The Art of Mediumship
Podcast
Episode:
The Art of Mediumship
by Danielle Searancke
The theme of duality in life showed up again in January. As I received the keys to the Spirit School space, I’m also experiencing vertigo and strep throat. However, I am choosing to lean into the joyful side of life and celebrate what this new space means for Spirit School and all those who will go on to make an impact from their experiences there!
In today’s episode, I am sharing a channelled class and philosophy from the last round of The Initiation about mediumship as an art. The live classes in my intimate development experiences are in response to the questions and conversations happening in the community. Part of the reason I’ve taught this mediumship foundations program so many times is that it’s different every round!
Though there is more scientific research being done and there is a basic structure, mediumship is more of a healing art form. If you think of it like a blank canvas, you can bring your own experiences and modalities and create something new!
The Initiation 8-Week Mediumship Foundations Experience includes self-study, live classes, practice readings and Q&A calls. This is a robust course for anyone in their first three years of mediumship development. The cart will be open until we start on Friday, January 27!
Episode:
The Art of Mediumship
Spirit School Podcast
In this episode:
Science is getting closer to understanding mediumship, it is still a form of art
We can have more fun on this path if we see it as a blank canvas
I want to remove the stigma around using other modalities and spiritual tools in mediumship
Many people connect with spirit during Reiki or oracle card sessions when they are in flow
I began developing mediumship before I connected with angels and oracle cards
You can pull an oracle card for inspiration if you’re stuck in a reading
Scribbling what comes up initially can help mediums narrow the focus to start
You can refer to the paper if you get stuck, just like oracle cards
Almost everything I write unfolds, even if I don’t look
Don’t let people tell you that using tools is a crutch
Mediumship is an art form and mentors give you a brush and paint
You are the blank canvas and get to decide how and what to paint
Some of you may fall into comparing colours, tools, or skills
It took me awhile on my journey to realize that you could add layers
Everyone’s painting turns out different with the same prompts
Your mediumship and connection to spirit are just as unique
You miss the creative process if you analyze instead of allowing it to unfold
If something you learn doesn’t work, you’ll find your own technique that you can teach
The creative process is the path that reveals what you will teach
You can change the brush or colours anytime
When you get a no, it provides clarity for you to tweak the “happy mistakes”
We aren’t for everyone, so it needs to be your own taste for you to enjoy it
Although I’m not artistic, creating a business is the most creative thing I’ve done
Document your experiences to look back at how far you’ve come
You can feel the energetic difference between the words discern and analyze
We talk about the importance of language in advancing mediumship modules
I don’t Google spiritual philosophies until I’ve contemplated them myself
Spiritual maturity is the ability to discern, not analyze
Analyzing is the ability to make conclusions based on natural senses
Discernment goes past perception and makes nuanced judgements
Discernment is more passive like observing your thoughts
Spirituality is meant to be experienced, not analyzed through logic
Discernment increases in sensitivity along our journey
No good reading identifies us and no bad reading identifies us.
Spirit School Links
Spirit School Collective: https://www.squamishmedium.com/spiritschoolcollective
The Initiation starts January 27: https://www.squamishmedium.com/programs-the-initiation
Join us on the new FREE Spirit School platform: https://myspiritschoolcollective.com/plans/
Trauma-Informed Lightworker Waitlist: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/6398f03888aca7e15696b1fa
Visit Spirit School at https://www.squamishmedium.com/ for all courses and upcoming programs
View full transcripts of podcast episodes at https://www.squamishmedium.com/blog
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Mediumship as an Art
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Spirit School. This one's going to be a little bit different. I hope you're all doing well by the way. Today is Friday, January 13th. I officially got the keys to Spirit School's first location, and the construction starts right away. So if you've been following me on my Instagram stories, I've been sharing a little bit about the journey of how this all came to fruition. And it started on my son's birthday, on October 4th. And here we are on Friday, January 13th, and I officially have the keys in my hand, and I'm so beyond excited.
Also celebrating. This week I had my first international teacher who is a medical intuitive. Of course you know Spirit Fluent, whose audience asked her to host a retreat in Canada. So she's reached out to me to say, I wanna be the first. She's like, I wanna be the first to host a retreat in your space. So, it's already happening. Things are happening here. So it's been a very amazing start to 2023 here for me.
Health-wise things have been a little bit rocky. I'm currently sitting here with vertigo and strep throat. My entire family has it. And yeah. You know, it's kind of interesting. Last year I remember talking about how we're often holding the dichotomy in life of things going well and things not going well. And I think, you know, every moment I have this opportunity to kind of choose where I'm gonna lean into. So, this morning was a bit chaotic trying to get a doctor's appointment for my child because she has a pretty bad case of strep throat. And if you don't know about the Canadian medical system, it could be quite difficult to navigate sometimes. So it was a very crazy morning. And if I leaned into the craziness of that morning, I would miss all the beauty and abundance and expansion that's happening on the other side of my life, which is really around this growth with Spirit School, which I completely believe was spirit led.
So I just took a moment while I was in the space, giving it a great smudge, giving myself a smudge, really filling the space with light and vibrancy, and just loving on the space. And I was able to hold that moment of just gratitude and joy in everything that I have been co-creating with the spirit world for Spirit School, for Squamish Medium, for my life, for the life of others who will be impacted by the work that I'm fortunate to get to do for you all.
So, you know, you gotta take the wins and the losses altogether. And if that could just be even a little bit of a lesson for you guys today, it is a conscious choice that we have to make in our lives. Like things are not always going to go well, and not everything is going to go well. I typically find there are different areas of my life that are excelling and thriving, and then there are some areas of my life that require a little bit more attention, and focus, and love, and change. And so I've been holding that duality a lot better lately and just leaning in where I need to lean in. And sometimes I do need to be sad and feel bad for myself. And there are times and opportunities that you have to give yourself for that as well.
So that's what I felt like saying at this very moment. But what I really wanted to come in and share with you all today was in The Initiation, I usually create the classes based off of what I'm inspired at the moment. And they're usually based off of the conversations that I see take place, the questions that are being asked in the community. And I create the classes in real time based off of those conversations. And what I wanted to share with you today was a conversation, and kind of like this channeled philosophy in one of the classes that we did in the last round, to kind of give you, you know, a little bit of a taste of what happens in these more intimate development containers with me.
But I also thought it was really important because I'm doing a Q and A. By the time you read this or listen to this, the Q and A will already be done, but in Spirit School, I'm doing a 90 minute Q and A. And I can see it in the questions coming up as well. And I feel like we feel often that mediumship is like a prescription, that there is an exact order to things, that it is rigid and structured. And there is a structure to it, don't get me wrong. And there is a structure that can definitely lean into what mediumship is, which is evidence that life continues and, you know, bringing healing through for people who need to know that their loved ones are okay, and that we all continue on into a more beautiful space than we're even able to have here on earthside.
And so, this philosophy and this channeling session kind of came through around mediumship being an art. Though science is starting to get closer to being able to validate the abilities around mediumship, it is still a form of art and it is still something that we can have a better time, we can thrive a bit better on this path, we can have a lot more fun on this path, if we can see it as a blank canvas. And if we can see it as something that we continue to improve upon as we lean into the artistic abilities of mediumship, because it is artistic in so many ways. And so I just wanted to open it up for you guys so that you can listen into this live class, and just different things that have come up through that class.
And I do trust, and I do hope that whether you intend on joining me for The Initiation, which starts on January 27th, or maybe next time if I run it again, it will help you no matter where you're at on your development journey. And I hope that you enjoy it. And if you do, feel free to share it with your friends. Feel free to tag me on Instagram, any insights that you get from it. And of course, if you have any questions, come into Spirit School's free space, and I'm always hanging out there and you're welcome to ask any questions at that time as well. So for now, I will leave you with the channeled class I did and I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead and we will see you in Spirit School.
The way that I teach is exactly walking you through my process quite a bit. I also want you to know that because you are all at different stages of your development, I'm gonna try my best to talk to people who are newly just beginning and people who are established and are looking to continue to get stronger in their connection and in their abilities. So I'm gonna do my best to weave in language that supports everyone. And I think I may even mentioned this in the opening call, but correct me if I'm wrong, cause I do, I teach a lot in a lot of different classes, but I would love to see us like remove any like stigma around using spiritual tools with mediumship, to be honest with you. I don't want you to call them a crutch. I see that a lot. I really don't like that because I think it kind of puts us in a corner. It limits us in a lot of ways.
I hear this even in some of my client sessions. I was with a student yesterday and she was like, you know, I love to pick up things psychically first, right? And that's how come people who unfold through Reiki, so many people have mediumistic experiences in doing Reiki because as the session unfolds, and as they relax, all of a sudden all these things start coming in. So if you are somebody who like naturally worked with oracle cards, or tarot, or any other divination tools, and then all of a sudden spirit drops in, that just might be part of your process right now. And I totally invite that as part of it. I personally never did. I didn't get oracle cards until almost a whole year after I started developing as a medium. So, whereas a lot of people come into mediumship through other modalities, it was mediumship first for me. Mediumship was the first thing I ever learned and then I started playing with oracle cards. Then I started playing with pendulums and getting to know angel energy and healing. So mine just started like a little bit differently. So I don't use them in my readings personally, but I use them in the spirit messages. And our teacher said like, if you even have oracle cards on your desk and say you're like stuck for something, you can easily pull a card and be inspired on like where to move to next.
What I personally do, you'll see lots of medium scribble, right? And I'm gonna talk about this as part of the lesson, and why I have this process, because when I expand my aura and blend in with the world of spirit, I get so much information at once that I'm constantly like I'm just writing a couple things at the top. So in this one it was mom, confusion, mom, the name Tom, the number's 4,5,6. So I basically write everything down feverishly. Then I look down and I'm like, okay, where am I gonna start? Right? And something will jump out at me. So if I ever get stuck in a session and I don't know where to go next, I simply look down at my paper and see if something else jumps out at me. So the same technique could be used in a card, right? So like oracle cards or tarot cards. And you could use it for the exact same function that I use my own writing, that I can't even read, for.
So I'll share a little bit more about that process as we go along. I gave a sample reading from YouTube, so you saw that exact same. Can you spell your first and last name? And you just see me writing things down and I just kind of started off. So I'm just writing down the first impressions and I'll explain what I think that is as part of the teachings of this class. And you just start talking and then more thing comes. And when I don't need to look down at my paper, the shocking thing is when I look at it at the end, often I need it because I don't remember what their name is. And so now I know what their name is so I can address them properly, right. And then I'm always surprised, like everything that I wrote down eventually unfolded as part of that reading. So that's a process I just kind of stumbled into as I started going along and it's worked really well for me.
Don't let anyone ever tell you it's a crutch. Don't let anyone ever try to convince you that, you know, you don't need it. If you feel comfort in it and it helps and supports you in a mediumship, I say continue on. And if one day you wanna try to stretch yourself and do things like a little bit differently, try it out. See how it goes.
But it's so important for you guys to understand that mediumship is an art. It is an art form. They call it the healing arts for a reason, right? So it's not a science, it's not an exactness, it's not fitting within some sort of like law that has like 1, 2, 3, 4 steps. It is completely an art, and you are all the artists of mediumship. Now, what teachers and mentors provide you with is paint and a brush, right? We give you the paint. We give you the brush. You are the blank canvas, and you get to decide how you paint that canvas. Now, some of you may go down a deep into the hole of like, well, she gave me green and I wanted red, right? Or why did I get a fine detailed brush, and she got a roller? Right? And then you start to look at your neighbor's canvases and you all of a sudden realize, hey, they started in the middle and I started over here on the corner. And I'm already working on the details of the like imagery, like the little leaves, and they're just doing like the base, like the background, whatever's gonna lay underneath all the details that come in the layers.
For me personally, as an artist, I didn't even realize you could do layers. I thought whatever you put on there was exactly what it was. And it took me a while in my journey to understand like, oh, you can add more layers to this. But realistically, you are all a blank canvas when you start. And though you may be handed certain brushes and paint colors, what you choose to turn them into, and what this piece of art ends up being is completely unique in your path. Have you ever done one of those paint night classes? You're all painting like a bear or an eagle and like how different everyone's painting comes out, even though you're like literally all learning the same thing and using the same brushes and the same paint colors. But it comes out so different. Right. And that's how unique your mediumship is, and that's how unique the world of spirit needs your mediumship.
And when I see people really analyzing it, we're gonna be talking about this a little bit today, you're not treating it like a piece of art. It's almost like you're missing the whole creative process. And when you unfold into the mediumship journey, you are literally in your creative process. And I tell you, I've always like worked for government or race cars and like been in the corporate space, always in an office. And it wasn't until I started developing mediumship and I get the same experience as an entrepreneur, it's so creative. It's like one of the actually only areas of my life that I allow myself to be incredibly creative, right?
So if like you learn from a teacher, like, oh, this is how she gets passings and you go try it for yourself and it doesn't quite fit, you're like, I don't like that shade. That's like an off green to me. I'm gonna go grab this red and like mix it up and see what else I can create. And then you have your own nuanced technique that you can then teach later on. Because, make no mistake, if you are drawn to a mediumship path, one day you will be asked to be a teacher. We don't learn all this to keep it for ourselves. So it's so important for you to go through the whole process of creating something from scratch, to creating something beautiful that you wanna share with the world. And it's actually everything that happens in that in between is the actual path and it's what gives you the knowledge and experience to continue to share like the next wave of light workers, if you will, or the students who will eventually be drawn to you. You won't know what to teach if you don't go through that whole creative process for yourself.
So if you don't like the brush you have, put it down. If you don't like the color that you chose, you get to change it. You ever see who's that artist that says, happy little mistakes? It's just a happy mistake. Bob Ross. So it's like if we could treat like the no's or like no, it doesn't make sense. It's like little happy mistakes. Okay. All this does is give me a little bit more clarity on how I can recraft this, and see if I could tweak it to something that is beautiful in my eyes, because that's also the truth. I don't like Picasso. I would never buy a Picasso for my house. the hard lines, the eclecticness of it doesn't really fit with my decor. It's not something I'm drawn to or I would buy. But I do love impressionism art. I love landscapes, right? Love Monet, Manet, like, not like I can afford it, but people who love Picasso are like, what the hell don't you get about Picasso?
And that's the same with your mediumship. We are not gonna be for everybody. How we rock our mediumship is not gonna be a one size fits all for the people out there. Which is how come it's so much more important for you to realize your creative process and how you unfold in your mediumship because spirit needs us working for everybody out there. Right? So really see it as an art. Okay. And if you're not artistic, and this analogy came to me because I did do a few paint nights. Like my daughter's an artist, my husband's an artist, my dad's an artist. Everyone around me is artistic. And I'm like, mine's, I still have the same skill I had in grade three. Like my people and my humans have not progressed at all since I was like in grade three, nor has my writing. I don't know. I'm just like, not an artist, but I get to express my creativity through my mediumship and I get to express it through my entrepreneurship endeavors, which I think is one of the most creative things I've ever done, is create a business. And I love it. I love everything about it.
The other thing I really wanna say about this analogy is like some of my favorite TikTok videos, and I watch them with my daughter because she is like a mind-blowing artist for like an eight year old, are those videos where somebody will show progressive pictures through the 20 years that they've been drawing. So pictures from when they were nine and then 10, and then 11, and it's like these highlights. And I keep her pictures for this reason. She's like, why are you keeping all these? I'm like, because when you're a famous artist, we're gonna have a TikTok to make right. And that's how I can try to reason it with her, with like a eight year old, almost nine year old.
So, you can start to document your own canvas, if you will, the experiences you're having now, what you think about them, how you feel about them, how you would describe them, and something you can continue to use and do over the course of time so that in a year from now when you're still stuck in the same mindset of, I don't get enough, it's not detailed enough, I didn't get this, da, da, da, you realize, actually I've come a really long way. And maybe the fact that I can pinpoint that. I thought about this last year and I'm still thinking about this this year has nothing to do with the mediumship. It has to do with my thought patterns, the way that I think, or the way that I feel, right? I'm a Virgo. Everything's kind of up here. And there's some of you in this community who just resonate so much with me. I'm like, you are me, like eight years ago, like literally me. I can sympathize with you with that, and empathize, because I too, am very much like that.
But when I was like reading some of like the posts and the comments and I'm like, how do I teach this? Like how do I talk about this in a way that like really makes sense, like what I see going on? And spirit dropped in this thought. They're like, you just need to tell them the difference between analyzing and discerning. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. So I've been sitting with it because I like to contemplate. That's like one of my favorite spiritual practices is contemplation, right? And so I have been contemplating, and I went on an hour walk this morning thinking about this class and the format and the structure I wanted to do it in.
And I was like, tell me more about the analyzing versus discerning. And so I sat with it and I started walking with myself and I was like, wow, they actually feel incredibly different. So like say, analyze out loud. Analyze. Analyze. Analyze. And now say discern. Discern. Discern. Go back to analyze. Discern. Can you feel an energetic difference in the words? Where do you feel the word analyze?
Head. Head. Head. Head. Head. Okay. Head, heart, versus heart. Okay, so then you say the word discern. Where do you feel that in your body? Chest, head. Now I want you to pay attention to one of my favorite ways of discerning, expand or contract. Looking at the difference between analyze and discern, does one expand and contract than the other? Do they both feel expanded? And another example of this is love and hate. Can you feel the energetic difference between those words and your experience of it? Okay. So, they carry a very different vibration. We are gonna talk in a later lesson about why language is so important. And that's where more advancing mediumship takes place, where you have the connection, and though you may not know what is gonna happen in that session, you know something's gonna happen, right? That takes a whole different level of trust. When you've reached there, then we can start looking at how can we keep our personality in our readings, right? How do we not go to complete like stillness and like become completely different people in our sessions, right? And then how do we then start to phrase things in a way that carry the vibration of my intention.
I have a lesson here, but I'm explaining to you my process of how I get to where I'm getting. So on this walk, I started being aware. Analyze and discern have completely different energies to them. I experience them completely different. So I do all this work and I'm like, I think I get it. I get the difference between 'em. This is what I'm gonna teach. So then I go home and Google, right? I will not Google until I've done my own contemplation work ever. And if you're interested in a spiritual philosophy, and I think it's incredibly important in mediumship, and that will be in the last lesson as well, when I Google it, I had an insane synchronicity. So I'm gonna tell you the definitions first. Okay?
So spiritual maturity is the ability to discern, not analyze. So there's that, which is huge. Analyzing is the ability of the natural mind to process the information received through the natural senses and make conclusions based off that process. Discernment is the rare ability to perceive things beyond our natural faculties of the five senses. The process of discernment involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced judgements about its properties or qualities.
Okay, so what I see kind of happening is this analyzing, right? Trying to create something like logical out of something that's clearly not logical. Talking to a departed loved one is not something you like rock up to a scientist and say, Hey, this is what I do. Can't prove it, but you'll feel it.
But then the discernment piece is much more passive. Another comparable that came on my walk was, you know how when you're sitting in meditation and they're like just observe the thoughts that move through you, instead of like hanging onto them. There's a much more passive energy in observing those thoughts. And I see the discernment as being a lot more passive. And maybe instead of asking like, why, why, why? How, how, how? Getting into that sense of like wonderment, right? So I just wanted to really clearly give an example of what I think because I think analyzing like takes the energy out of the room. Right? And it kind of could even ruin some spiritual experiences too, right? And this is the quote that Skylar came through on the weekend. I was writing, and then all of a sudden he pops in with the thoughts saying, spirituality is meant to be experienced, not analyzed through like logic, something like that. I was like, yeah, you're right. It needs to be experienced.
So a lot of the things that you're just dying to know right now, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, will be revealed to you through experiences that you have. And often clarity comes on the other side of that experience. So I could tell you till the cows come home how it works for me, but we have very different paintbrushes, and we have different brands of paint, and I've already blended mine. So like it won't come through the same as yours. Right? And the lighting's different. So do you kind of get what I'm saying around this? So I want you to really put on this like childlike wonderment when it comes to this. I want you to be like a little newborn baby in the world, that's just like fearlessly playing, and just like having experiences. And then looking back at some of those experiences and starting to look at how it works for you. And that's gonna be the tool that I leave you with today, okay.
I wanted to show you just another, because I also think discernment is a muscle that increases in sensitivity, just like our sentient abilities, right? So where we start to connect with spirit, I think that's them. And then as you increase your sensitivities, aka awareness, and you become more aware of the energy around, it starts to feel closer. It starts to feel more potent, if you will, more intensified, because your sensitivities are increasing. So, I think that discernment is also a muscle that increases in sensitivity as we go along our journey.
Okay. We talked about mediumship being an art, and I really want you to see it as art. And you are literally an artiste. And your canvas will never look like anyone else's, okay? And as we move through every week, every single session you do is literally a new stroke to that canvas. You know what? Every session is just a happy mistake because you probably learned so much from that experience that it adds so much texture to that canvas. You definitely want it, right? We wanna keep it, but we don't want it to own us, and we don't want it to identify us because guess what? No good reading identifies us and no bad reading identifies us either.
I appreciate you guys. Thank you for being so open to my teachings and the way that I express. Bye.