My father died just before I turned seven. My mother had gone to mediums for all my childhood. I was raised in New York and New Jersey and had access to the New York Theosophical society to which both my parents had belonged. I was exposed to the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and Alice Bailey. As an adult I was open to having readings; and the lady I went to, a friend of my mother taught me early on to do numerology and read tarot.
When I came to the UK I experienced difficult life circumstances and had a reading once from a lady who was telling me about this and that relative that really had no correlation with my past; although the house I lived in dated from the 13th century. I thought she was a nice lady but that she had no grasp on reality and she had not been able to help my situation. Still, she had made me aware of the spiritualist church in the UK and I was open to going although I was not aware of any local churches. I went to a church meeting on the Isle of Wight in 1990. Whenever I would go, no one from the other side ever spoke to me during demonstrations.
Then one year when I was studying to be a chiropractor, I stopped in the Oxford church on my way home from school. Someone came to me during the demonstration; they said it was my maternal grandmother. As far as I knew she was very much alive, in the USA. My mother had been estranged from her mother my whole life.
So when I got home I phoned my mother in the USA, and then did some digging. My maternal grandmother was alive when I was in church, in a coma. She died within 48 hours of the demonstration and it was the only way my mother found out her mother was passing.
I had been reading cards for years but the exploration of mediums continues a very interesting and ever changing experience.
The purpose of being a medium is to listen and to translate. A medium learns to listen clearly and to interpret with compassion and integrity and kindness, to those present. For instance, if the medium is presenting in front of a group of people, part of the listening is to choose the correct recipient in the audience. Discernment must be employed as well as looking to the spirit world for the confirmation that their information is being passed on correctly. Some people present have a deep understanding of spirit. Some people are drawn by some loss and bereavement. They can be vulnerable; your translation can either heal or hurt. Some are drawn by curiosity. The translation of the listening is very key to the idea of what can or cannot be acceptable as communication.
The spirit people are all around everyone, all the time. To take the responsibility to translate for them is great indeed. The idea is to be the telephone for loved ones separated by ether. People without their physical trappings of a body are not so different from when they were alive in their bodies. Sometimes they can be rude or crude. It becomes the gift of the medium to translate all manner of messages with compassion, in a way that does not cause even more grief to the newcomer. To be able to translate between the worlds is an honour and an act of service to humanity. At the same time, the medium has the responsibility not to colour messages with the drama or glamour. It is the responsibility of the medium not to preach. Practice makes perfect. Ongoing personal development outside the demonstration is imperative to accuracy and to become comfortable with most accurate communication.
Evidence must contain information that the recipient can remember or look up either in photographs or even trinkets or other articles left by the spirit communicator. Evidence may include physical description of the loved one, or the manner in which they may have passed, based on what is being communicated either mentally or through the body of the medium.