And the answer is....

So you have watched Colin Fry on the tenth re-run of the programme “Sixth Sense”, caught up with John Edwards “Crossing Over” at lunch time and you have now received your application form to be Tony Stockwell’s next apprentice on “Psychic Academy”. All in the preparation of launching yourself on the unsuspecting world with your new found ability to predict the future and talk to the dead.

But before you rush off to post your application, is it really that easy to become the next top medium?

For some, maybe, but for most it is years of self-development, self-healing and single minded dedication, with a few ego trips thrown in.  The biggest issue is knowing where to start and to sort through the minefield of information given to you by your new found spiritual friends.

Unless you have grown up in Spiritualism, most peoples journey starts with a thousand unanswered questions and a stumble towards a tarot reading with Mystic Peg who dramatically confirms to you that you have psychic powers.   Sometimes it is through a Clairvoyance Evening at the local sport centre or pub and for others it was by braving the doors of the local spiritualist church with hope and doubt held tightly in both hands. Either way Spirit has announced that you are one of them and you have been left feeling like Quasimodo and the Tooth Fairy rolled into one.   The answers, however,   that you hoped to find from the tea leaves at the bottom of a tea cup or at a medium demonstration may still leave you somewhat bewildered and wondering if you have joined the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

The revelation that all the things you know when you shouldn’t know, the weird voices no one else hears and the odd people you see are not a figment of your wild imagination or you buying a timeshare in the local mental home can be welcomed with masked relief laced with wonderment.  Unless you have a profound spiritual most initially put psychic ability in the level of having magic powers or at the foot of God or the Devil, whichever comes first. 

The background drop of Christianity still sits heavily upon the social conscious of the western world, and whilst the acceptance of multi religion is still in toddler training pants, the fear of anything potentially supernatural, or unnatural, is not. Most might think that the days of witch hunts are gone, but those stuck in the world of religious dogma would rapidly agree to get their crusade swords out if God, and human rights, would only sanction them to do it.  Where fear is involved, change is like the hidden track on an album, not in the title list but eventually played.

But times are changing. Pockets of people are starting to virally spread all over the UK bringing the questions of Who, How, What and Why to people’s personal lives.  TV and radio programmes now have “your daily talk with spirit” slots etched in their schedules in not wanting to miss out on the new hot religious trend.  Psychic development workshops and medium demonstrations are starting to infiltrate every town as people open their awareness to Spirit and blink their third eye.  Spiritualism is like the new kid on the block, everyone has noticed him and trying to work out if he is going to fit into the gang, with some embracing him like a long lost friend and others suspiciously watching this new “weird” kid from behind the corner.

So you want to develop your psychic ability and to learn all about how to be a medium – but it feels like someone is playing the three cup game, and you are struggling to work out where the ball is?

Don’t get taken in by the hype.  It is good that Spiritualism is evolving in this dawning Age of Aquarius, but note with popularity, also breeds those keen to part us from our money; those keen to become leaders in this new revolution with them replacing “God” with new buzz words like “Great Spirit”, “The Divine” and “The Source”, all confirming that we have a place in Spirit, and that with them we will find the quickest way to enlightenment. Get your purses ready!

God does have a new PR company, but they are still governed by those human traits of greed and control.

Firstly, let’s get a few misconceptions out of the way.  Yes, you do have a place in Spirit, as we are Spirit in a physical body, and when we die, our spirit body continues into the Spirit World.  God may not be an individual but there is a consciousness, an energy, which most would identify as Christianities “God”, and many in the movement still call this source “God”.  It is a label which us human’s have given because we insist on labels to identify our physical world.  Yes, there is a path to enlightenment, but it is not quick, and no one but you will help you get there any quicker. 

But hey, don’t count on me for evidence, this is my belief, and you are going to have to find your own.  Belief is personal and I highly recommend that you listen and hear what everyone else has to say – and gather the common known stuff and then read in between the lines.  Yes, I am writing the gospel according to me, Jan Godfrey, but you will find many views out there, but when you learn about Spirit, it is important to understand it.

Recently I came back from The Arthur Findlay College of Psychic Studies after a week on a Mediumship Course organised by Tony Stockwell, one of the many but more well know mediums, who organises courses there.  The Arthur Findlay College is a wonderful place for learning as well as a lovely place to stay. It is managed by the Spiritualist National Union, and yes they do have their way of thinking, but one thing which came out of it for me strongly was a message that was given by one of my Husband’s tutors issuing a mantra to her students every now and again.  “Keep working with Spirit simple”.

It is true that if those at Arthur Findlay have a variety of  Witches, Druids, Earth Angels and Folk of the Fey, as well as average human Fred and Marg attending their courses, the rooms during demonstration may be a little full of communicators.  Consider it for a moment, Archangel Michael and Uriel and several other Angels from the dominions queuing with Quarter Guardians, and the Great Indian Guide, Purple Cloud, hob-nobbing it with dotty Aunt Mildred and Uncle George to get their message across. This is totally besides a few Ascended Masters and other high guides being channelled in Trance class. God may even make an entrance himself!  Interesting. but potentially very confusing for anyone trying to learn the controls for their new toy mediumship.

The message keep it simple is a good one though.  When you are learning to work with Spirit you don’t need to dress it up or bring your full personal belief of the magical or angelic world into it.  All you need to do is believe in what you are doing and the evidence you are obtaining for yourself when you are working with Spirit. The lovely thing is when Spirit comes through they give you evidence about their physical lives to you, and this evidence becomes beautifully confirmed as true by the person you are giving the message to.  If they can’t confirm it – then there is something not quite right and it is normally the “medium”.

I can hear you magical people out there shouting “but what about honouring the other spirits?”  In truth most people are looking to understand that their existence is not limited to this world, but continues for eternity.  Most struggle with that in the first place, and to bring them too much into someone else’s reality by channelling a label they do not recognise or understand will undermine the true message you are trying to give.  It will be like you channelling Mickey Mouse when they decided that they grew out of Disney when they were a child.

That is not to say that the Mystical and angel lore does not have their place.  You will look at other knowledge – I did.  Shamanic Journeying, Animal guides, Angel workshops, Druidic and Wiccan paths, Buddhist, Fairy and Elemental lore; they are full topics in themselves and deserve an understanding.

The point is that everyone has their own reality, but the human trait of over complicating things in their aim to reach perfection is often misplaced.  We go through experiences in our life both good and bad and it is not in the aim to be perfect, but to grow spiritually and to be the best we can be.  Often when we try to be perfect it is because we have allowed someone to set our ruler at an unfair level and we feel that we fail if we do not achieve it. This often results in treating ourselves, and others, harshly when it seems beyond us.  The human need to control others in order to control our own world can be found in every battle and every religious book telling us how we should be.  Someone else is always to blame for our own perceived failures with God and the Devil having a starring role in having a bad day on the publicity front and named as scapegoat.

So if you are looking for the Devil, just look at yourself in a mirror and imagine horns and fire around you and by all means give yourself a roasting for your lack of perfection.  You can create your personal hell, as that is what man is good at and does every day to himself just by over complicating life. Everything you emotionally feel is created by you, and if you see Judgement day coming, it is you who is the judge, the jury and the hangman.  God aka the Great Spirit and your Spirit family are partying in the blissful knowledge that one day you will have a home coming celebration where the big picture and your true reality will be lovingly understood. Meanwhile you are not enjoying your experience.

So when you get passed the rumour that you are doing the devils work, and the worlds view of the amazing powers you possess and how you are going to work with all these wonderful people who are now at your beck and call.  Start cutting the story away from the facts, look for your truth and understand when everyone is lost in their own story.

As everything in your life, whether you walk through good or bad experiences, recognise that everything in life is as it should be for you to grow spiritually & be the best you can be. You do not need to fix it, make it better, or be perfect.  You only just have to live in the moment and just trust in Spirit. Just learn from the lessons of life as they come.  You only have to be open to the opportunities and it is the same with developing your psychic abilities and working with Spirit, you do not need to reinvent the wheel, just allow the wheel you have to naturally go round.

As Aleksandr Orlov of Market fame wisely says the answer is “Simples”.

The beginning

In my world I am normal - but in Harry Potters "muggle" world, I am not.  Its good to be quirky, have a character, but if you tell some people you are a medium, someone who talks to Spirit - instantly to most you have become someone who is on par with the local looney fruitcake, and at the very least an object of interest.  So many would argue this normality - as the unseeing are just blind, the unhearing, just deaf, and the unfeeling, just unconnected.  Every psychic/medium though has been there, started at the beginning.

We all have those light bulb moments, where a deep realisation seeps through our consciousness and changes us inside. When you finally recognise that you are on a spiritual path it is like having Regents Street, Oxford Street and Disneyland’s Christmas illuminations all turn on at the same time.

Finding yourself is truly a wondrous thing, knowing that there is more to your life than just you and a reason for your being and that the ultimate answer to the ultimate question to life the universe and everything is not 42 as found in “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. It is something more, but as you explore it becomes still indefinable and less tangible and open to interpretation and just as explanatory as the answer of 42.

Why? It is because belief is personal. We all want evidence that we are an important integral part of Gods, or the Great Spirits, plan, and that we belong in it in some way. To believe in an afterlife or the continuation of the soul after death is a big one for anyone to get their head round, particularly as God’s PR Department seems to be putting out vague and confusing versions of his truth with his own personal spin doctors seeming to be all more focused on bloody argument and whose lightning struck who first.

If like me all your life you have had this inner knowing that things are not quite as they seem, and that the drama of being born to die is potentially more like the commercial break in a wonderfully long drama series, you may have just cracked it.  Some of us may come to the spiritual path young, but most stumble upon it after a tremendous hangover after drinking too much life, and discover that Spirit is not just the lovely stuff in a bottle which makes your head all fuzzy on a night out, but is also who we truly are, and equally as mind blowing. Getting our head round that we are energy light forms, and that when we depart this world, we go home to spirit and catch up with all those lovely people we missed, and some who we haven't.  It is our own version of the big bang.

So, ok, you have just got over the thought of preferring to get dressed in the dark due to members of your family potentially standing at the bottom of your bed, some without even a formal introduction, let alone the odd stranger or two joining in. It comes, therefore, as a great relief to hear as you contemplate in the loo with orchestral sound effects that superiority can be a good thing and that Spirit are not so concerned with the mundane things of physical life.  They have been there and done it, got the t-shirt and prefer to retain their energy for causing the odd night disturbance and frightening the unsuspecting person with the odd knocking, or ghosting appearance or two. You might get a dose of the hebe jeebees, but that just makes it more exciting.

The stories of ghosts are as old as time itself and the rumour of one sends paranormalists into waving tickets like touts at a world football match, often ignoring the plight of an earth bound Spirit or chasing after residue energy of moments in time that have been recorded faithfully by buildings.  Most newbie’s to spiritualism are intrigued and confused by all the blurb that comes with the Light Bulb Event and are more looking for someone to give them the answers. So, devotedly many join the "Spiritualist" club safe in the knowledge that they will all be greeted with love and light and immediately transcend to more than just human and faster than you can say Superman.

Nope!  Just because you have become a fully paid up member of Spiritualist United, and that you are regularly receiving your “Spirit Weekly” (magazine or spirit visitation) does not mean you have white washed your soul and all those nasty little negative human traits have disappeared.  Being spiritual is just a term when someone has accepted that spirit exists and a wider concept is being considered.  Little clique groups of people vaguely suggesting that you can’t come and play if you don’t play with their ball still exists, and they still gossip about Miss Pointy Nose down the street.  Often you can find that some people are just not so spiritual after all, and that sometimes the more down to earth ordinary man who doesn’t profess to have a spiritual belief is closer to the higher realms that most of us.  The first thing we need to remember is that we are human, and that we are here to live our human lives, spiritual or not.   Being truly spiritual is not a hat you can take on and off as and when you feel like it, but is part of who you truly are inside and the very fabric of your energy.  Not everything is about love and light and if you choose to wave that concept around like a Jedi Knight wielding a light sabre, then that is up to you. The truth is to be just a person who genuinely tries to treat everyone they meet with care, respect, warmth, tolerance, compassion and there are many other words similar. All those words are aspects of that big word “Love” which is the big flag of God, the universe and spiritualism, so you won’t be going far wrong.  We all recognise those people in our lives, those gems that make us laugh and support us when we cry and who we admire as truly nice people.  We want to be in their “light” energy, and be more like them – spreading the light is just being an example of goodness for others to follow.    The nice thing about spiritualism though, is that when you weren’t so sure about who you had in your life, you do start to learn that there are a special group of people who do try to support you in your everyday challenges.  Yep, it’s back to the people at the bottom of the bed again, your Spirit family.

This does not mean your local spiritualist centre or church are only for bunch of people displaying themselves whiter than white – although you do find some huddled together in a corner, but generally they are good and welcoming places to be and greatly assist you in your new existence.  Just that when you start off on a spiritual journey you concentrate so much on trying to live your new existence that you divide people into spiritual and not spiritual and think that those who are supposed to be spiritual, think just like you, totally understand you and are as dedicated to spirit as you.  They are already on their journey so, of course, they have the answer.  Not quite.

It is back to the fact that belief is personal and so is the light bulb moment which brought us to spiritualism. We all come from different directions, with different experiences moulding us into the humans we are. We are much similar to a well used book being picked up by each of us, open up and all falling open at a different page, some ahead, some behind, some pages being skipped, and some staying on the same page the content not being absorbed.  The point is that it doesn’t matter where the book was opened, we are all trying to do the same thing, and it doesn’t make anyone else any better, just sometimes a little bit further on reading the book.  We are all walking towards realising our potential, recognising that we are Spirit in a physical body and that there is so much for us to try to understand with our limited brains.  To understand the big picture, which is far too big for us to absorb in our current physical forms, and all you can settle into is just the awareness of something more and trust in what you believe. It is useful to think of it as a gigantic picture jigsaw with pieces missing.  When you are close up to the picture you are so aware of those missing pieces and wonder if you will ever find them and just see a big gaping hole in your knowledge.  But when you step back and look at the picture in its entirety you get the overall perception of the picture and it is a little more tangible – yes it is still vague, but you have a better idea. Don’t dwell to closely on the detail, just accept that it’s there.

For a while you may feel like a rabbit dazzled by headlights, but the lovely thing about this spiritual awaking, there is no hurry.  As you understand, you will find that there is a reason for everything and that there is no such thing as coincidence, but just a thing called synchronicity where things happen as they are meant to happen. People will come your way, and they will have seemed to arrive just at the right time, with the right information, this applies to teachers and people who will help you on your spiritual journey. You may not have realised it yet, but you have been walking towards this light bulb moment for some time and now things will start making sense. Telling people you know things about people, see things, that you are psychic or a medium, that you believe in Spirit and have talked to ghosts all your life makes most earthlings look at you as if you have sprouted three heads.  Most would have told you are just plain weird, totally off  your head and you are of the looney, fruit loop variety, but hey! Welcome to the club.  To those who have been working with Spirit for a little while, these concepts and occurrences are just plain every day normal. 

As you walk into your new life, you will meet many people.  Many will have a message to tell you – their own version of their own spiritual truth.  Some will be followers of Shamanic paths, Wiccan, and include those of traditional paths like Christianity.  Others will claim to have a host of angels at their disposal, others great Ascended Masters and 51 spirit guides to whom they have a deep personal relationship with.  This may be somewhat reminiscent of  the 72 Virgins of Islam myth to you, but it is not the point of whether what they saying is true or not, but more what is true for you.  As you discover and become more aware of the tune of life and the spirit helpers you have who may guide you, it will come down to one thing.  What is your truth?  What is your belief?  What is real for you?

The biggest message that anyone can give you is that being a sceptical believer, someone who does not believe everything they hear until some small personal experience brings them belief, is a safe one.  In many of the messages brought to you there may be things which will make you want to run for the hills and not stop until you get there, but don’t allow fear and ignorance be your guide.  There are many people who worship a god called “Science” and feel that if it is not shouted from the roof tops by the famous science moguls of the planet that it does not exist and therefore anyone who thinks different should be nailed to a cross or fed to the lions.  There are many things that science have not yet found the measuring stick for, and like many inventions of the 20^th Century, they would not come into our reality if someone didn’t stand by their initial inspirational thought instead of dismissing it into non-belief and non existence.  Those people just trusted in themselves and allowed themselves to think out of the box, often through challenges that left them wondering why.

But do you know what? When you know who you are and you are in touch with the energy of your higher self and/or spirit, what people think doesn’t matter.  There are times it does feel truly magical and each experience is truly amazing, although there are moments when you will still marvel and feel outside of it all.  All you can do at the end of the day is just trust, allow your mind to be open and explore the possibilities of the answer to the ultimate question.  The answers may lie at the end of the universe, or at the end of life.

But a little point to remember if you are at this beginning, or even part way through, or feeling you are at the end.  Although there is always a destination, it is not the destination that is important; it is the journey getting there!