What is Mediumship?

If you have ever seen a medium on television or in a movie, you probably already have a picture in your head of what you think mediumship looks like. Maybe you picture someone sitting across from you with their eyes closed, suddenly talking to your grandmother who passed away years ago or maybe you picture a spirit appearing in the room while the medium dramatically tells you exactly who is standing there. While there are certainly mediums who may experience things in ways that can look similar to what you have seen on TV, mediumship isn't necessarily going to look like that.

So what exactly is mediumship? At its most basic, mediumship is about communication from the other side of the veil. A medium is a person who acts as a channel to help facilitate that communication between those who have crossed over and the people who are still here. The way that communication happens can look very different depending on the medium and their individual practice.

You may hear different terms used when talking about mediums, including evidential medium, spiritual medium or psychic medium. There are other terms too, and sometimes those terms can make it sound like there are all these completely separate categories of people doing completely different things. While there can absolutely be differences in how someone practices, we are all essentially under the same umbrella. We are working to communicate with the other side and bring through information from those who have crossed over but each of us may do that in our own way.

There really is no one size fits all approach to mediumship. Every medium develops their own practice and their own way of working. The way I experience information may be completely different from the way another medium experiences it, and the way I conduct a reading may look very different from the way another medium conducts theirs. That doesn't mean one person is doing it right and the other is doing it wrong. It means we are individuals and our practices are going to reflect that.

This also means that if you have a mediumship reading with two different mediums, those readings may look completely different from each other. One medium may receive a lot of visual information while another may hear words or names. Another may experience physical sensations or emotions, while someone else may simply know something without being able to explain where that information came from. Some mediums experience several of these things together. There really isn't a single way that a medium is supposed to receive information, and the fact that your experiences with different mediums can look different is not only okay, it is normal.

This is where we start getting into something called the clairsenses. You have probably heard of clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance, which involve receiving information through different forms of seeing, hearing, feeling and knowing. There are also other clairs that involve things like smell, taste and touch. We are going to take a much deeper dive into each of these in their own upcoming blogs because there is a lot more to them than I can fit into one introduction, but I wanted to touch on them here because there is a really interesting possibility that you may have experienced one or more of these yourself at some point in your life without ever realizing there was a name for it.

Maybe you have suddenly known something without knowing how you knew it. Maybe you have smelled a scent that reminded you of someone who had passed away when there was no obvious reason for you to smell it. Maybe you have had an incredibly vivid image pop into your mind or experienced a feeling that seemed to come from somewhere other than you. I'm not saying that every unexplained experience is automatically mediumship, but these are experiences that people can have and it can be pretty damn exciting when you start putting the pieces together and realize there is actually a language for some of the things you have experienced.

So we know what mediumship is but what is mediumship not? There is a ton of misinformation floating around out there. Some of it comes from people who simply don't understand what mediumship actually is and some of it gets repeated so often that people start treating it like fact. Skeptics also love to point to that misinformation when talking about mediumship as though every medium practices in exactly the same way and every reading is supposed to look the same.

Mediumship isn't about being able to magically know everything about someone just because they are sitting in front of you. It isn't mind reading and it isn't having access to every thought, secret or detail of someone's life. It also isn't about every medium having the exact same experiences or receiving information in exactly the same way. I also want to say very clearly here, mediumship is NOT talking to demons or Satan. You are not going to go to hell for contacting a medium or having a mediumship reading. Also mediumship does not give us the winning lottery numbers or predict the future, it's a bummer I know.

A mediumship reading isn't necessarily going to look like what you have seen on television either and if your experience with one medium doesn't look like your experience with another, that doesn't automatically mean something went wrong. There is a lot more to mediumship than what gets portrayed in movies, television shows and social media clips. It is a practice that can look different from person to person there is no one right way to connect that everyone needs to follow.

If you have experienced any of the things we talked about here and you've been trying to make sense of them, I'm glad you found this. Maybe you've had an experience that you couldn't explain, maybe you've always been curious about mediumship or maybe you've been thinking about having a reading but weren't really sure what to expect. Hopefully this helped clear some of that up for you.

We're going to spend the next several blogs getting into those clairsenses individually, what they can actually feel like and how they can show up in mediumship. You may even recognize yourself in some of what we talk about. If you came in curious about having a mediumship reading yourself, I hope this gave you a better understanding of what mediumship actually is and what you can expect from the practice.