The Intelligence of Spirit: How the Unseen World Communicates Through Us

One of the things I keep learning through my own mediumship is that the spirit world rarely seems to communicate in the neat, orderly way that the human mind would like it to.

We talk about the language of Spirit, but I’m not sure there is one universal language.

Sometimes communication can arrive as a feeling. Sometimes a memory. An image. A physical sensation. A seemingly random thought. Something in the room catches your attention. A song suddenly appears in your awareness. You remember something you saw three days ago and, for reasons you can’t immediately explain, you know it matters.

Increasingly, I think mediumship is less about receiving perfectly formed messages and more about translation.

And that was one of the ideas that stayed with me after my Soul Sync conversation with Canadian spiritual medium Nicole Powell.

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The Intelligence of Spirit: How the Unseen World Communicates Through Us with Nicole Powell

When questions about death become questions about life

Nicole’s relationship with mediumship did not begin with a desire to become a medium.

It began with questions.

As a child, somebody very close to her died tragically. Nicole described lying awake afterwards trying to comprehend what had happened and asking the sort of enormous questions that many human beings eventually encounter:

Where did he go?

What actually happens when somebody dies?

Is physical death really the end?

Later, after watching her grandfather suffer through illness before his passing, Nicole experienced death differently again. Rather than only sensing loss, she described an extraordinary feeling of freedom surrounding him.

There was something about this part of our conversation that touched me because mediumship does not make us immune from grief.

Nicole put this beautifully during the episode. Being a medium does not save you from grief. It changes your experience of it.

That distinction matters.

Mediumship should never be used to bypass the completely human experience of missing somebody. We miss the physical person. Their voice. Their presence. The ordinary things. The chair they sat in. The messages they sent. The things only they would say.

But for people whose experiences have led them to believe that consciousness continues beyond physical death, the relationship itself may begin to feel different.

Not necessarily ended.

Changed.

As somebody who works as a psychic medium and who has experienced grief very personally myself, this is one of the areas of mediumship I find most profound.

It asks us to consider whether love is entirely dependent upon a physical body.

What does spirit communication actually feel like?

Perhaps the most fascinating moment in the conversation — and the moment that ultimately inspired the title of this episode — came when Nicole described something remarkably ordinary.

She was driving one day and passed a miniature golf course.

She noticed it.

Nothing dramatic happened. There was no booming spiritual voice telling her to remember it.

She simply saw it and carried on with her day.

Several days later Nicole was giving a public demonstration of evidential mediumship and found herself between two possible recipients for a communication.

She needed something specific.

Something that would identify where the communication belonged.

And suddenly the mini-golf course came back into her awareness.

The person receiving the communication immediately recognised it: her father had taken her mini golfing every weekend.

For Nicole, that is the intelligence of Spirit.

I love this example because it says so much about how mediumship can work.

The information was already inside Nicole.

Spirit did not necessarily need to manufacture a completely new image.

Instead, the communication appeared to make use of something already stored within her own experience.

A memory became a word in the language.

And once you begin thinking about mediumship in that way, the possibilities become enormous.

Perhaps the medium is part of the language

I sometimes describe the medium as a telephone, but even that analogy feels increasingly inadequate.

A telephone is passive.

A human being isn’t.

We carry decades of memories, relationships, emotions, films, songs, smells, places, conversations, heartbreaks, jokes, fears, triumphs and completely insignificant Tuesday afternoons.

We have an enormous internal library.

If mediumship works through consciousness, perhaps that library becomes part of the instrument.

This may also explain why two mediums can communicate with the same spirit person and describe the experience differently.

The communication has to travel through an individual human being.

It comes through their senses.

Their memories.

Their vocabulary.

Their emotional palette.

Their life.

That is why I think the development of mediumship cannot only be about learning techniques.

It must eventually become about learning yourself.

Evidential mediumship still needs foundations

Nicole has spent years studying evidential mediumship, including repeated journeys from Canada to England to develop her work.

Her own mediumship appeared to open with extraordinary speed after the sudden passing of her grandmother. She went to a Spiritualist church shortly afterwards, watched the medium working and realised she seemed able to perceive much of what the medium was perceiving.

She went home and told her partner:

I think I’m a medium.

And then she tried it.

It worked.

What I respected about Nicole’s story was what happened next. Rather than assuming natural ability meant there was nothing to learn, she felt a responsibility to understand the work properly and immersed herself in the development of evidential mediumship.

I think there is something important in that.

Freedom does not mean having no foundations.

Before we can break rules intelligently, it probably helps to understand why they existed in the first place.

Evidence matters in mediumship.

Personality matters.

Memories matter.

Specificity matters.

The recipient needs the opportunity to recognise the person being described without feeding the medium all the information first.

But then something else happens as we develop.

Eventually, the framework that helped us learn can become the very thing restricting us.

There comes a point when mediumship has to become yours

This was another part of my conversation with Nicole that resonated deeply with where I currently find myself.

There is a period in spiritual development where we need teachers.

We absorb.

We practise.

We listen.

We learn the philosophy, the history and the mechanics.

And then, at some stage, Spirit seems to start nudging us towards something else:

Now find out how this works through you.

Nicole spoke about reaching a point after years of training where she started questioning things she previously accepted. Her interpretation was not that learning no longer mattered, but that she needed to begin allowing the mediumship to unfold in its own individual way.

I recognise that feeling.

I've spent a lot of time wanting to get mediumship right.

What should I feel?

Where should the evidence arrive?

What happens if I get a no?

Was that Spirit or was that me?

The irony is that all of that questioning can eventually make us so analytical that we stop experiencing the communication.

Mediumship becomes an examination rather than a relationship.

And I don't believe that is where its greatest potential lies.

Why “no” isn't always failure in mediumship

Nicole and I also talked about something almost every developing medium knows intimately:

The fear of hearing no.

At the beginning, that tiny word can feel enormous.

But Nicole offered another way of looking at it.

Sometimes a no tells her she was guessing.

More often, she said, it tells her to go deeper.

Perhaps the impression was right but her interpretation was wrong. Perhaps she polished something that should have been given literally. Perhaps there is another layer underneath it.

I think this is a much healthier relationship with mediumship.

Experiment.

Listen.

Respond.

Adjust.

Learn.

The aim isn't perfection.

It's sensitivity.

Why mediums need to live

The mini-golf story led into another idea I loved.

Nicole said that mediumship has taught her the importance of having the full human experience.

There can sometimes be a strange idea within spirituality that becoming more spiritual means withdrawing from ordinary human life.

Meditate more.

Detach more.

Retreat further.

And yes, stillness matters.

Sitting in the power matters.

Learning to quieten the noise of the mind matters.

But perhaps Spirit also needs us to go outside.

Travel.

Fall in love.

Make mistakes.

Watch ridiculous films.

Meet people.

Walk through cities.

Sit beside oceans.

Experience different cultures.

Laugh until it hurts.

Lose things.

Find things.

Live.

Because every experience gives consciousness another reference point through which communication might one day be expressed.

Nicole's mini-golf course only became useful evidence because she had driven past it.

There is a strangely beautiful message in that.

Your life isn't getting in the way of your spiritual development. Your life may be part of it.

Mediumship as creative expression

Towards the end of our conversation, we moved into trance, altered states, voice, art, writing and creativity.

Nicole is increasingly interested in what happens when we stop thinking only about mediumship as one person delivering evidence to another and instead explore what consciousness might express through us more broadly.

Through speech.

Art.

Healing.

Writing.

Music.

Trance.

Inspiration.

Her feeling was that many of us have spent years absorbing information and that perhaps we are entering a period where the invitation is to express.

That really stayed with me.

Because creativity and mediumship have something profound in common.

Both require us to tolerate not knowing exactly what is going to happen next.

The artist staring at a blank canvas has to begin.

The writer has to write the first sentence.

The musician has to play the first note.

And the medium has to speak.

There is vulnerability in all of them.

But perhaps there is also freedom.

The intelligence may be greater than the method

The more mediumship I experience, the less interested I become in trying to reduce it to one mechanism.

I am increasingly humbled by it.

A personality can emerge through a collection of impressions.

A memory can appear through something the medium saw days earlier.

A seemingly insignificant sensation can suddenly become enormously meaningful to another person.

And sometimes the information makes sense immediately.

Sometimes it does not.

That is part of what keeps me curious.

I don't think we have to pretend that we understand everything about consciousness, life after death or spirit communication in order to explore these experiences seriously.

In many ways, admitting how much we don't understand makes the exploration more interesting.

For me, mediumship is not about having all the answers.

It is about remaining open enough to the possibility that consciousness — and perhaps the intelligence behind consciousness — is far greater than we currently comprehend.

And if that is true, perhaps our job as mediums is not to control that intelligence.

Perhaps it is to become available to it.

To learn.

To practise.

To live.

To trust.

And eventually, to allow Spirit to speak through the completely individual language of who we are.

About Nicole Powell

Nicole Powell is a Canadian spiritual medium, author, speaker and teacher based on Vancouver Island. Her work includes private mediumship readings, intuitive guidance, public events, teaching, workshops and spiritual development. She has trained extensively in evidential mediumship and altered states, including studies with tutors at the Arthur Findlay College in England. Her published books include The Power – A Call to Mediumship and The Light, The Dark – A Journey to Wholeness.

Connect with Nicole:
Website: Nicole Powell's website
Instagram: @nicolepowellca
TikTok: @nicolepowellca
Facebook: Nicole Powell Readings

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