Introduction

Ask almost any mediumship tutor what matters most in a student’s development, and the answer tends to come back the same: sitting in the power. It is taught in development circles and church back rooms, in weekend workshops and one-to-one tuition, from the United Kingdom to North America, to Australia, Europe and well beyond. Most teachers will tell you that nothing else in mediumship can be built without it.

And yet science has barely glanced at it. The practice has never been isolated as a research variable or measured in any systematic way. Neither parapsychology nor the now-substantial field of contemplative science has turned its attention to what sitting in the power actually does to the person who practises it.

That gap matters more now than it once did. Mediumship has travelled a long way from the margins, carried into millions of homes by television, podcasts, and social media, and the number of people taking up its disciplines has grown with it. If the practice really does the things its practitioners describe, then understanding how and why would serve students, teachers, researchers, and the bereaved people who one day sit in front of a working medium.

This paper sets out to do three things. It places sitting in the power in context, within Spiritualism and within the wider world of contemplative practice. It gathers the scientific research that, while it does not address the practice head-on, bears on the states of consciousness and the developmental changes it appears to involve. And it draws together the considerable body of first-hand testimony from practitioners, which, whatever its limits as evidence, is too extensive and too consistent to set aside.

As a teacher of mediumship and related subjects myself, SitP has been the bedrock of a solid foundational path for students. After my first experience of it, the depth of my spirit connection started to grow, subsequently instilling greater confidence and knowledge of my own spirit, my own sense of universal connection with the divine source.

Background: The Origins and Nature of Sitting in the Power

Historical Roots in Spiritualism

Spiritualism took shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, growing into distinct traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. British Spiritualism in particular came to treat the unfolding of mediumship as something more than the learning of a skill. The medium was understood as an instrument, and the quality of any communication was thought to rest on how finely that instrument had been tuned.

Sitting in the power, as a named and structured discipline, is bound up with the teaching of Gordon Higginson (1918–1993), among the most respected British mediums of the last century and for many years President of the Spiritualists’ National Union. Higginson taught that you could not separate the growth of mediumship from the growth of the person. Character, awareness, and spiritual sensitivity developed together, and regular sitting was the means by which they did. His emphasis passed down through later generations of British teachers and travels internationally today. The medium Glyn Edwards (1949–2015) did a great deal to bring the practice to a wide body of students.

In fact my first course at the Arthur Findlay College was a weekend course organised by Glyn. At one point, he summoned all the classes into the sanctuary and took us all into the power, with his usual flamboyance and flair. One hundred of us sat for the power together. Through Glyn’s instruction, we learned to connect to that unique sense of divinity and spiritual existence.

What Sitting in the Power Involves

Stripped to its essentials, sitting in the power means sitting quietly with the intention of expanding your awareness into the energy of spirit, rather than reaching outward or trying to accomplish anything. That sets it apart from most mindfulness meditation, where the aim is usually to watch the mind or let its contents settle. Here the instruction runs the other way. The practitioner is encouraged to move past the watching self, to let the edges of personal identity soften, and to allow awareness to open into something larger, which the tradition understands as the presence of spirit.

In practice it usually looks like this. You sit comfortably, eyes closed. You let the breath slow and the body relax. You hold an intention to connect with spirit rather than to observe yourself. You let your awareness grow outward, past the body, into the room and beyond it. Then you rest there in a kind of receptive stillness, neither chasing impressions nor pushing them away. There is no goal, no clock, no measure of success. A sitting might last five minutes or stretch beyond an hour, depending on experience and the time available.

What that description can miss is that the practice is not passive. It asks for an active, sustained intention and a quality of open attention that takes real effort to hold, even though what you are attending to is left deliberately undefined. That combination of effortful attention with no fixed object is part of what separates it from ordinary mindfulness, and part of what makes it interesting to anyone thinking about it in cognitive or neuroscientific terms.

If I had to describe it to a beginner, I would explain how it strips away the ego and replaces it with the pure divine spirit within us all. It creates the sense of interconnectedness with eternal life and reframes universal truths in such a way, it can only encourage trust in the reality of the spiritual dimensions.

Sitting in the Power in Contemporary Mediumship Education

Today the practice sits at the front of almost every mediumship curriculum. Teachers across the tradition describe it as the ground everything else stands on. The point is not to learn a technique for picking up information from those who have passed. The point is to learn the state from which that information arrives, and to grow at home in it: a mode of awareness that is expanded, quieter in its self-talk, and more sensitive to the faint impressions a medium works with.

Seen this way, the practice reaches beyond mediumship. The state it cultivates, with its loosening of the ego’s grip, its widening of awareness, and its open receptivity, is one that contemplatives in many traditions have long regarded as transformative in its own right, quite apart from any question of spirit contact.

The Research Scene: Mediumship, Altered States, and the Scientific Gap

The Historical Marginalisation of Mediumship Research

The scientific study of mediumship goes back further than most people assume. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, investigated mediums with real rigour through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and produced a substantial body of careful work. Then it largely stopped. As Emily Williams Kelly has observed, the study of mediumship was more or less set aside in the second half of the twentieth century, stalled by an argument that could not be settled: were the phenomena the work of discarnate communicators, or of the living medium (Kelly, 2010)?

That stalemate did more than freeze one debate. It suspended almost all enquiry into mediumistic experience itself, including the simple question of what regular practice does to a medium as a person. Even researchers who stayed curious found the subjective, hard-to-measure nature of the work discouraging, and so the psychology of practice went largely unexamined.

The Contemporary Revival

The picture has changed in this century. A revival of mediumship research, led mainly by the Windbridge Research Centre in the United States and the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, has brought serious method to bear on mediums and the states they enter. None of it studies sitting in the power directly. All of it bears on what the practice appears to involve.

The Windbridge Research Centre, directed by Dr Julie Beischel, runs three lines of enquiry. One asks whether mediums can report accurate, specific information about the deceased under blinded conditions. Another looks at who mediums are, examining their characteristics, experiences, and wellbeing. A third asks whether readings can help the bereaved (Beischel, 2015). Together they amount to the most sustained scientific look at mediumship, and at its effects on both mediums and sitters, that we currently have.

Adjacent Scientific Evidence

Altered States of Consciousness in Mediumistic Practice

One Windbridge finding speaks almost directly to what sitting in the power trains. Rock and Beischel (2008) gave certified research mediums the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory, a validated 53-item questionnaire that maps 26 dimensions of conscious experience, once after a mediumship reading and once after a control task involving no attempt at contact. The two conditions differed significantly across several dimensions. In plain terms, the mediumship state registered as a genuinely distinct altered state of consciousness.

That matters here. If working mediumship is a measurably different state, then sitting in the power, whose whole purpose is to reach and deepen access to that state, can be read as a form of training in it. Which raises the obvious next question. What does it do to someone to enter that state deliberately, again and again, across years of practice? No one has measured it. But there is a good deal of nearby evidence to draw on. Speaking only for myself, the state I settle into when I sit is plainly not my everyday mind, and it has never felt like one I am simply imagining.

Psychophysiological Correlates of Mediumistic Work

Work on the physiology of mediumistic states has turned up some suggestive results. Hageman and colleagues (2010), studying Brazilian mediums, recorded measurable shifts in muscle activity, heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature as their subjects entered and held their working states. The findings need replication, and they were not gathered in the context of sitting in the power, but they point to something worth noting. These states are not purely subjective. The body registers them too.

Beischel, Tassone, and Boccuzzi (2019) looked at haematological and psychophysiological markers in mediums during readings. A single reading produced no measurable change, but the study added to a growing portrait of mediums’ physiology. The Windbridge team has also reported that mediums describe more childhood trauma than comparable non-mediums, and has argued that this, rather than the practice of mediumship, accounts for raised rates of certain health problems. The implication is reassuring. The practice itself does not appear to harm, and may well support, wellbeing.

Parapsychological Frameworks: Altered States and Psi

Parapsychology has long noticed a link between altered states and reported psi. Frederic Myers, one of the SPR’s founders, was among the first to suggest that shifts in consciousness let psychic material cross from the subliminal mind into ordinary awareness (Alvarado, 2010). On that view, a practice that deliberately cultivates such shifts, as sitting in the power does, might open the door both to psi experience and to the wider changes such states seem to bring.

Later work developed the idea into what is sometimes called the noise-reduction model. Quiet the ordinary churn of thought, planning, and sensory traffic, and any faint signal from a non-local source becomes easier to detect (Alvarado, 2010). Read through that lens, sitting in the power is noise-reduction training, lowering over time the threshold at which subtle awareness becomes possible. I have always understood it in plainer terms: most of the work lies in getting myself out of the way.

The Division of Perceptual Studies: After-Death Communications and Their Effects

At the University of Virginia, the Division of Perceptual Studies has examined after-death communications, the experiences in which people sense contact with someone who has died, and what those experiences do to them. The researchers note that such contacts often arrive in altered states, in meditation or in the drifting moments between waking and sleep, and that people tend to find them deeply meaningful (Perceptual Studies, DOPS).

The connection to sitting in the power is not hard to draw. The practice cultivates exactly the open, soft-edged, receptive awareness in which these experiences are most often reported. And the DOPS work suggests they leave a mark: less fear of death, a firmer sense of meaning and purpose, a deeper spiritual orientation. If sitting in the power makes such experiences more likely, it may be one of the routes by which those changes arrive.

Practitioner-Reported Effects: A Synthesis of Anecdotal Evidence

With no direct studies to draw on, the testimony of practitioners is the main evidence we have about what the practice does. It does not meet the bar of controlled research, and it should not be dressed up as though it did. But it is not worthless either. When reports are plentiful, consistent across people who have never spoken to one another, and in line with what nearby science would predict, they deserve a serious hearing, and they make a sound starting point for hypotheses worth testing.

What follows draws on accounts from working mediumship teachers and practitioners. A handful of themes recur. In my experience, greater trust, awareness and a release of emotion are commonly reported and witnessed in my students. I’ve seen the tension and performance anxiety drain after SitP. Previously nervous students have turned in to explorers with confidence. Importantly, the need to study more on spirituality, mediumship, consciousness and many other existential subjects, has increased and offered renewed purpose and perspectives to their lives.

Enhanced Spiritual Confidence and Reduced Self-Doubt

The change practitioners mention most often is confidence, and specifically a growing trust in their own impressions. Developing mediums talk constantly about second-guessing: catching an impression, then talking themselves out of it, usually from fear of being wrong or looking foolish. Regular sitting, they report, wears that habit down.

The way they describe it is a slow growth in familiarity. Sit with the subtle textures of spirit often enough and you begin to know them, to tell them apart from imagination or hopeful invention. One teacher puts it simply: the practice “teaches you the subtlety of their presence, so you stop second-guessing yourself” (Medium, 2025). That loosening of the analytical grip on intuition lines up neatly with what meditation researchers call meta-awareness, the capacity to notice your own mental processes without being run by them, and with the parapsychological picture of altered states quietening the noise that hides the signal.

Deepened Energetic and Perceptual Awareness

Practitioners also describe a steady refinement of perception. Not louder or more dramatic phenomena, but cleaner and more reliable ones. The attunement itself becomes more trustworthy. As one teacher describes it, “the more time you spend in spirit’s energy, the more naturally you blend. You won’t have to ‘try’ to connect, it will already be part of your awareness” (Medium, 2025).

There is a parallel here with how expertise develops in contemplative practice generally. Long-term meditators show measurable gains in attention, in perceptual sensitivity, and in how efficiently they process information (Lutz et al., 2008). What practitioners describe sounds like the same kind of honing, turned toward the particular sort of awareness their work calls for.

Increased Trust and Tolerance of Uncertainty

A related theme is a particular flavour of trust. Not confidence that things will turn out a certain way, but the capacity to stay present and open when there is no confirmation and nothing to control. Sitting in the power has no agenda and no scoreboard. It is, in a sense, practice at being in the unknown. Practitioners say that capacity carries over into their working mediumship, taking the edge off performance nerves and steadying them when the work goes uncertain, as it always eventually does.

Mindfulness research describes something close to this under the names decentring and equanimity, the ability to stay steady inside difficult or uncertain experience. Longitudinal studies treat equanimity as a marker of deeper practice, tied both to resilience and to a changed relationship with one’s own mind (Dambrun et al., 2024).

Personal Transformation Beyond Mediumistic Development

What stands out most in these accounts is how often the effects spill past mediumship into the rest of a person’s life. Practitioners speak of knowing themselves better, of a clearer sense of purpose, of more compassion, of a steadier sense of who they are.

The teacher Arlene Mills describes how, as practitioners deepen their connection with themselves and with spirit through sitting in the power, “they experience profound transformations, including increased self-awareness, expanded consciousness, and a deeper sense of purpose” (Mills, 2023). Claims of that kind sit comfortably alongside research on self-transcendent experiences of other sorts, from near-death experiences to mystical states to intensive contemplative training.

People also report changes in how they are with others: more patience, less reactivity, more empathy, a readier generosity. If those reports are accurate, they fit what the research shows about contemplative practices that cultivate self-transcendence and loosen the sense of a central, defended self, which reliably increase compassion and prosocial behaviour (Trautwein et al., 2016).

Challenges and Limitations of the Anecdotal Record

None of this should be taken at face value. The reports come overwhelmingly from people committed to the practice, who have every reason, mostly without realising it, to remember the hits and forget the misses. With no controls, no standard measures, and no tracking over time, causation is out of reach. The changes people describe could owe as much to meditation in general, to the warmth of a development circle, or to the meaning that any devoted spiritual practice lends a life.

There is a quieter problem too. The practitioner literature rarely records what did not happen: the sittings that led nowhere, the people for whom nothing shifted, the occasional experience that unsettled rather than helped. A fair account would need to capture those as carefully as the successes, and at present it does not.

Parallels with Broader Contemplative Science

Self-Transcendence as a Common Pathway

The clearest bridge between what practitioners describe and what contemplative science has found runs through self-transcendence. Sitting in the power aims, quite openly, to take awareness past the ordinary self, to dissolve for a while the usual line between the individual and something wider. That dissolving of the ego-boundary is exactly what a growing body of research points to as the engine behind many of meditation’s deeper effects.

Dambrun and colleagues (2024) found, in randomised controlled trials, that attentional meditation lifted positive emotions such as gratitude, hope, and awe, working through body awareness, meta-awareness, and self-transcendence, and that those self-transcendent emotions in turn improved wellbeing and inner peace. Practitioners reach for the same vocabulary when they describe sitting in the power: a falling-away of self-consciousness, a widening of awareness, a presence that feels at once larger and more peaceful than ordinary waking life.

Dose-Response Relationships and the Shift Toward Spiritual Goals

Longitudinal meditation research has turned up something that maps well onto practitioners’ experience. Tracking meditators across two to four years, one prospective study found that the more people practised over time, the more their motivation shifted toward spiritual goals and away from practical ones such as managing stress (PMC, 2025).

That is a familiar arc in mediumship. Beginners usually arrive wanting something: vivid experiences, stronger phenomena, visible proof that they are improving. Seasoned practitioners describe leaving that behind for something closer to devotion, sitting not to get anywhere but simply to be present. That change in why a person sits may turn out to be one of the practice’s most important fruits.

Compassion, Connectedness, and Prosocial Outcomes

Research on compassion-based meditation has documented reliable gains in compassion for others, in social connectedness, and in prosocial behaviour (Trautwein et al., 2016; Frontiers in Psychology, 2025). Sustained contemplative practice, this work finds, fosters self-transcendence and, with it, a stronger sense of connection and a more altruistic bent.

This bears directly on what practitioners say about sitting in the power, where greater compassion and a real interest in others come up again and again. The mechanisms the meditation literature proposes, less self-referential processing, a greater capacity to take another’s perspective, what researchers call interpersonal self-transcendence, match closely the inner shift practitioners describe.

Spiritual Wellbeing and Regular Contemplative Practice

Studies of contemplative practice and spiritual wellbeing find that regular practice strengthens a person’s sense of connection to themselves, to others, and to the transcendent, the three strands De Jager Meezenbroek and colleagues (2012) treat as the substance of spiritual wellbeing (Springer, 2025). The same research carries a caution worth dwelling on. The gains do not hold from a single sitting. They have to be renewed through ongoing practice. Which is exactly what Spiritualist teaching has always insisted, that sitting in the power is something you do regularly, not occasionally.

Proposed Mechanisms

Pulling the threads together, the literature and the testimony suggest several ways the practice might produce the changes people describe. They are not rival explanations. More likely they work together, each reinforcing the others.

Attentional Refinement and Signal Detection

In cognitive terms, regular sitting may sharpen the attentional system until faint impressions become easier to catch. Studies of experienced meditators consistently show gains in attention, both the focused kind and the open-monitoring kind, that broad, non-reactive awareness which takes in the whole field of experience at once (Lutz et al., 2008). Carried into mediumship, that sharpening would do two things together: raise sensitivity to subtle signals, and quieten the habitual self-talk that drowns them out.

Default Mode Network Modulation

Neuroscience offers a second mechanism. The default mode network, a linked set of brain regions tied to self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and thinking about other people, has emerged as central to how meditation works. Sustained practice tends to quieten this network and reshape its connectivity, producing states in which the inner monologue fades and present-moment awareness comes forward. That is a fair description, from the inside, of what practitioners report in sitting in the power: a move out of ordinary self-focused awareness into something wider and less centred on the self. Over time, the practice may leave a lasting mark on how the network behaves at rest, making the mediumistic state easier to find and to hold. The science here sits well outside my own field, but a quieter inner voice and a wider, less self-centred awareness is exactly how the practice feels to me.

Meaning, Identity, and Existential Orientation

Beyond brain and cognition, the practice may work through the meanings it carries. For the people who do it, sitting in the power is not an exercise but a relationship, a deliberate and repeated turning toward what they take to be the spirit world. Done for years, that may settle a person into a stable, spiritually grounded identity and a felt sense of ongoing connection that reaches past ordinary human ties. Research on religious and spiritual experience finds, fairly consistently, that a secure spiritual identity goes with greater resilience, less existential anxiety, and a steadier sense of self (Springer, 2023).

Discussion

The Convergence of Evidence

What emerges from all this is a convergence. Several independent bodies of evidence point the same way, each lending the practitioners’ accounts a little more plausibility. Parapsychology shows that mediumistic states are measurably distinct states of consciousness. The Windbridge studies suggest the practice does no harm and may go with a particular psychological makeup. The testimony, anecdotal as it is, is broad, internally consistent, and echoed across people working independently of one another. And contemplative science supplies well-evidenced mechanisms, in attention, in self-transcendence, in the default mode network, and in compassion, by which the reported effects could plausibly come about.

None of that confirms anything about sitting in the power directly. But the agreement across so many different lines is coherent enough to warrant two things: taking the practitioners seriously, and putting real research effort into testing what they describe.

Limitations

The review has its own limits, which are worth stating plainly. It is a narrative review rather than a systematic one, so it makes no claim to completeness and may lean, despite my best efforts, toward evidence that flatters the practice. The practitioner testimony carries every weakness of self-report: selective memory, the pull of social desirability, no comparison group. And the science I have leaned on does not actually study sitting in the power, so carrying it across to this specific practice takes assumptions no one has yet tested. A later review with a systematic search, and a real effort to surface null and negative findings, would stand on firmer ground.

Implications for Practice and Future Research

Recommendations for Practitioners

For teachers and practitioners, a few practical things follow. The convergence of evidence, from parapsychology, from contemplative science, and from testimony, supports the central place sitting in the power already holds in mediumship training. The practice seems to grow exactly the qualities both bodies of literature flag as fundamental: a quieter analytical mind, a more receptive awareness, a greater ease with uncertainty, and a steadier spiritual sense of self.

The longitudinal meditation findings carry a second lesson. If the benefits depend on sustained practice, and if motivation naturally migrates from the practical toward the spiritual with time, then students are worth encouraging to keep sitting well past the early stages, especially through the dry spells when nothing dramatic seems to be happening. Those may be the very periods doing the most quiet work.

A Framework for Future Research

Perhaps the most useful thing this review does is show how much is still missing. A few directions stand out.

A structured longitudinal study could follow practitioners over six to twelve months, tracking self-reported confidence, wellbeing, perceptual sensitivity, and personal change against a matched group of non-practitioners. Something like this could be run inside an existing teaching community and would give us the first direct data on what the practice does.

A phenomenological study could document what sitting in the power actually feels like across practitioners at different stages, using a validated instrument such as the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory that Windbridge has already employed. That would let researchers line up the sitting-in-the-power state against the mediumistic states the science has begun to chart.

A qualitative interview study could go after the long arc, asking what shifts, over years of practice, in a practitioner’s character, relationships, and sense of self.

Any of this would be stronger for partnership with established centres, the Windbridge Research Centre and the Society for Psychical Research among them, which bring both method and hard-won credibility to research in this difficult field.

Conclusion

Sitting in the power is among the most widely taught and faithfully practised disciplines in mediumship. By the accounts of those who do it, its effects are real, far-reaching, and remarkably consistent from one practitioner to the next: sharper perception, a quieter analytical mind, more spiritual confidence, more resilience, and a transformation that reaches well beyond mediumship into the whole of a life.

No one has yet put those accounts to a direct test. The argument of this paper is that someone should. The nearby science, from parapsychology, from consciousness research, from contemplative studies, offers plausible mechanisms for what practitioners describe, and converges with their testimony in suggesting that sitting in the power cultivates states of mind and qualities of awareness with genuine developmental weight.

The distance between how much this practice matters culturally and how little attention it has had from researchers is at once a missed opportunity and a task waiting for whoever is placed to take it up. If this paper does anything, I hope it nudges that work a little closer to happening.

Sitting in the Power was a game-changer for me personally and I have witnessed the same in my students. In this world of shorter attention spans and the ‘doom scrolling’ of information, a real return to being the spirit that I am and seeing the spirit that you are is worth the focus and time to achieve. My hope is that significant peer-reviewed research of SitP becomes available as part of the future of spiritual development study. We always want proof and in the research we need more validation. I have seen it make such a positive difference to mediums and spiritual workers alike.