08/27/2026
This is an excellent article and spot on! Thank you Tony 💜
Sensing It All: The Complexities of a Modern Working Medium
There is a particular kind of tiredness that only another sensitive truly understands. It isn’t the ordinary fatigue of a long day’s work — it’s the tiredness that comes from spending hours open, tuned in, receiving. As a working psychic medium of many years’ standing, I have long since stopped expecting people to fully grasp what this life actually involves. But I would like, in this article, to try to explain it — and to offer some encouragement to those developing sensitives who are still finding their feet between two worlds.
Living Between Two Worlds
To be a medium in the modern age is to walk a strange and wonderful tightrope. On one side sits the everyday material world — mortgages, appointments, the school run, the weekly shop. On the other sits a world of impression, feeling, energy and spirit that most people only glimpse occasionally, in a dream or a fleeting sense of “knowing.” A working sensitive lives with a foot in both, permanently. That duality is, in my experience, both the gift and the great challenge of this work.
It is very easy — and rather fashionable — to mock the modern medium. We are an easy target: dismissed as charlatans, cold-readers, or well-meaning eccentrics. And, of course, in any field there are those who let it down. But what is rarely acknowledged is that a serious body of scientific research now exists that takes the question of consciousness surviving death entirely seriously.
What the Science Actually Says
Researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, led for decades by the psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, have spent years studying thousands of near-death experiences and have concluded that the phenomenon deserves serious scientific attention rather than dismissal as “a trick of the brain.” Studies published in recent years, including large hospital-based research led by the critical care physician Sam Parnia, have found that in a meaningful proportion of cardiac arrest cases, patients show organised brain activity — sometimes resurging strongly — even after the heart has stopped, at a point when the brain should, by conventional understanding, have shut down. Some patients in these studies have recalled accurate details of events occurring around them during the period when they showed no measurable brain function at all.
None of this proves what mediums do. But it does something important: it shows that the boundary between “life” and the absence of consciousness is nowhere near as tidy as sceptics like to claim, and that mainstream science is now actively investigating territory that spiritualists have quietly occupied for well over a century. When a serious researcher at a respected university says the dying brain may not be the end of awareness, the modern medium’s work looks a little less like fantasy and a little more like an old question finally being taken seriously by new methods.
The Real Complexity of the Work
What is harder to convey is the emotional weight of doing this work day after day. A medium does not simply “switch on” for a sitting and switch off afterwards. Sensitivity, by its nature, does not come with an off switch. You feel the grief in the room before a word is spoken. You carry, for a while, the joy of a reunion message delivered well. You absorb, more than most people realise, the emotional undertow of everyone you sit with. Doing this responsibly, sustainably, and with integrity over decades requires real discipline — not less discipline than any other profession, but arguably more.
Finding Balance: A Few Tips for the Developing Sensitive
For anyone finding their way as a developing medium or sensitive, here is what I would offer, drawn from my own years in this work:
- Ground yourself daily, not just before sittings.** Spiritual work is not meant to float free of the body. Simple, repeated grounding — walking outdoors, eating properly, feeling your feet on the earth — keeps your instrument steady.
- Learn to close down as deliberately as you open up.** Many developing sensitives are taught to open their awareness but never properly taught to close it again. Both halves of that skill matter equally.
- Protect your energy like any other resource.** Not every message needs to be given in every moment. Discernment about when to sense and when to rest is itself a spiritual skill.
- Keep one foot firmly in ordinary life.** Friendships, hobbies, physical work, laughter — these are not distractions from your development, they are what keeps it sustainable.
- Let nature do some of the work for you.** The natural world has its own rhythm of opening and closing, and spending time within it teaches your energy to do the same.
My Own Solace
Over the years I have found my own balance increasingly in the simplest of places: in nature, in growing things, and in the animals who share my life. There is something quietly restorative about tending a garden — watching a seed you planted push its way into the light, entirely on its own timetable, asking nothing of you but patience. Animals, too, have taught me a great deal about presence; they do not carry yesterday’s grief or tomorrow’s worry, and being near them draws me back into the simple, grounded now.
I have also come to feel a real kinship with the phases of the moon — the waxing, the fullness, the waning, the dark. There is something in that steady, ancient rhythm that mirrors the rhythm a sensitive needs to find in their own life: times of opening, receiving and giving, followed always by times of rest and renewal. The moon does not stay full forever, and neither should we expect to remain permanently “switched on.” Working with, rather than against, that natural ebb and flow has been one of the great lessons of my career.
An Honourable Path
Being a working medium in today’s world is not simple, and it is rarely as glamorous as it may appear from the outside. It asks for genuine discipline, real emotional resilience, and an ongoing commitment to balance the spiritual with the material. But it is also, I believe, an honourable path — one increasingly, if quietly, supported by serious science, and one that continues to bring real comfort to real people. For those developing their own sensitivity, my hope is simply this: be patient with yourselves, stay grounded, and let nature remind you, again and again, that everything — including you — has its own season.
