A tale of two mediums

Sometimes for fun I watch Tyler Henry, the relatively famous medium (he has two Netflix shows). First and foremost, he's better than I am: he's a professional who has had lots of practice, and readings are my hobby that I love. But I watch what he's doing and sometimes I feel appalled. On his Netflix live show, he'll have 5 guests, all of whom have brought objects from deceased people, and he'll touch all of them at the same time and then (seemingly haphazardly) just start saying what he's seeing, which feels horribly unfocused. Like, does anyone know a woman who died in her 60s of cancer? Dude, does anyone not? 

Of course I started looking at his chart, because that's what I do: he's sun-Neptune and he's got an angular Pluto. If that sentence was gibberish, Neptune was conjunct (next to) his sun on the day he was born, meaning that it's part of his ego function to do spiritual stuff, and at the moment he was born, Pluto was basically as beneath the earth as it gets, so it's important to him on a deep level to do mediumship, since he has that gift (additionally, he has an 8th house south node, which in this case seems to indicate that mediumship is a gift he came in with).

You'll notice two things if you watch him: 1. he starts a lot of sentences with "this is going to sound weird/silly/crazy" and 2. he says he is getting symbols and says their meanings out loud. One of them I watched was "the symbol for Gemini, which means twins." From my perspective, as a person who actually does this work (and as someone with ample Capricorn, which Henry also has), "this is going to sound crazy" means "I feel like an idiot but I have to say this." What's happening is we are getting input that makes absolutely no sense to us, because the information isn't for us. If your ego kicks in and refuses to say something because it feels stupid, you're cooked: the reading's going to be bad because you're in your head in an intellectual sense, so you have to dismiss your ego and say everything you see, regardless of whether it makes sense, and regardless of whether you want to say it. My mentor told me something he's found in doing this work, which is that sometimes dead people still have shitty viewpoints or are attached to their traditional views (translation: sometimes they are still somehow racist/sexist/an asshole despite being dead). So I like spirit guide readings more than I like mediumship, because I listen to dumb opinions all the time from living people as it is (the other day I had someone who is not yet 50 complain to me about "kids these days" and I had to work to control my face). Spirit guides are evolved and I trust them way more than racist grandma. That's my bias.

When you are doing spiritual work, you get input that isn't for you, so a random stream of ideas and symbols and images and words. In order to make the images change, you have to say what you see, and if you're not conveying it correctly, the images won't change. I did a reading a couple of days ago to someone I talk to very frequently, and I had to explain that my speed of talking was slower and stuttery because I was choosing my words very carefully. Sometimes I have to try saying things out loud and feel they are wrong in order to get the right sentence, but with this type of work, the stakes are higher: if you say the wrong thing, or if someone hears something the wrong way, you can send them down a rabbit hole that they may struggle to get out of. Word choice matters!

One fun reading outtake was I spent about 6 minutes going on and on about "fancy handwriting and pens and stationary." After I finally stopped rambling, the person I was reading for said "I'm a calligrapher." My inside voice said "you could have interrupted me to tell me that!!" because I felt like a moron. I have bad handwriting and haven't seen the inside of a stationary store in at least a decade, so the best I could do was "handwriting, but fancy! It's really fancy!" Facepalm. God help me if I ever have to explain grape scissors or something else bougie or even a Starbucks order that isn't "black coffee."

As for symbols, the more readings you do, the more symbols you see, and the more you develop an internal language. Dead people or spirit guides can only speak to you in terms that you understand, so the longer I do this work, the more I have an encyclopedia of items/objects/themes that have a specific meaning when I'm doing readings that makes sense to me. So while for Henry, Gemini might mean twins, for me, Gemini might mean someone who can't stop talking, because we're different readers. So his symbols are his symbols. In other words, don't read too much into the symbology of psychics as something that's 100% true for you if you're also intuitive. If it feels true, great. Additionally, the symbols we get have "usual" meanings, but sometimes they get switched up, so while Gemini can usually mean twins, maybe today it means the month of June. If they won't stop showing me Gemini, that means that I'm not getting the message right, so I have to keep guessing until I get it. Ever played high-stakes charades? Where the other person you're playing with is crying?

This brings me to Henry's methodology, which is what we don't have in common: he will touch all the objects in order to "get" the dead people he's looking for. Almost all of my readings are remote, and fortunately I don't need (or want) objects to touch. I can usually find who you're looking for, but whether they have anything meaningful to say is another matter. Sometimes they'll just show up and stare at me. Henry kind of throws the doors open and has an "everybody-in" way of reading: I would get overwhelmed and run away, so I'm always like "what on earth are you doing?" I'm methodical and one at a time, because if i had a bunch of dead people talking at once, I guarantee I would mix things up, just like if I had a bunch of physical people talking to me at once, so I call (dead) people forward and then ask them to step backward. But seeing his chart made that make more sense to me. His method works for him and mine works for me. You will never see me do any of this publicly, ever. The stuff that comes up in readings is entirely too personal. (Neptune's on my moon, which is much more private than having Neptune on your sun (which Henry has), where you would do psychic things to show off.)

The final ingredient in readings, for me, is how open the person I am reading for is to receiving information. You can make your own readings (where you are the client) better by deciding that you're open to whatever information you get, rather than what you hope to get. Said another way, you can decide that you only want the best and most useful information for yourself. That might help put a stop to racist grandma's ramblings. Living people have far more control over our emotional/psychic inputs than most of us realize. Occasionally I'll have a reading where the person I'm reading for is a "prove it to me" and trust me, I will be reluctant to say much that's personal, because I could stumble on something they don't want to talk about, which will make someone close up more. This is why you don't share information in passing with someone who isn't expecting it. They'll usually slam shut emotionally, which kills the lines of communication. Imagine that you had a contentious relationship with someone who died, and you hope to hear that they're okay and have turned into a better person through death (which usually happens eventually but is not a quick process a lot of the time), but you're scared that they might unleash some bullshit on you. That fear closes you up and also makes it harder for anything else to come through that might be more positive. I hope this makes sense: I see it all the time, but I realize it...sounds crazy.

You can see how much better people feel when they receive affirming messages from their loved ones. That's what makes the work worth it. I honestly wouldn't do it otherwise.

P.S. New video on the Menendez brothers here.