Question 3: Do You Think It’s a Gift?
Do you think it’s a gift? Yes and no.
Think of it like the other kinds of gifts we attribute to people. There are people who excel at running, for example, but if they don’t practice and train, they’re unlikely to become an Olympic gold medalist. But that doesn’t change the fact that even without intensive training, they’re still going to be excellent runners and outrun the vast majority of us on the track in the first place. So there is something to be said for the raw material – the diversity in all of us that allows the human race to excel at so many different things and at so many levels.
To that extent, perhaps some of us are born with a greater natural aptitude to unfold our awareness and develop the skills required to be a professional psychic and medium: sensitivity; empathy; the ability to sense spirit; the ability to tune into the multiple channels of perception; the ability to be still and clear the mind at will; the skill of being able to differentiate personal thoughts from information we’re picking up from another mind; and so forth. Of course, it’s also critically important that I can explain what I’m feeling and seeing to another person clearly, and without flourish or embellishment, so that my client can have the most evidential experience possible. So yes, do I have a gift, sure. But on balance it’s not any greater or less than any other human gift, and even more importantly – the most basic skills of psychic work and mediumship can be taught and developed through dedicated practice.
This said, there is a feeling I once carried that I think is common in our culture, that psychics and mediums are these “other people” who were “born special” or perhaps had a sudden brush with death or other traumatic experience where they were “transformed” – so if you didn’t have that, if you weren’t one of those people who were talking to your dead Aunt Marge in the first grade – well, then you’re not one of the “special ones” and that’s simply so untrue. And these false beliefs can be hardened, sometimes, when a client with absolutely no understanding of psychic work or mediumship experiences it for the very first time, and doesn’t see the often decades of practice and devotion that went into making that reader an excellent psychic medium. Perhaps it is the fact that so few of us in general do this work professionally, that it is easier to understand the kind of effort and training that went into the development of other professionals’ abilities.
Throughout my life I’ve had the privilege of meeting truly amazing psychics and mediums – but before I started, I had absolutely no idea, at all, that I was also sitting on that very same power, undeveloped, and would eventually be able to use it professionally and teach others to do the same. Understanding this deeply, I can see why the end product can “look like magic” and be exploited by some as a “gift” of the “special few” – when in reality, communication between two souls is a completely natural human capacity that’s found at the core of our beings. That’s why some Spiritualists talk about the idea of “unfolding” one’s mediumship rather than “developing” it: the language affirms the belief that all of us have the capacity for it inside.
We’re all born mediums and psychics, and that’s a gift of the human experience at whatever level you are. And yes, there are also some like me who have taken this gift and developed it with great passion and love.