Message of a Medium - Insight Interview, Pt 2

Hello again, everyone! Continuing from last week's blog, here is Part 2 of my interview with Carol Geiler regarding my experiences as a medium, specifically honing the psychic signal and developing abilities. Next week will be the final excerpt before moving on to other topics. Eventually I will come back and post a transcript of the "questions from the audience" section from this event. Hopefully I have been able to give people a glimpse of what I have gone through in this paranormal journey and what the nature of being a psychic can be about. Enjoy!

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On learning to hone skills …

One of the things you need to learn how to do is to discern what your energy is versus something else. I mean, you sit with yourself all day and you think you know yourself, but you really don’t until you sit down with yourself and really go inside and ask “How do I feel?” Really sit with that and imagine, if you had to describe yourself in terms of a color, what would that color be? If you had to describe yourself in terms of a sound, what would that sound be? So once you’ve got that down, when you go out to read another person, you’ll have a pretty good idea what your Self “feeling” is as opposed to the person you are reading because you need to be able to try and separate the two. It can be a little difficult, but you do need to be aware of that.

Then the big one, the big one of all for honing skills … The support groups are great. I never had a support group doing it … So, those of you who do come to the support groups, you have a much better benefit than what I had.

The other thing is expectations … on both the psychic’s part and the person you’re reading. There should be no expectations, because expectations narrow the energy field. Think about a time when you expected an outcome, how narrow your mind was. You just become like a laser beam. The thing about psychic work is that it needs to be as wide open as possible. The psychic has to be able to have access to the energy to get any kind of information, and if it’s really small, it gets really difficult. And like I say, it’s also has to be the psychic’s job to not have any expectations. Now I speak from experience … As a psychic standing up there and having expectations, you will always fall short. You will always walk away going “You know what, that really sucked.”

… When you have expectations you are basically stunting your own self from being able to be open to everything that’s available. Some people will come to me and just want to hear from a deceased relative, and if that’s my expectation, well, there may be other information there, like stuff that’s coming down the road in their future that does not come from anyone who is deceased -- it’s just buried in the person’s energy field. It may be important for them to know what that is. But if I don’t have myself open to that, they could miss it. And it’s always about the client. It’s always about the person you’re reading, it’s never about you, because they are coming with their issues, and they’re looking for some kind of guidance and some kind of answer. Your goal is to hopefully find something to help them in finding that answer.

My tips for honing: Practice, practice, practice. Really, that’s it. You just got to keep practicing. And you will get scared. You will always be nervous before you start a reading. Like I said, I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and it’s only been until about the last 8 months that my fear level before doing a reading has greatly diminished. Up until that point, certainly the first 5 or 6 years before I even started doing group readings, before every personal reading, I was terrified. “Am I going to get anything? Am I going to flop?” You just have to stick with it. Fortunately, I think my curiosity won out over my fear.

Describe what communication is like for you. A lot of people come to the group wondering … There’s a lot of different ways of receiving energy and information.

Well, I’m not one of the lucky ones that gets things clairaudiently, where I hear it. Very rarely … I very rarely hear anything. A lot of what I get first starts with a feeling somewhere in my body. And then that feeling will usually generate an image. And then it becomes my job to interpret the image. That’s really it. For dates, I will get a calendar, and the calendar will light up wherever on the calendar to mention certain things.

… If you’re developing as a psychic you will probably end up generating your own library of symbols. The cool thing is, some of those symbols will come to you kind of randomly on their own (but) you can also direct them. You can sit down and come up with your own symbols. I’ve done this. I’ve created a symbol and said “This symbol, when I see it, means this.” And you just make that an intention to whatever is out there. I started doing that in November last year. I did a reading for someone and I saw a good three of the new symbols that I myself had created and they were smack right on.

You have to pay close attention to the energy and its magnetics. When I say magnetics, for me, it’s … Is there pull? Is there essence? Is there weight to it? That will always be the one to go to … I could go on a rant on that, but I won’t. The other thing is to pay attention to what is flashing in your mind. A lot of times, psychic information comes like that (snapping fingers). It’s like standing in a dark room and somebody’s taking a picture. You know how quickly a camera flash is on and off, that’s how quickly sometimes the information comes. You have to be an observer to your thoughts, as opposed to a person who is just thinking. You have to sit there and be observant. And pay attention when something flashes. Ask yourself “Is this something that is in my normal thought-flow.” If it’s not, that’s your big hint that you’re probably getting something psychic.

Do your pictures look like photographs or are they more like … cartoons?

It just depends. Sometimes they’ll be still-photographs. Sometimes they’ll be moving. It just depends. You have to learn to distract your left brain. That will be your biggest challenge.

Unless you’re naturally a right-brainer.

Unless you’re naturally a right-brainer. There’s one medium, I forget his name, but he will actually sit and scribble (on a pad) and that’s because he’s distracting his left brain so the information can come through his right brain. For me, my eyes go buggy.

Definitely, learn to meditate because you have to be relaxed in order to receive. If you are jumbled, frustrated, upset, you’re going to block it. It’s all about energy, and if your energy is a jumble, you’re going to have a hard time discerning what is coming at you.

What’s the one piece of advice that you would give to those people interested in connecting with those on the Other Side?

Actually, this is the history lesson. Understand that it’s not communication like you and I have on a daily basis, where it’s words that you can pick up and hear and it’s all crystal clear. It’s not that way. It’s actually very difficult for them to get information across to us here.

They (meaning psychical researchers) actually know this historically from the earlier 1900’s with the Society for Psychical Research. These were honest scientists that studied mediums at the time. And the interesting thing was, a lot of these scientists were in the late time of their lives, and they died while the mediums were still young. So they started coming back through the mediums to the other researchers that were still alive. They described how hard it was to communicate through the mediums.

Basically, what it is, and I was told this all growing up using the Ouija board (but I never understood it), they perceive those people that have the ability to receive information as being like light. They see everybody as lit up, but those that seem to be able to get information appear to be a little “brighter,” for some reason. The trick that they have to go through is that they need to impress within the light whatever messages that they are trying to give. It gets pretty random and chaotic.

I actually highlighted a few passages here (from printouts) … Richard Hodgson studied the most famous medium in history named Leonora Piper. This woman makes John Edward and James Van Praagh look like children. She was able to give full names, full dates, events that people had gone through throughout their lives. She didn’t know any of the sitters. They were very stringent of how they investigated this woman, to the point of calling everybody that came to visit her “these are the Smiths.” They even had private investigators following her around to make sure she wasn’t gleaming information. She was very well kept under wraps. And this woman, like I said, was just phenomenal. So anyway, Richard Hodgson studied her for 13 years and then he died. Well, he knew who to go to on the Other Side when he wanted to get back in touch with his friends. It actually took him a week. One of the first things he did, 5 days after being able to finally get through, he explained that it was extremely difficult for him to communicate because he had to learn … as he put it “impress the mechanism” which would’ve been Leonora Piper’s body.

Basically, one of the other SPR members, Frederick William Henry Myers, who we all have to credit – he was the one that actually came up with the term telepathy – came through … He was the initiator of what they called the Cross Correspondences. This is probably the best evidential stuff showing life after death. There were 3 mediums – actually there was more, like 4 or 5 – living thousands of miles apart, across the ocean, getting information from Myers that corroborated one another. In fact, one of the investigators that was with Leonora Piper instructed Myers to sign a couple of these correspondences with a circle and a triangle. The trick was, he told it to the spirit of Myers through Leonora Piper in Latin. Leonora Piper didn’t know Latin. So obviously this was a really good test, because Myers did know Latin. And sure enough, a week later, two mediums claiming to have Myers drew a circle and a triangle at the end of their correspondence. Now, Myers, in one of his transmissions said, “It’s like standing behind a pane of frosted glass, yelling at a sometimes reluctant secretary.” (Laughter from the audience). That’s how hard it is to get information.

So a piece of advice is understanding communication is garbled.

Yes. And so one of the things I struggled with for years until I started reading some of this stuff …

Why I’m not always accurate or not getting --?

Yeah. Why is it not coming through more? Why am I not getting more information? This, that, and the other. That’s one of the other downfalls, too, is that you will always want more information. The fact of the matter is, it really doesn’t require much at all. One of the group readings I did last month, there was a guy who was looking to hear from his dad. All I had to say was “he mentions the hat.” The guy almost busted out weeping because he had given his father a hat that he ended up wearing until the day he died, and he was buried with that hat. So all he needed to hear was the hat.

When did Leonora Piper live?

Leonora Piper started her mediumship work in the 1880’s. I believe she passed in the ‘50s. She is considered the most researched medium in history. Now, she didn’t do medium work like what you see today, where John Edward and James Van Praagh, and me, are standing up here … She was the new kind of medium at the time, which was the trance medium. She would literally go into a sleep, and she would do it two different ways – in terms of getting information. She had what they called “control spirits.” These spirits would come through, take over her body and start relaying messages. She would also have the deceased sometimes come through and deliver messages. When she wasn’t doing the control spirit, she was doing automatic writing. The way this developed was, she actually fell down like this (slumping over), threw her hand up, somebody put a pencil in her hand and she started writing. They had experiments going where they had one family over here (with the automatic writing hand), and she would be channeling over here (on the left, with verbal communication), carrying on two conversations with two different families talking with two different groups of dead people. (The verbal communication people) would get information (through the verbal spirit), and the hand would get information for … People would talk to the hand, literally, and the hand would write the answers out. A lot of the information from Richard Hodgson, who was the investigator who studied her, was done through automatic writing.

Should make you feel pretty normal in comparison. Imagine the fear she had to deal with!

Actually, she didn’t know. For years, she said “I don’t necessarily believe I’m talking to dead people.” But since she was always out (in a trance), she had no idea what she was doing.

She just rolled with it.

She just rolled with it.