How Mediumship Works

Talking to our loved ones via a medium is so important to piercing the veil that I’ve often wondered what’s going on when a medium conveys messages to us from the Other Side. I’ve just read a great chapter about this in a book about Mrs. Gladys Leonard (1882-1968).

The four important contributors to a sitting are:

1. Communicator – the person on the Other Side who is sending the messages.
2. Control – the nonphysical being who acts as a bridge between the communicator and the human medium. Using a control avoids the need for communicators and mediums to learn how to work with each other. The control also serves as ‘traffic cop’ to prevent all the communicators bombarding the medium at once.
3. Medium – the living person who receives the messages from the control and speaks them or uses automatic writing. (This is true for a conscious medium. Leonard was a trance medium, with Feda in control.)
4. Sitter – the person who attends the sitting either to ask questions or hear the messages.

How It Works

Back in the hey-day of spiritualism, a sitting would usually open with the medium going into trance and establishing contact with the control. Then the control would describe the communicator to the medium, who passed it along to the sitter, so the latter can establish the identity of the communicator.

Now, the important part of this is that the control has learned how to interact with the medium’s mind, and can drop words and impressions directly into it. Being in trance, the medium’s conscious mind has retreated, leaving the other parts of the mind open to the control’s input. One of the medium’s big challenges is to get out of the way of the control and stay out, and it took Leonard a while to get comfortable with Feda assuming control of her body, mind and vocal cords.

Once the sitter is satisfied that the communicator is who they say they are, the real process can begin … and this is when problems can arise.  First, the communicator needs to convey information clearly to the control, which requires tremendous focus on the part of the former so images and words can be accurately transmitted. Common scenes like children playing with animals are easy to send, but more esoteric images can get scrambled by the communicator or misinterpreted by the control. And names are next to impossible. For example, how would you send ‘Parkinson’ to someone when playing Charades?

The next problem is the frame of reference of the control, which determines how they interpret the messages from the communicator. He or she may jump to a conclusion about what the message means, and thus impress the medium with total garbage, which ticks off the sitter. Feda, Mrs. Leonard’s control, often caused huge problems due to her limited vocabulary and life experience. During times of war, many communicators would be military, who would want to convey concepts way beyond a girl who died in 1800 at age 13, which Feda did. This also limited the complexity of messages, which was a shame because sitters and communicators were often highly intelligent and very well-read.

This limitation was overcome when the communicator was able to dictate the message word-for-word to Feda, who then used Mrs. Leonard’s vocal cords to speak it word-for-word. However, the conditions had to be exactly right for this to work, and it depended on how the medium’s day had gone earlier. On days when it was not possible, Feda relied on interpreting thought-images sent by the communicator, which was sometimes hit-or-miss.

Another problem came when the communicator changed the subject but Feda didn’t pick up on the change and ascribed information about the new topic to the previous topic, so nothing made sense any more. Hours could be wasted as the sitter tried to figure out what was going on and why nothing was fitting together.

The final component in the process is the sitter, who forms a unified field with the medium, control and communicator, so the sitter’s energy is important. Suppose a husband and wife show up for a sitting, and the wife believes in the process but the husband doesn’t. His negativity will either kill any communication, or, if communication actually happens, could reduce its clarity.

When we look at all the variables, it’s a wonder that the process ever worked:

• Communicators may not yet have attained mastery of their energy after crossing over.
• The control simply may not be able to figure out what the communicator is sending, or even understand the words being used, so jumps to a conclusion, any conclusion, just to keep the sitting moving along.
• The medium may have an interest in the subject of a message and inject some personal slant that distorts the meaning.
• The sitter may have firm expectations about what constitutes a ‘hit’ and refuses to accept as valid anything that does not conform to that expectation.
• Some outside entity may disrupt the process out of curiosity or malice.

Despite the frustrations, mediums such as Gladys Leonard and Leonora Piper helped millions of sitters assuage their grief by providing a link to those on the Other Side.

Right on!