Permission to Fail.

Some said they were shocked...

For the last six weeks, I have taken a new batch of students through my Fundamentals of Miraculous Mediumship program. This is my entry-level course for beginners, and those who wonder if they could be mediums.

Among the guided meditations, practice sittings, and tried-and-true strategies for connecting with our higher power, there was one aspect of the course that prompted many of the students to email me.

Some said they were shocked I had done this…

Others reported that the lesson was deeply touching…

Many simply said ‘thank you’.

The lesson in question was a video of a reading where I failed. It included commentary reflecting on why I had bombed so hard, failed to connect, and what I planned to do about it moving forward.

This was not a reading from ten years ago, mind you, it happened just a few weeks ago!

My students’ responses to this lesson can only be described as exhalation. Many of them had been holding their breaths, tense with the fear of failure. They watched me bomb and saw, for the first time, that there’s no shame in failing at mediumship.

Their reactions revealed just how under pressure mediums feel to get everything right. Even baby mediums.

Skeptics have convinced society that unless a medium gets everything right then they are a fake, a fraud, and no good at all. And even if they do get everything ‘right’, it doesn’t prove anything - there must be some ‘normal’ explanation. We are routinely shoo-ed away with exasperation from meaningful research and scientific conversations. We are denied the attention granted to real things, and exiled from the places where real things are welcome.

Ironically, it is the pressure to get everything right that prevents the flow of mediumship. Communion with spirit doesn’t happen in the energy of trying, it happens in the energy of allowing.

And if a medium has some skeptic’s voice in the back of their head calling them a fraud and a failure before they’ve even begun, then of course they’re going to mess up.

No one - not chefs, not footballers, not surgeons, not ballerinas - can reach their pinnacle if they have an internalized voice of scorn and contempt.

If we really want to see what mediums can do, we have to give them permission to fail.

We have to stop thinking they are making claims about being superhuman, and accept that mediumship is a normal (and flawed!) human capacity that tells us something about humans selves and the ways we are connected.

Mediums have never claimed to have perfect superpowers, and to have the view of ‘you better get everything right or else I don’t believe you’ is, quite frankly, a bit immature.

When physicists fail, they are patted on the back. It’s part of how science is done. Every wrong answer is closer to the right one. And, often, physicists are making claims that are far more outlandish than mediumship!

When a sports team fails, it’s part of the structure of the game. Failure is baked into competition. Your favourite sport would be meaningless without it! Failing well and being ‘sportsmanlike’ is as important to the health of a sport as winning.

And when we fail to understand our lovers, our children, our parents, our friends, we are encouraged to repair the rupture, move forward, and love them better.

We don’t claim that there is nothing to physics, sport, or relationships because they fail. We accept that failure is part of what makes these aspects of life extraordinary.

But when it comes to mediumship, failure is treated as evidence that it does not exist.

We have to recognize this contempt - this double-standard - within ourselves, and within society.

Its sole purpose is to invalidate.

In every other sphere of life, we are encouraged to ‘fail forward’, dust ourselves off and keep going. It’s time we extended that same compassionate permission to mediums.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, please share it and discuss it with others. And consider upgrading your subscription to join the conversation with me in the comments.

Today’s question is: Have you ever felt that it was not ok for you to fail? How did you finally give yourself permission to fail?

Tell me about it in the comments.