Presenting and Working with
the Evidence
Although there are no hard and fast rules that satisfy each and every encounter you might have with a sitter, because everyone’s life circumstances and reasons for coming to you are unique, I have found that generally a professional, kind, and thoughtful demeanor is most useful. From this standpoint, a reading can always be respectful, even if the sitter does not get the information that he or she came for, or might even be confused by some of the information that is given. Here are a few guidelines regarding how to convey the messages you receive.
Be Dignified in Your Presentation
Even if you are a beginner, you should always present your mediumship in a professional manner. Remember, a lot of people still think that mediums are either frauds or circus acts. To educate the public, you must hold your mediumship to a high standard and present unique, high-quality evidence.
Describe How You Receive Spirit Information
If you receive the information clairvoyantly, preface your report with, “I see … ” If the information comes through clairaudience, say, “I hear … ” If you receive impressions through clairsentience, say, “I sense … ” or, “I feel … ” If you smell something, say, “I smell … ” or, “I am aware of the scent of … ”
When you present the evidence in this way, you validate your process and provide a context for the information. You also train yourself to pay attention to what you receive through all the spiritual senses. In my development circles, I often notice the mediums who present the evidence with a series of “I get” statements often miss out on the subtler spirit impressions, because they are always waiting for the next big thing to “get.”
Always Present the Evidence
through a Series of Statements
“I see a young man who appears to be in his mid-thirties. I sense that he died in a car accident. I hear hip-hop music around him. He brings with him the scent of a hot-fudge sundae. I taste Cherry Coke, and I know that he drank it often.”
Don’t Present Evidence by
Asking a Series of Yes-or-No Questions
Even if you are correct, your sitters may think you are making lucky guesses. They might not believe you are communicating with their spirit loved ones. Some questions might seem to be so specific that they clinch the spirit person’s identity. Still, they are much more compelling if phrased as statements. Consider switching the following questions into “I sense” or “He tells me” statements: “Did your father marry five times?” “Was he forty-five when his first child was born?” “Did he drive a school bus?” “Did he like to play poker?” “Did he win the lottery?” “Did his son crash the family car?”
Working with the Evidence
Verify that Your Sitter Understands
the Information You Receive from Spirit
I like to provide my sitter with about five or six pieces of evidence at a time before I ask if he or she understands the information. For example, I might say, “I am aware of a woman who lived into her nineties. She outlived her husband by twenty-five years. She is your grandmother. Her name was Rose or Rosa. She died in her sleep, and she loved quilting. Do you understand? Please answer yes or no.” After the sitter has acknowledged the information, I bring in another group of five or six pieces of evidence.
In this way, you can make sure your reading stays on track. Conversely, if you were to give too many pieces of evidence without checking with your recipient, you might run into trouble—the sitter might not remember the beginning of the evidence, or might get turned off if one piece in a string sounds wrong, even if the rest are correct.
Also, verifying information with the sitter makes it easier to spot when there has been a change in spirit communicators. For example, after Grandma has had her say, Granddad might decide to come into the reading and start sending his own information, though he might not come into your field of clairvoyant vision. If you were to continue giving information without verifying with your sitter, you might not realize that the dentures, the bum leg, the penchant to drive above the speed limit, and the tendency to lose keys don’t match with Grandma, but with Granddad. If the sitter had the opportunity to say, “No,” to the last four pieces of information, I would ask the communicating spirit person to identify himself clearly and not mix the evidence.
Do Not Edit or Omit Seemingly Incongruent Evidence
You might be tempted to edit or omit information you think might not fit with your sitter or that makes you feel uncomfortable. However, when you leave out information, your sitter might not recognize the spirit person who has come into the reading. You have no way of knowing what might be significant!
Years ago, when I was student medium in a development class, my exercise partner was a very stylish woman with manicured hands and perfectly coiffed hair. The spirit relative who came through for her was a slovenly looking, middle-aged man named Ed with a big belly, disheveled hair, and grease stains all over his shirt. I could not figure out how such an unkempt person could be connected to my very chic sitter. So when I described the spirit person to her, I purposefully omitted the disheveled appearance and the grease-stained shirt.
My exercise partner kept wrinkling her nose and shook her head. “Ed?” she asked. “No, I don’t know anybody named Ed.” I kept beating around the bush, but the information still didn’t make sense to her. Finally, exasperated, I blurted out, “Okay, Ed looks like a slob. His hair is a mess, and there are big grease stains all over his shirt!”
“Oh, my God,” my exercise partner exclaimed as she reached for the tissue box. “That’s my beloved Uncle Ed! He was my favorite uncle! I’ve missed him so much! Oh, dear Uncle Ed! I’m sorry, I just didn’t recognize him from your initial description!”
Do Not Tailor the Evidence When a Recipient Disagrees
Inexperienced and insecure mediums who haven’t developed enough trust in their spirit helpers are sometimes guilty of changing the evidence based on feedback from the recipient. It works like this: You give a stream of detailed evidence; for example, “I am in contact with your father; he died in his late seventies of a heart attack. In his younger days he was a roadie for the Rolling Stones.” The client shakes her head and says, “No, my father was forty when he died in an accident. He wasn’t a roadie, but I think that he once went to a Rolling Stones concert.” The medium then changes the evidence: “As I was saying, your father was in his forties when he died and had chest pain as a result of an accident he had on his way back from a Rolling Stones concert.”
There are several problems with backtracking and trying to make the evidence fit the feedback you receive. First of all, it is dishonest, and the recipient might conclude that you are a fraud even if your skills are legitimate. Second, subsequent evidence will also not fit the person’s father, because the actual spirit communicator is someone different. Third, a few minutes later the sitter might have an epiphany and recall the initial evidence fits her father’s brother. At that point you will have gone so far down the wrong path that the initial spirit communicator is long gone. What could have been a wonderfully evidential reading is now completely bungled.
It is always best to just stick with your evidence. Trust and report what you receive. If the client says, “No,” then work with the spirit person to clarify the problem, but do not change the evidence so it fits the feedback!
Do Not Rush to Interpret Symbolic Information
Symbolic information is often very unique and highly personal to the spirit communicator, the sitter, or both. A medium can easily throw a reading off course by trying to interpret a symbol.
Describe what you perceive as accurately as you can, and ask whether your sitter understands the symbol. If the sitter nods his or her head, just move on to the next piece of evidence. Do not try to understand what the symbol means to the sitter. It is not your business! Besides, by trying to understand, you interject your conscious mind, and you risk losing your connection with your spirit person.
If the sitter does not understand the symbol, ask if there is a reason why the spirit person would show you this symbol. Most of the time, once the sitter starts to think about it, the meaning will become clear. In the rare event that the sitter still does not have a clue, go back to your spirit communicator and say, “[Sitter’s name] does not understand the symbol you’ve shown. Why are you showing me the symbol? Can you give me the information in a different way?”
I would attempt to interpret a symbol only as a last resort. In that case, I would give the sitter a number of possible interpretations and encourage the person to think about the possible meaning in the days after the reading. Often people just need some time to reflect before they understand a symbolic message.
Do Not Draw Conclusions Based on the Evidence
For example, the spirit communicator might have identified himself as a soldier. A few moments later he might give you an image or the feeling of being in a hot and arid location. Based on these two pieces of information, you might jump to the conclusion that he had been stationed in Iraq, when in fact he was remembering his favorite family vacation in Death Valley National Park (no pun intended). Let the sitter draw conclusions based on what you, the medium, are reporting. When in doubt, or if you have a hunch about something, always go back to the spirit communicator and verify that your hunch is correct.
Never Solicit Information from Your Sitter
You’ll often see mediums in public demonstrations say things like, “Do you have a mother in the spirit world? Was she young when she died? Did she have a car accident?” Or, “Who died of a heart attack? What killed Grandpa?” Or, “Who is John to you?”
Mediums who ask such questions give the appearance of fishing for information that they can feed back to the sitter. This practice leaves you vulnerable to the charge that you are not in contact with the spirit world at all, but out to dupe the gullible.
If you have to ask questions, ask your spirit helpers and your spirit communicators. Trust they will help give you the correct information and the right answers.
Provide a Plethora of Evidential Information
Before You Launch into the Message
Giving someone a message without giving a plethora of evidence as to who is communicating is like sending a spam email. Why should your sitter trust a message from an unknown sender?
Never Embellish the Evidence or the Message
Don’t say Mom was a darling and is sending love to your sitter unless you really feel her love in your heart. It is important to remember that not all spirit people were kind and loving while they were in a physical body. Sometimes you’ll bring through spirit people who were downright nasty and abusive to their spouses and children. When you say the sitter’s abusive father is coming through with hugs, kisses, and compliments, your sitter might think that either you are on drugs or that you are lying. It is not your job to sugarcoat the evidence or the experience.
Never Predict Death
The majority of human beings are terrified of death. You will erase all the benefits of a reading or spirit greeting when you predict a person’s death. Also, keep in mind that a prediction of death could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is absolutely irresponsible, unethical, and a misuse of your spiritual gifts to plant such an idea in someone’s mind.
It is possible that on rare occasions a spirit person might articulate concern about a person who is still alive. You might have the sense that this person’s time on earth is running out. Should you tell the recipient about what you are sensing?
If you feel absolutely compelled that the sitter needs to know this, ask the spirit communicators why they are conveying this information to you. What action would they like your sitter to take?
It is then up to you to find a tactful way to convey the spirit’s concern without making a death prediction or scaring the sitter. For example, if the sitter’s mother is living in another state and you feel that her time to return to Spirit is drawing close, you could say: “Spirit recommends you make time to visit your mother. I feel urgency with this, so please don’t delay this trip.” If the sitter wants to know why, you can say that the spirit doesn’t say why, but that’s the message you received.
Beware of Working on the Psychic Level
You can tell that a medium is working strictly on the psychic level—receiving information from the energy field of the sitter instead of from a spirit person—when he or she either gives no evidence or only minimal evidence. When the medium works only on the psychic level, she will immediately talk about matters that relate to the life of the recipient, not the deceased.
In this case, she would probably say something like, “Your mother is standing beside you, and she’s telling me that next month you are moving to another state. Watch out with that move, because things won’t turn out as you think. There is going to be a problem with the house you’re going to move into, and your new job is going to be a challenge, too, because someone in the new office isn’t a team player.”
While this could be a perfectly valid and valuable message for the recipient, there is no proof of the continuity of life in it. Remember, as a medium, you should always strive to convey healing and comfort through bringing evidence of the continuity of life beyond physical death. Your job is to convey the message that the spirit person wishes to convey—not your own psychic reading of the sitter’s circumstances.