How to Become a Medium: Where to Start, and Why It's a Talent, Not a Gift

How do you become a medium? Mia Ottosson, a medium for more than 30 years, treats it as a talent you practise, not a gift you wait for. Start with yourself, sit quietly in what she calls the power, learn with other people and give it years. Nobody can promise you'll end up working as one. You don't have to feel ready to begin.

As she told one class:

Everybody has potential for mediumship. Some more than others, obviously, but everybody can train it.

She didn't set out to become one herself. Looking back, she says:

I didn't want to become a medium. … I was trying to find me. I was trying to find a place where I belonged, where I didn't feel as misfitted as I'd done all my life.

What is mediumship, and where does psychic work fit in?

Mediumship aims to bring evidence from someone who has died. Psychic work reads the living person in front of you. Mia's version:

If you work psychically, you work with a person opposite you intuitively, and if you work with the spirit, it's facts from and evidence from someone who's come to the other side. Easy as that.

For her, a good medium is a psychic medium too:

It was a period in time in history when people said you can't be psychic, you should be 100% mediumistic, but that's really amputating your legs. … One thing doesn't exclude the other, so to speak.

From the sitter's side, there's more on the difference between a psychic and a mediumship reading.

Mia once wished she could see and hear spirit clearly, word for word. Now she's glad it doesn't work like that:

But in all honestly, if I were to be a parrot to the spirit world … how much enthusiasm do you think I would have left?

If you've lost someone and hope to reach them yourself, this is worth knowing. Mia says she would go to a different medium to hear from someone close to her:

…it's very hard for yourself because you're not objective. I might feel them around me, but I would never trust the information I would get.

Looking for a message from someone who has passed, or guidance on where you are? Compare Mia's sittings, personal sessions and the community.

Can anyone become a medium, or do you have to be born with it?

Mia doesn't believe mediums are born special. To her, it's a talent, and talents can be practised. Many people grow up hearing that mediums have a gift, and she doesn't like the word.

I hate the word gift. I like the word talent.

Her reason goes back to her own first steps:

I don't like the word gift, because when I started my development, someone told me, "Let's see if you have the gift for this, then." And that means that God has favorites, and I don't believe in that. … It doesn't come for free. You have to put an effort in that.

In one video she says a talent "needs to be practiced to be really, really good", and that "not everybody becomes a concert pianist, but everybody can learn to play the piano."

In a class, she pointed out how differently people treat this kind of learning:

…if you would go and take a guitar lesson, and you want to be awesome … You know you're gonna practice forever to get there, forever. But here when we're doing this, it's like we are useless if we are not professional from the day one, and we have to change that attitude.

That isn't a promise that everyone ends up a medium, and she says so:

Not everybody's meant to be a medium, but a lot of people who comes into this, they find other things. … But spiritual development, personal development is for everybody, and you feel so much better when you're doing it.

What are the first signs, and do you need any before you start?

There's no checklist of signs here. Mia talks instead about never quite fitting in:

Because most of you, like me, would feel that you never belonged anywhere in your life. You probably have felt like the oddballs.

You don't need a history of seeing things, either:

Hey, I'm the one who never saw a lot. I'm the one who never felt a lot, or I thought I didn't because it's my normal state, you know?

She once told a class: "I remember, even though I've been working so much, I only seen spirit once…"

And curiosity is enough to begin:

If you're curious, you have a talent that can be practiced. Not everybody wants to be a professional, absolutely not.

Where do you start?

Here is how to become a medium, step by step, in Mia's own words:

1. Start with yourself. "I would start with personal development."
2. Sit in the power. "So my biggest advice to anybody out there, sit in the power."
3. Set one simple intention. "Help me to be what I'm meant to be."
4. Read living people before the spirit world. "You're gonna start to work with your own psychic ability, your talent, not the spirit world."
5. Practise with other people. "Sitting alone is not the same … you sit together, it's stronger"
6. Go in to experiment. "I'm gonna have fun. I'm gonna experiment and I'm gonna learn about energy. I'm not here to prove anything"
7. Afterwards, ask what you learned. "what you bring with you home is what did I learn?"
8. Then find real people to practise on. "tell people that you're out there, I need to practice, can I practice with you"

She remembers her own start:

And my journey, it started quite late. I think I was 24, 25 when I started … I was a shy, little, insecure woman. … So I started meditation group, I started healing, I started all sorts of things.

If she were starting again today, she says, she would probably begin the same way:

I would start with healing, and I would start to sit for the spirit and to sit for myself, to find myself, to find that peace within me. That's the most important thing. Mediumship came as a bonus for me.

Sitting in the power comes first for her, and it isn't quite meditation:

Sitting in the power does the difference from meditation. A meditation … you go in inwardly to find your answers, so to speak. Here, when you're sitting in the power, you're going out and you're becoming one with everything. … You don't have to complicate it.

Early on she sat a great deal. Now it can be five minutes at bedtime:

The first 10 years, I sat an hour at least every day … Nowadays, not so much. … But what I do do every night is when I go to bed, even if it's just five minutes, attuned to the power of the spirit … and I lay in that power till I fall asleep.

Don't expect fireworks. When she sat, often nothing seemed to happen, and she thought she was doing it wrong:

I was just sitting there in stillness and it was like a void around me. … I was just sitting there in the blackness and I thought, "I'm doing it wrong." … I was doing it the right way.

She believes regular sitting is what keeps a medium's work steady. In the same breath, she tells you not to take her word for it:

But that's my theory. Like I say, never trust a medium. … I always been sitting from when I started my spiritual journey, and I never fallen flat on my face. And I don't know, I think it's because of that.

How do you practise, and who should you learn from?

In her teaching, beginners learn to read each other's energy before they link with the spirit world, and she starts with colour.

Wherever you practise, it should feel safe. She once told her own group:

This is a group where we all should feel safe and secure.

It can happen online, too. She finds that harder, and calls it good practice:

I also find it harder to work over the internet than when they are with me … so it's good practice over the internet, it is.

If you've been practising on your own so far, you don't have to develop alone.

On choosing teachers, she says:

I believe you should go to a lot of teachers, and bring out the gold nuggets from each and every one that suits you individually. … And I think, therefore, it's very dangerous to put the medium on a pedestal.

She wants you to find your own way of working:

You have to be your own unique medium. … We don't want a copycat of someone else.

Am I a medium, or just making it up?

Mia's answer is that it will always feel a little made up, because the spirit world has to work through you:

The only thing they can use is my knowledge, my life experience, and my imagination, so it will always feel a little bit like you're making it up, always, but if you're making it up for several years and people can understand it, you're not making it up.

She made the same point in another class:

And this is where a lot of people say, "Oh, that's just my mind. That's from my story." Well, that's the only story you can use: your own indoctrination, your knowledge, and your imagination, and that's what spirit has to work with.

For Mia, the test is evidence the other person can understand. She doesn't want the feeling lost along the way, though:

Yes, I don't believe that we should nitty gritty into the evidence so we forget the feeling and the healing. But yes, the evidence is what mediumship is all about.

And if you worry that you're only reading the person in front of you:

And sometimes the best evidence is when they have to go home and check it out, and it's correct, because we haven't drawn from the aura. There's no cold reading, it's the best evidence.

What happens when you get it wrong?

You will get things wrong. So does Mia, and she is glad of it:

Yes, I do mistake every time I work, and thank God for that, because if I don't do mistakes every time I work, I wouldn't learn anything else, would I?

When the person you're reading for says no, she treats it as something to work with. Her advice:

So if you get the no, just go back and say to yourself why. Why did my mind interpret the energy this way? What else can it mean?

Confidence doesn't arrive first. In her words, it comes "by changing your thoughts and realizing by practice that it's actually working every time".

Her own work got better once she stopped chasing perfect:

…when I started to change my thinking and not looking at the perfection and that everything has to be right, but actually start to enjoy it, my mediumship became better because I dared to experiment in a different way with it…

Well, we don't have to be good, we just have to practice for the sheer joy of it.

Is it safe to develop as a medium?

If you're scared, Mia was too:

I was so afraid of the dark. I was so afraid of the spirit world because of all the horror movies and all the stories you grow up with when you are a child.

Today she sees it differently:

I always speak about there's no evil in the spirit world. … I believe in the light of a soul.

Her own protection is a single intention. In The Complete Medium she writes:

My protection is simple. I state my intention: "I am working for the light." If I'm coming from a place of love, service, and integrity, I will attract spirits of love, service, and integrity.

Rituals are fine if they help you focus:

And you don't need to do sage in all the corner, you know? If you want sage, it's a tool. For me, everything is a tool to focus your mind…

If something feels uncomfortable while you're sitting, she has a simple check:

But if you feel something that is uncomfortable, speak within your mind to the spirit because they will change the energy if it's them who has made you feel like that with their energy. Otherwise, it's me. I have to check myself. Because this should always be a loving experience.

If what you're experiencing frightens or overwhelms you, please talk to your doctor.

You also need to be able to switch off. The guide again:

Many developing mediums make the mistake of always being available to spirit, leaving their connection open. … You must learn to open the door … you must also learn to close it.

Some practice leaves you tired and some lifts you. In a video, she explains why:

When you're working with the spirit energy, it's a very bubbly, fast, uplifting energy, and you get very, very alive in it. If you're working with your own energy for a long, long time, it can be very draining and very tiring.

Energy can't hurt you, but you can hurt yourself with your fear and your anxiety.

What should a medium never tell someone?

Once you start reading for other people, what you say matters. In Mia's teaching, that means no predictions and no naming illnesses. She goes back to the early days of spiritualism:

…when mediums started to work, there were not really any messages. The message actually was, "Life goes on after death. I love you. I'm sorry." … My job as a medium is actually to make you feel comfortable within yourself, so you can make your own decisions.

On the future, she says:

And when you're working as a spiritual medium, you're not a fortune teller. … for me it is a huge responsibility, and I don't think the future is written in stone.

On illness:

…I think it's so scary to say to people, "Oh, I'm picking up cancer here," or "I'm picking up something bad here," … The client should always go away with happy tears, nothing else.

That's also what's scary with this job because we can put someone on a pedestal or we can drown them with our words. So you have to be careful with what you're saying as well.

And know your limits:

…if someone really needs professional help, I tell them to look for a proper psychologist. … You have to be clear what you can do and what you not can do…

How long does it take to become a medium?

It takes years, and Mia says you never finish:

And yes, we are impatient. … It has to happen yesterday more often than anything, but things takes time, and mediumship especially takes time, and you never finish…

One stage catches people out, four or five years in, when the sensations seem to fade:

…we lose so many good ambassadors who can do a good job for the spirit after four or five years, because suddenly the pictures disappear. Suddenly you don't feel them as you used to do, and you think you lost it, but now you actually gone up the level, because you get used to the energy…

When are you ready to read for other people?

In Mia's view, you're ready to start practice sittings before you feel it:

It's like I say all the time that I want to do, but maybe I need to be a little bit better, maybe I need to be a little bit secure. That's when you're ready to start doing your sittings.

But don't rush the professional stage. Her caution comes from starting professional work too early herself:

…because I was thrown out too early, really before I laid my groundwork to work as a professional medium, I always had that pressure that I have to deliver…

Nor do you have to pick one path. People starting out ask her whether they're meant to be a medium, a healer or a trance medium. Her answer:

Who says that you have to focus on one thing? I'm doing everything. Otherwise, I would get bored, and they wouldn't get the best out of me.

She doesn't pretend it's easy:

So yes, it is a painful journey, but it's also the most beautiful journey to actually wake up and see magic.