Is Everyone a Medium?
- 2 hours ago
- 9 min read
Dani Van de Velde is a passionate advocate for living a spiritually aligned life in the modern world. She is a meditation teacher, Reiki Master, psychic medium, and author of Spirited. She is the founder of Spirited Living and Spirited Business online communities, a broadcaster on News for the Soul Radio, and host of The Modern Crone podcast.
As I prepare to welcome renowned psychic medium Christine Morgan and participants to Wonder of Spirit in Singapore, 12 to 15 October, I find myself, as I so often do, reflecting on the extraordinary experience of working as a medium.
What exactly is happening when we receive information that doesn't seem to originate from our own stream of thought? What are we accessing? And perhaps most intriguingly, is mediumship an unusual ability possessed by a few, or an inherent human capacity that some people have simply learned to recognise and develop?
We talk a great deal about what we put out into the world, our thoughts, our intentions, our emotions, our words, our energy. Across psychology, spirituality and even everyday language, there is an assumption that something emanates from us and affects the surrounding environment.
But what about the other direction? What are we receiving?
What if human perception is far more receptive than we generally recognise? And what if some of the experiences we dismiss as coincidence, imagination, or “just a feeling” are glimpses of a perceptual capacity we have never learned to recognise?
It raises a fascinating question, "Is everyone, to some degree, a medium?"
The receptive side of human consciousness
The idea of the human being as a receptive system isn't particularly radical.
Every second, our nervous system receives and integrates enormous amounts of information. Some arrives through the familiar senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Some arises internally through interoception, our capacity to sense and interpret signals from within the body, including heartbeat, breath, temperature, visceral sensations and subtle physiological changes.
Much of this happens before we are even consciously aware of it. Our bodies and brains continuously detect, filter and interpret information. Conscious awareness encounters only a fraction of this vast conversation.
Even at the cellular level, life depends on receptivity. Cells have receptor proteins that detect environmental signals and respond accordingly. Biologist Bruce Lipton has popularised the idea of the cell membrane as an interface between the organism and its environment. While some of his broader interpretations about consciousness remain outside mainstream scientific consensus, the fundamental biology is clear, living systems survive because they are exquisitely sensitive to information.
Mediumship finds its home when we think of ourselves not simply as generators of thought, emotion and action, but as extraordinarily sophisticated receivers too.
We already experience this in ways that can be difficult to explain. Something feels wrong before we know why. Someone walks into a room, and the atmosphere seems to change. An answer to a problem suddenly appears while we're showering or walking. A creative idea arrives seemingly complete. We wake from a dream with an extraordinary sense that something important has happened. We experience déjà vu, the uncanny sensation that this moment, somehow, has happened before.
Some of these experiences have plausible explanations in memory, unconscious processing, pattern recognition and the brain’s predictive nature. Yet many others that most of us experience cannot be as easily explained.
I think it is worth remaining curious about the edges.
Information before thought
This inquiry fascinates me because mediumistic information rarely feels like thought.
When I work as a medium, the experience is much closer to listening in on a deep conversation.
There is an incoming stream of information I haven't deliberately generated. An image may appear. A phrase may arrive. I might suddenly smell or taste something that isn't physically present. A sensation can move through my body. Sometimes there is a ripple across my skin or a noticeable shift in temperature.
The information is always felt before it is cognised. Then comes the cognitive work of interpretation.
What does this mean? Who does it belong to? How do I translate a sensation, image, smell, word, or fragment of information into something another person can recognise? I have learnt not to try to interpret it at all, but simply to relay to my clients what I am perceiving from their loved one.
In a beautiful recent example, a father in spirit came through and put a very clear taste of aniseed in my mouth. Of course, it was a psychic sense, not a physical substance or sense of taste, but it was clear. When I relayed this to my client, it was deeply meaningful for her, as she had prepared fennel water daily for her father when he was dying to ease his stomach and dry mouth.
This distinction between reception and interpretation is significant.
When I teach psychic and mediumistic development, one of the skills we cultivate is recognising the difference between the ordinary movements of our own mind and something that appears to arrive within awareness.
It can be subtle. That may be why many potentially mediumistic experiences are dismissed before we become curious about them.
Have you already experienced it?
Ask someone whether they are a medium, and most will probably say no. Ask a slightly different set of questions, and the conversation becomes more interesting.
Have you ever vividly dreamed of someone who has died and woken with the lingering feeling that you were actually with them?
Have you suddenly smelled the perfume, aftershave, tobacco or cooking of someone you loved, despite there being no obvious physical source?
Have you repeatedly encountered an unusual symbol, animal, song or object that has a very specific association with someone who has died, especially at times when you were thinking about them or needed reassurance?
Have you experienced an immediate, powerful thought about someone in spirit that seemed to arrive from nowhere, completely disconnected from your environment or previous train of thought?
Have you ever simply felt that someone was there?
None of these experiences, in isolation, proves communication with someone who has died. Memory, association, expectation, unconscious perception and coincidence are all possibilities.
Discernment matters enormously. But dismissing every anomalous experience without examining it is no less curious than believing every unusual experience unquestioningly. There is a fascinating territory between the two.
Very often during a contact, the person in Spirit will confirm how they have been trying to communicate with their loved one here. Recently, during a Zoom session, a loving mum came through for her daughter. She shared many wonderful memories and recent events from her daughter’s life, showing that she is still close to and loving her and her family from the spirit realm.
But it was when the mum referred to her perfume that the contact landed much more deeply. The daughter had experienced the scent of her mother’s perfume in her home several times since her passing and dismissed it as a product of grief. However, on her way to the session with me, she put out a thought to her mother, “Mum, if this is real and you are really still around in Spirit, mention your perfume to the medium.”
So, what makes a medium?
If we entertain the possibility that mediumistic perception exists on a spectrum, perhaps the distinction isn't simply between those who “have it” and those who don't.
In my own experience, the difference lies in perceptual development.
For me, mediumship begins with mastery of the mind. The mind needs to become calm enough to notice subtle information without immediately overlaying it with our own thoughts, expectations or desires. Awareness needs to become expansive rather than tightly focused. Attention needs to become stable without becoming rigid. We need to become ultimately receptive. That takes practice.
Meditation has been invaluable to my development because it teaches something deceptively difficult, how to observe what arises in consciousness without immediately becoming involved with it.
Then there is sensitivity to energy and to the body. A pressure, a temperature change, a tingling sensation, a ripple across the skin, an unexpected emotion, an image that enters awareness carrying a particular voltage, or a sentence whose tone somehow feels different from your usual internal monologue.
The developing medium first learns to notice these changes and then gradually to discriminate between them.
Often, our people in spirit will show the way they passed over. Not to be morbid, but more so, I think, because these moments are so specific to the individual, often occurring in private during deep, beautiful exchanges, either verbally or energetically.
Whilst every medium is different, I feel the cause of death as a sensation in my body, a sensation in the brain tells me of a neurological disease, a numbness on the side of my face or body tells me of a stroke, a heavy feeling in my lungs tells me of breathing issues, a dense feeling in an organ tells me of a specific kind of cancer, and a sudden impact tells me of an accident.
This is why development matters, because the objective isn't simply to become more open, it is to become more discerning.
What creativity might teach us
Another human experience that deeply intrigues me about receptivity is creativity. Artists, writers, musicians, scientists and inventors have long described ideas as arriving.
We even use this language instinctively, an idea “came to me”, inspiration “struck”, the answer “appeared”, I suddenly “saw what I needed to do”.
Research into creativity suggests that creative insight involves interactions among brain networks associated with spontaneous thought, memory, imagination, attention and executive control. Interestingly, insight often arises when concentrated effort relaxes, while walking, dreaming, showering, travelling or doing something apparently unrelated to the problem.
Something has been happening outside the narrow beam of conscious thought. Mainstream neuroscience would locate that processing in the brain and nervous system. But again, I think it is worth staying curious.
Where exactly does inspiration begin? Where does intuition begin? Where does that strange flash of knowing begin? And where might mediumistic perception sit within this broader spectrum of human receptivity?
Perhaps these phenomena are entirely different. Perhaps they overlap. I think we simply don't know enough about consciousness yet to draw firm boundaries between them. For me, that uncertainty makes the enquiry more interesting, not less so.
The receptive human
Mediumship extends beyond communication with those who have died. It asks us to reconsider what perception itself might be.
We know human perception is richer than conscious thought. We know the body constantly receives and responds to information before conscious cognition catches up. We know creativity can produce ideas that seem to arrive fully formed. We know dreams can create experiences of extraordinary emotional and sensory intensity.
Mediumship takes that enquiry a step further. What if consciousness doesn't only generate information? What if it also receives? I don't think science currently provides us with a definitive answer to that question.
But after years of sitting with clients and receiving highly specific information about people I have never met, lives I have never known, and memories that mean nothing to me but everything to the person sitting opposite me, I remain deeply curious about what human consciousness is capable of.
Only last week, I had an incredible experience of this. A friend in Spirit came through for a woman in my development circle. She showed me the golden mask of Tutankhamun, a scarab beetle, a particular bracelet, and the feeling that she was a teacher. The receiver, a good friend long passed and a teacher of Egyptian mysteries, recognised her immediately. The receiver had both the scarab beetle and a bracelet that belonged to the teacher in Spirit. There was a strong feeling of support, accompanied by the image of the Eye of Horus. As it turned out, the receiver had a challenging conversation coming up with someone in their life who wears an Eye of Horus pendant. Amazing and very reassuring for the receiver of the message.
So, is everyone a medium? Perhaps. Or perhaps that isn't quite the right question. Maybe the more interesting place to begin is this, "What am I already receiving that I haven't yet learned to notice?"
If this article has piqued your curiosity to learn more, or if you have had a similar experience to those I have mentioned, check out our Wonder of Spirit program in Singapore this year, or get in touch. I would love to hear from you.
Read more from Danielle Van de Velde
Danielle Van de Velde, Meditation Teacher, Reiki Master, Psychic Medium, and Author
Dani Van de Velde is a meditation teacher, Reiki Master, psychic medium, and author of Spirited. She is the founder of the Spirited Living and Spirited Business communities, supporting spiritually aligned growth and conscious leadership. Dani is a broadcaster on News for the Soul Radio and host of The Modern Crone podcast, exploring modern spirituality and embodied wisdom. Her work bridges intuition and everyday life, offering grounded, accessible pathways to self-trust and inner clarity. She is known for a warm, practical approach that honours both the mystical and the real.
