Mia has a whole talk called The Power of the Mind, and it opens with a man she loved: her former father-in-law — the very person who first led her into spiritualism. At fourteen, doctors told him he had ten years to live, at most. He lived to sixty-two, in a wheelchair, playing his guitar, the most stubbornly positive human she ever met. One day a stranger informed him his illness must be punishment from a past life. Mia was furious. Her conclusion went the opposite way:

I believe that was the power of his mind.

Can the mind really do that?

More than we like to admit. Mia loves a documentary experiment where a man's pain tolerance was measured with electrical pulses: sitting alone, braced and serious, he tapped out almost immediately. Playing a game and laughing with friends, he took five times as much before noticing. Same body, same stimulus — different mind. As she told the circle afterwards: the mind is such a powerful thing, it's unbelievable.

She's seen the dark side of the same power. A woman once had a reading that declared hardship written over her life — and believed it so completely that she never dared to be happy again, always waiting for the punishment. Nothing was wrong with her life. One planted sentence ran it for decades. The mind doesn't check whether a belief is true before building your world around it.

Does belief really shape what we can do?

Mia tells of a young man she met on her travels years ago who could materialise small objects — she watched it happen in an ordinary kitchen, inches away. What fascinated her wasn't the phenomenon. It was that everything he produced matched the spiritual culture he was raised in — and when he later became devoted to a different faith, the old phenomena stopped and new ones began, in the imagery of his new belief. Her takeaway:

We're channeling our power to something we believe so strongly in. How you think is how you will be.

It works in miniature on all of us. Mia has bent spoons — felt the metal go soft as butter. But the moment she tries to prove it to her skeptical husband? Nothing. Ever. Wanting it too much puts the ego in the doorway, and the open, playful state these things need cannot share a room with the tense, grasping state of proving a point. Now think about what that means for a developing medium who steps into every exercise thinking I'm not sure I'm good enough for this. Can you imagine, she asks, how much that blocks your talent?

Is it all just imagination then?

Here's the twist: imagination was never the enemy. It's the language.

The imagination is the only tool spirit has to use. So from the imagination comes reality.

The mind interprets energy through what it knows — your memories, your symbols, your culture. That's not a flaw in the system; it is the system. The question was never "is my mind involved?" It always is. The question is whether it's working for you or against you. Mia's honest version: my mind is my biggest problem, and it can be my best friend or my worst enemy.

How do I retrain mine?

Mia's method is unglamorous and it works. She calls it brainwashing yourself — with love. Feed the conscious mind better sentences until the subconscious takes them over:

• Catch the sentence you repeat most. For most sensitive people it's some version of I'm not good enough for this.
• Replace it, out loud if you have to: What did I learn? instead of What did I fail? — I'm going to have fun and experiment instead of I have to deliver.
• Repeat it daily. Thought patterns change with weeks of repetition, not with one inspired afternoon. Mia has done it on herself every day for years.
• Protect what you let in. Be as careful with other people's sentences about you as with your own — one planted "you can't" can run for decades.
• And trust what arrives. Whatever pops into your mind when you've set your intention is there for a reason. The mind will work for you, not against you — once you stop treating it as the enemy.

The same mind that talked you out of your talent can be taught to hold the door open for it. That's not positive thinking as decoration. In Mia's experience — from a wheelchair that outlasted every prognosis to a thousand students who finally stopped flinching — it's the whole game.