Sitting in the Power: The Quiet Discipline Behind Real Mediumship

Ask ten developing mediums what sitting in the power is and you will likely hear ten different answers, several of them vague. Some will call it a type of meditation. Others will describe it as “opening up.” It is one of those terms passed around development circles far more often than it is actually explained.

That gap matters. Sitting in the power is the quiet, unglamorous discipline underneath everything else in mediumship. It is where you learn what your own consciousness feels like at rest, what changes when something other than you draws close, and how to hold that state steadily enough to work with it. Skip it, and you may still receive impressions. You just won’t know where they’re coming from.

A Practice Older Than the Name

The phrase comes out of the British Spiritualist tradition, where development circles have long met weekly to sit together in silence before any attempt at communication. The practice remains a cornerstone of teaching at places like the Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall in Essex, which has trained mediums since 1964 and whose curriculum spans mediumship, healing, meditation and trance work.

The idea behind it is simple. Before you can recognise a signal, you need to know the sound of the room when no signal is present. Sitting in the power is the practice of becoming intimately familiar with that baseline, and then learning to rest in an enlarged, receptive awareness for longer and longer stretches without grasping for results.

Why It Isn’t Just Meditation

From the outside, a person sitting in the power looks exactly like a person meditating. Eyes closed, breath slow, body still. The difference lies in the direction of attention.

Most meditation turns awareness inward: you settle, quieten the mental chatter, and rest. The aim is restoration and clarity. Sitting in the power begins with that same settling, but then reverses the flow. Instead of drawing yourself in, you allow your awareness to widen beyond the edges of the body, as though the field of your attention were a lamp being turned up rather than a door being closed.

Parapsychologists have a useful frame for this. In the 1970s, researcher William Braud proposed what he called the psi-conducive state: enough mental alertness to stay aware, deep muscular relaxation, reduced sensory input, and attention withdrawn from the outside world. The Psi Encyclopedia’s review of meditation and psi research traces how that model shaped decades of experiments. Read it with a medium’s eye and you’ll recognise the recipe immediately. A relaxed body, a mind that is awake but not busy, and a deliberate step back from ordinary sensory noise. That is sitting in the power, described in laboratory language.

What Research on Mediums Actually Suggests

It is easy to treat all of this as purely subjective, but mediums’ inner experiences have been studied more carefully than most people realise. The Windbridge Research Center in Tucson has spent years working with screened research mediums, and one of its more striking lines of inquiry asked them to describe what happens inside them during two different tasks: an ordinary psychic reading about a living person, and an attempted communication with someone who has died.

The descriptions did not match. During contact with the deceased, mediums reported a partial merging with the communicator, several senses switching on at once, and a distinct impression that the presence was independent of them. A later study scored mediums’ experiences across many dimensions and found that feelings of love ran significantly higher when the target was deceased than when the target was alive.

That finding lines up with what Spiritualist teachers have always maintained: the shift into mediumship feels different from intuition, and the only way to learn that difference is to sit long enough to notice it. Without that training, a reader can easily drift into what is really psychic or intuitive work while believing they are hearing from the other side.

An honest note belongs here too. The overview of modern mental mediumship research makes clear that while some mediums produce accurate information under blinded conditions, the data cannot yet settle where that information comes from. What the research does describe consistently is the texture of the experience: an altered state ranging from light to deep, several inner senses working together, bodily sensations, a strong emotional component, and a quality of simply knowing. Those are exactly the things sitting in the power trains you to notice.

A Consciousness View of the Practice

Readers who know Thomas Campbell’s work will find another way in. Campbell, a physicist who began exploring altered states with Robert Monroe in the early 1970s, argues in My Big TOE that consciousness is the primary reality and that the physical world is better understood as a rendered virtual environment than as solid, self-existing matter. The Psi Encyclopedia’s profile of Campbell gives a fair summary of both his model and the criticisms it faces.

In Campbell’s terms, each of us is an individuated unit of consciousness, a localised piece of a much larger system, and our physical senses are one data stream among several. Most of the time that stream is so loud we notice nothing else. Seen through this lens, sitting in the power is a training exercise in turning down the volume on physical data so that quieter, nonphysical information becomes perceptible. It is less about summoning anything and more about shifting where attention rests.

Campbell is also emphatic that people should test these ideas through their own practice rather than taking anyone’s word for them. That is a healthy attitude to bring to the sitting chair. You are not there to confirm a belief. You are there to gather experience.

Know Your Own Signature First

The most overlooked part of the practice is also the first. Before you can sense another presence, you need a clear, embodied sense of your own.

Every person has a characteristic inner feel, a kind of energetic fingerprint. For some it registers as warmth in the chest, for others as spaciousness or a particular emotional tone. In early sittings, your only task is to become acquainted with it. Notice how it feels when you are relaxed and expanded and nobody else is around. Learn its edges.

This is what makes discernment possible later. When the quality of the space shifts, when an emotion arrives that is not yours or a sensation appears that has no explanation in your own body, you will only catch it if you know your baseline well. Mediums who skip this step often struggle to separate their own imagination, memories and moods from genuine contact.

A Simple Session to Begin With

There is no single correct method, but this structure works well for beginners.

Set the space. Choose a quiet room, a chair that keeps your spine upright, and a consistent time of day. Sit with feet flat and hands resting loosely. Lying down tends to tip people into sleep.

Settle the body with the breath. Take a few minutes of slow abdominal breathing. Harvard Health describes this kind of breath focus as one of the simplest ways to evoke the relaxation response, the physiological opposite of stress. They also note it may not suit people with breathing difficulties or heart failure, so adapt as needed.

State an intention once. Something plain works best, such as asking that the time be used for your development. Then let it go.

Become aware of yourself. Spend several minutes simply noticing your own presence. Allow your awareness to widen gently past your skin and fill the room, without forcing it or building elaborate pictures.

Invite and wait. Hold the open, expanded state and silently welcome the presence of the spirit world. Then wait. Note any shifts in temperature, emotion, pressure or atmosphere without chasing or analysing them.

Close down deliberately. Bring your awareness back into the body, feel your weight in the chair and your feet on the floor, and open your eyes slowly. A glass of water and a minute of movement help you return fully.

Write it down. A short note after each sitting, even “nothing much today,” becomes invaluable over months. Patterns emerge that you would never spot from memory alone.

Twenty minutes is a sensible target, which happens to match the daily practice length Harvard suggests for relaxation work. Consistency counts for far more than duration.

When Nothing Seems to Happen

This is where most people give up. They sit for a week, feel nothing they could point to, and conclude they lack the gift.

The subtlety is the point. In the early stages, contact rarely arrives as a vision or a voice. It is far more likely to register as a faint change in the feel of the room, a mood that drifts in without reason, or a thought that feels a fraction more distinct than your usual mental traffic. Those impressions are easy to dismiss as imagination, which is precisely why the baseline work matters.

Even when you register nothing at all, the sitting has done its job. You have practised holding a relaxed, alert, expanded state, and that capacity grows like any other skill. The Psi Encyclopedia’s entry on altered states and psi offers a useful caution in both directions: impressions received in altered states can be bent by expectation and ordinary cognitive bias, yet writing all of them off as hallucination throws away genuine insight. Hold your experiences lightly and keep records.

Intention Without Expectation

These two words get confused constantly. Intention is the direction you set: why you are sitting and what you are open to. Expectation is a demand on the outcome: tonight I will meet my guide, tonight I will see something.

Intention focuses the session. Expectation contaminates it, because the moment you start waiting for a particular result, your mind begins producing imitations of it. Sitters who arrive hoping for fireworks tend to leave disappointed or, worse, convinced by something their own imagination supplied. Those who simply show up, set their intention and pay attention to whatever is actually present tend to progress further, with results they can trust.

The Long Game

There is good reason to think of sitting in the power as a practice measured in years rather than weeks. Research by parapsychologist Serena Roney-Dougal with yogis and Tibetan Buddhist monks in India found that years of meditation practice predicted better performance on psychic tasks, with the most consistent results among those who had practised for fifteen to twenty years or more. A later study with Western meditators in Scotland did not reproduce the pattern, so the question is far from settled, but the broader message matches what experienced mediums say: the state deepens through steady repetition.

That is perhaps the most encouraging thing about the practice. It does not depend on being born special. It depends on turning up, sitting quietly, learning the feel of your own consciousness, and staying curious about what else might be sharing the room. Over time the subtle becomes familiar, and the familiar becomes something you can work with.