or inherent ability (that everyone has to some degree), and through education and experience you develop and refine that ability into a reliable, consistent set of skills. With practice and guidance, you can learn to communicate with the spirit world. Whether you want to contact someone you know in spirit or someone who simply knows more than you do, like a spirit guide, there are many techniques that just about anyone can learn.

While everyone has the ability to connect with those in the spirit world, some people are more open to such connections than others, and are more aware of the connections that take place. As an element of the universe, you are already linked to its energy—you’re already plugged in!

Developing and refining your mediumistic skills will lead to experiences that are amazing, amusing, entertaining, and profound. You will certainly experience growth in your personal life, and will also help others to grow in their lives and understanding. Even if you choose not to develop your own mediumistic abilities, becoming aware of them will let you become more receptive to spirit communication through others.

You’ve no doubt noticed that we use both the term “psychic” and “psychical” throughout this book. (And no, the latter is not a misspelling of “physical”!) While they are interchangeable on a certain level, they actually define a somewhat different set of skills. Psychic skills are those abilities that you use to communicate in unspoken ways with other people on the earth plane. A psychic (someone who is using psychic skills) reads from earth energy; he or she reads the vibrations of what is going on here on earth.

Psychical skills are those abilities that you use to communicate across the earth/spirit divide. The skills are similar to those that a psychic uses—remember, all mediums are psychics (although not all psychics are mediums; more on this later). A medium (someone who is using psychical skills) communicates with deceased beings through his or her own sensitivities.

Becoming a medium is more often than not a process of being the medium you already are! As a child, you were likely in touch with your spirit far more intimately than you are now as an adult. Part of what we view as “growing up” is learning to suppress this spontaneous and unconstrained piece of ourselves. Reconnecting with this piece is just a matter of allowing it back into our lives.

What are your mediumistic abilities? This directed communication exercise can help you identify and activate your psychical skills. Read through these steps until they are familiar enough that you can follow them without reading through each one.

When you feel ready to do so after completing the exercise, write down your experiences.

As your mediumistic skills develop, use variations on this exercise to further explore your psychical senses. You might find that your abilities include advanced skills such as automatic writing and drawing spirit-inspired images.

The most challenging aspect of using your mediumistic abilities is learning to focus them. Think of this like entering a room crowded with people who are talking, laughing, eating, drinking, and even dancing to the music that plays in the background. A cacophony of “input,” to use a term from our computer-driven culture, assaults your senses. Yet within seconds, you locate the friends you are to join, and make your way to them. How are you able to do this?

Focus. All of your senses align toward identifying and locating your friends. Your eyes scan the room for images of clothing and other physical characteristics. Your ears tune in to frequencies of sound that are closest to what you know signals their voices. Your sense of smell seeks the fragrances your friends typically wear. You search for other details that narrow the scope of your quest to find your friends—foods, drinks, or dance moves. All of this transpires without much conscious participation from your mind, of course, and in fractions of time barely measurable. Then click! You’re locked in on your target, and in moments you’re sharing in the revelry with your friends.

Learning to focus your mediumistic skills is very similar to singling out individuals in a crowded room. In fact, you undoubtedly used some of these skills—your psychical abilities—in locating your friends at a party. (One way to further develop these abilities is to consciously concentrate on using them in such ways; but more on that later!) With practice, you become both skilled and comfortable using your core psychical skills—clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience—to receive mediumistic messages.

When you search for someone in a crowd, you simultaneously receive and reject signals. Looking for a male friend? Automatically your focus shifts … men in, women out. Short? You glance right past those who stand head and shoulders above the crowd. Always in vogue when it comes to attire? Your attention migrates to those wearing the latest styles—and overlooks those who are not. Drinks Pepsi … or nothing? Loves those little cocktail wienies? Laugh sounds like a cross between a choking lion and a giggling little girl? You filter all of these signals and countless others, consciously and subconsciously.

When receiving spirit signals, the filtering process is sometimes more challenging (particularly when you are just beginning to develop your mediumistic skills) because the signals are less tangible to your conscious mind. You might think you heard a voice or saw an image. Did you really? Or was it just your imagination? This kind of conscious questioning is actually a sign of progress in your development. As we said earlier, spirit communication feels like imagination at the beginning!

Mediumistic signals sometimes come to you unbidden. Rather than you attempting to invoke spirit connection, a spirit comes to you and wishes to make contact. The spirit might desire to convey a message to you or to someone else. As we discussed in Chapter 9, it’s important for you to establish intent and set limits. Otherwise, you’ll feel like a giant antenna, picking up lots of static but not getting any clear channels!

Establishing intent makes it clear that you always desire spirit communication for the highest good and with light. Whether you initiate contact or spirits contact you, take time to consciously establish intent. Setting limits reminds visitors from the boundary-less spirit world that your world has structure and constraints, and that you can’t always be available when spirits want you to be.

We Worked So Hard, December 1989, oil on canvas. Rita often works with troubled inner-city youths and one young man seemed to attach himself to her. Not an easy person to counsel, Rita decided to ask in meditation, “Who dropped this boy into my lap?” A man showed himself to Rita and told her he had been a migrant tobacco farmer. When Rita showed the boy this painting, he told her that his family had been tobacco farmers and that he thought he recognized the man it portrayed. Rita feels this spirit guided her to work with these youths.

This is a good opportunity to call on your spirit guides for assistance. Use the “Meet Your Spirit Guides” guided communication exercise in Chapter 7 to ask for communication with your spirit guide. Then ask your spirit guide to help you maintain the limits you wish to set. Rita has established with her spirit guides, for example, that she does not want spirit contact to disturb her sleep unless absolutely necessary—the sleep state is a favorite time for spirits to attempt contact because your mind is very receptive. Instead, she makes herself available for spirit communication during her waking hours. She does permit spirit messages to come to her in the dream state, which is okay because it doesn’t wake her up.

The best place to practice your mediumistic skills is in a circle. There is strength in numbers, as the cliché goes, and the others in the circle can help and guide you as you are learning. They also learn from you, even though you might feel that as a novice you have little to offer them. You might find one circle and stay with it for a long time as participants grow together in their mediumistic skills and maintain a group vibration that those in spirit will come to recognize, or you might participate in several circles that have different members.

Check with the Spiritualist Churches and metaphysical groups in your area to find out what opportunities there are for learning mediumship. Appendix B also provides some general resources to get you started.

If you are not able to find an organized mediumistic circle, consider forming one of your own. You might be surprised and delighted with how many people (many of whom are likely already among your circle of friends and acquaintances) are interested in, or already have some level of participation with, mediumistic abilities and spirit communication. Where there is one, there are usually many—it’s just a matter of finding each other. (Chapter 11 offers advice and suggestions for choosing circles and circle participants.)

Realizing that you have mediumistic abilities is often exhilarating—like recognizing that you can sing, paint or dance when you’ve always wanted to do those things but thought they were beyond your reach. You are opening yourself to a whole new world—literally and figuratively. But after the novelty of discovery wears off, what’s next? You want to learn more, of course, and to explore your talents and see where they lead you.

Is this a calling to a career change? You might indeed decide that you want to be a professional medium. But that’s really a very personal decision that requires you to consider all aspects of your life. Regardless of how far you think you might want to take your development as a medium, start with the basics.

To some extent, your learning curve as a medium begins with the abilities that seem most prominent. Do you experience voices and sounds? Your predominant psychical ability might be clairaudience, and is a good place for you to start your development process. As is the case with your physical senses, your psychical senses are intertwined. (Do you taste or smell that freshly baked cinnamon roll?) As you develop one, you’ll discover and develop others.

You probably already use your psychic abilities in your communications among friends and family here on the earth plane. You pick up the telephone right before it rings, and it’s your sister calling. You impulsively turn left instead of right, and find a parking space. You stop by to see a friend, just in time to see him before he dashes off on an unexpected business trip.

Take these abilities to the next level, to communicate with spirit entities on the higher side, and now you’re talking medium!

As with any other skill that you want to develop, finding a mentor who can guide and assist you is a great boost. You can learn from your mentor’s experience and expertise as well as from your own experiences and any courses that you are taking. You might even think of this as an apprenticeship of sorts. It might be a teacher from your mediumship courses who becomes your mentor, or another medium that you meet through a circle.

Seek a mentor whose skills are significantly more advanced than yours, someone who is a leader of sorts in the spiritual or metaphysical community. Look for someone whose abilities and integrity you respect and trust, and ask if he or she is willing to mentor you. Because learning and teaching are so intimately integrated, those who want to learn are often also eager to teach.

Practice makes perfect, no matter what you’re doing. (Well, maybe not perfect, but certainly better!) The more you use your mediumistic abilities, the more competent you will become. Even when you reach the point of producing consistent results, practice leads to continuing improvement. Like playing the piano or riding a bicycle, you meet new challenges, reach new heights of achievement, and rest on plateaus of proficiency until it’s time to repeat the cycle of learning. And in time, your skills become second nature, simply part of what defines you and how you function in your life.

The short answer is, of course! If you want to learn more about anything, the most logical route is to go to school or take some classes. If there is a Spiritualist Church in your area, that is a good place to start. Spiritualist Churches offer instruction and classes in mediumship. They can also refer you to legitimate, qualified programs that offer more extensive study, if this interests you. One such program is the Spiritualist Course of Study for Mediumship, part of the Morris Pratt Institute’s Course of Study for Spiritualism. (See Appendix B for more information about MPI and other educational resources for mediums.)

Local universities and colleges, community colleges, and other educational institutions sometimes offer what they might call “extended learning” programs. (Sometimes these are called “life experience” or “adult continuing education” programs.) These are courses, generally not for college credit and often taught when regular credit classes are not in session, conducted by local experts. Such programs run the gamut from computer skills to tarot reading. You might find a course in psychic abilities, or even mediumship.

As with most learning experiences, the value of such courses depends on the expertise of the teacher. Always check the credentials of both the program and the teacher! Talk with the teacher before enrolling in the class, and ask about his or her training, experience, and orientation. Is he or she a Spiritualist? Or just a fan of the Ouija board? Does he or she view spirit communication as learning and healing, or just see it as entertainment? What if educational opportunities are in short supply in your area? Some programs offer distance learning courses (also called correspondence courses). A key benefit with such courses is that you can learn at your own pace, and within the constraints of other demands placed on your life and your schedule. Not everyone can drop everything to go to school, or even squeeze enough time from a busy day to take night classes!

The disadvantage of distance learning programs, of course, is that you’re pretty much on your own. There’s no opportunity for structured practice because you won’t have an instructor working with you to help you receive and give messages. If you’re considering a distance learning program, make sure you have adequate access to a medium. Lessons should be structured and detailed, and should include specific advice for addressing various scenarios that might arise during a spirit communication experience.

We talk a lot about establishing intent, and always try to make clear that this means asking for divine light to guide spirit communication for the highest good and for the greatest healing or learning. A piece of this inevitably becomes, “So what do you want to accomplish with this communication?”

At times, you might desire contact with a specific spirit entity—your mother, father, sister, brother, spouse, or friend who has passed to the other side. Often, this spirit is willing to oblige, and responds to the energy signals that you send out. This is always gratifying and comforting; it reestablishes your sense of the continuity of life in very direct and obvious ways.

But spirits aren’t always willing or able to respond when we want to call on them. Spirits are active and learning on the higher side, too! Spirits have free will, too. It’s important to remain open to the spirits and to messages that do come through, even when they don’t appear to be what you want. There is a grander scheme to the universe than we, as physical beings, are capable of understanding, and we often simply need to accept that.

If you are using your mediumistic abilities to communicate with spirits for yourself, remain open to whatever the experience turns out to be. The questions that you have, and the contacts that you desire, might not be the matters that are relevant in a particular communication, or even in general. Always keep as your conscious intent that spirit communication is for the highest good. Be still, and just let the information come through. You’ll have plenty of time afterward to think and analyze.

Ask questions of your spirit connections if you are unclear about a message, but realize that the meaning of the message might not become clear to you until quite some time later. A message that appears enigmatic might be just a piece of a much larger message that will come to you over multiple spirit connections, or that contains information you aren’t ready to receive yet. Be patient; the meaning will come!

When you use your mediumistic abilities on behalf of other people, remember that you are just the messenger. It is not your role to interpret the messages that you receive, or to judge them (although certainly your consciousness filters them; more on this in Chapter 13). Let the images and concepts come through. Always remember that you are in charge; deliver them responsibly.

Sometimes, information comes in bits and pieces. If you are patient, the fragments will take shape and make sense to the sitter who is receiving them.

Your mediumistic abilities are a great gift, and with them comes the responsibility to use them wisely and always for the greatest good (we keep emphasizing this because it is such an essential point). Indeed, spirit contact can be, and often is, joyous and fun. Not many of us would be drawn to it if it wasn’t! Spirit communication can bring much insight, understanding, comfort, and delight into your life. In the end, it’s all about you!

Messages that come through spirits are sometimes unexpected or intense, and can surface issues that you need to confront, address, and resolve. If your intent is pure (meaning that you’ve established that this spirit communication is for the highest good), tremendous healing and learning will come as a result.

When these messages are for you, take time afterward to sort through your emotions and thoughts. Keep a journal about your experience, if this helps you. Talk with a friend who understands. Talk with a medium, if you know one whom you trust. And if the issues that arise feel overwhelming, seek professional help from a therapist. It doesn’t matter what initiates the process of healing; what counts is that you follow through so that healing can take place.

There is great receiving in giving. It can be tremendously satisfying to use your abilities and skills to help others, and to bring messages of comfort and love from loved ones who have passed. Imagine what our world could be like if we all used our talents, mediumistic and otherwise, to help and nurture each other!

The Least You Need to Know