From Proof to Trust: The Real Journey of Mediumship Development
When I first walked into the Arthur Findlay College in 2020, I wasn't there to trust anybody. I was there for proof.
I'd been a police officer, magician, cabin crew and had run my own business for many years. For years I'd been an atheist. I was the person who sat in front of a medium with my arms folded, thinking, "Go on then. Show me." Undeniable evidence of the afterlife was the only thing I was willing to accept.
What I didn't know then was that proof was only the first step. Looking back over my own development, trust has come in three stages, and the third one took me the longest by a mile.
If you're developing your mediumship, or just curious about what it takes, I suspect you'll find yourself somewhere in this.
Stage one: I wanted proof
Let me say this clearly: wanting proof is not a failing. Evidence is the foundation of good mediumship, and anyone who tells you to stop asking questions isn't doing you any favours.
The great mediums of the past set a bar that still stops me in my tracks. Gordon Higginson was known for platform evidence that often included full names, addresses and even telephone numbers. That's the standard. That's what the spirit world is capable of when the channel is clear.
So I got my proof. At Arthur Findlay I watched it, and then, to my own shock, I found myself giving messages that moved people to tears. The evidence was real. The question stopped being "Is this real?" and became "What do I do with it?"
Stage two: I learned to trust the spirit world
Trust in spirit grew the way trust grows in any relationship: slowly, by being proven reliable again and again.
Reading after reading, the spirit world kept turning up. My granddad, Eddie Paul, who was himself a medium, made his presence felt more and more. Over time I stopped testing spirit and started leaning on them.
That trust was tested properly when my business of ten years changed almost overnight. In this episode, recorded right in the middle of it, I talk about pulling the Tower card months before any of it happened. When the moment came, it took real courage to make the decision I made. I felt my granddad standing strong beside me, and I leaned on my mediumship to guide me through. I trusted spirit completely.
Myself, though? That was another story.
Stage three: trusting spirit, but not myself
This is where so many developing mediums get stuck, and it's where I stayed for longest.
I knew the spirit world was there. I never doubted their love or their intelligence. What I doubted was me. Was that really them, or my imagination? Was I making it up? Should I say it, or play it safe? The spirit world was never the weak link. I was.
Here's what surprised me. When my business ended and I had space for the first time in ten years, my mediumship didn't just improve. It took off. The evidence got sharper, my clairvoyance came alive, and readings flowed in a way they hadn't before.
Spirit hadn't changed. I had. For years I'd spent all day in the land of the ego (deals, targets, pressure) and then come home expecting to be a clear channel. Trust in yourself doesn't grow in that kind of noise. It grows when you make room for it.
From magician to mystic
A book that has shaped how I think about all this is Magician to Mystic by Simon James and Brian Robertson. Both are respected teachers, and Brian tutors and runs courses at the Arthur Findlay College.
The way I read the title, the magician is the medium who can get information through. It's skilful and impressive, and it's genuinely hard to do. The mystic is someone for whom mediumship has stopped being a trick they perform and become a way of living.
The authors write about "everyday mediumship": the quiet guidance available to all of us, not just on a platform. They draw on a classical oral tradition passed down from some of the great mediums before them. That's the journey I'm on, and I don't think it has an end point.
Why you can't skip the journey
At the moment, a lot of people want to rush through development: a weekend course, a certificate, straight onto the platform. I understand the excitement. But here's why it doesn't work.
The Arthur Findlay College describes mental mediumship as happening through the medium's own consciousness. That means spirit communicates through what is already in you: your memories, your experiences, and how you feel about them. Every chapter of your life adds to the vocabulary spirit can use. My years as a police officer, in business and in heartbreak are all part of the palette now.
That's also why your mediumship keeps evolving for as long as you keep living. You can't fast-track a life.
Look at the greats. Gordon Higginson sat in his mother's development circle from the age of three and wasn't allowed to communicate with members of the circle until he was ten. He demonstrated publicly on his twelfth birthday, and he kept working the platform for decades after. Estelle Roberts called her autobiography Forty Years a Medium. Even the title tells you it was a lifetime's work.
The mediums I most admire working today, like Christine Morgan and Eileen Davies, carry that same depth. None of them got there by skipping steps.
If you're somewhere on this path right now
Wherever you are, you're exactly where you're meant to be.
If you still want proof, good. Keep asking for it.
If you trust spirit but not yourself, you're in the most common place of all. It isn't a sign you're not a medium. It's usually a sign you care about getting it right.
If you're ready to trust yourself more, start by taking the pressure off. When Steven Trolland was on the podcast (click here to listen) I said I wish I'd treated my early readings as an experiment. Learn to love the word "no", because that's how you learn. And look honestly at what's filling your days. The clearer your life, the clearer your channel.
Listen to the episode
This is a solo episode, recorded right in the middle of one of the biggest changes of my life. If you're going through change yourself, I hope it helps you trust whatever is shifting. Listen above, on the Soul Sync podcast page, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you'd like a mediumship or tarot reading, I work with people worldwide over Zoom. Find out more on my services page or get in touch. I'll also soon be launching mediumship development classes. Sign up to my newsletter at the bottom of this page to hear first.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Welcome to Soul Sync: Change Is in the Air
Hello and welcome back to Soul Sync, the podcast for curious souls, deep thinkers, recovering overthinkers, and anyone currently being spiritually nudged into a life change they absolutely did not put in their diary. This is a space to explore spirit, intuition, consciousness, healing, and all the strange little signs that seem to arrive when you're pretending you have everything under control. So please take a breath, pour yourself something nice, ignore the email you should probably answer, and let's connect to something a little deeper.
When Life Changes Overnight
Today it's just you and I, to talk all about change. Because I do think there's something in the air at the moment. I'm not sure about you, but there seems to be change in the air. So many people I speak to who are spiritual, whether they're mediums, psychics or healers, are feeling it. And like I alluded to the other day on the meditation episode, I'm going through so much change at the moment, and I'm going to talk to you about it.
But first of all, I want to address the fact that I haven't done loads of solo episodes, because there's a real level of vulnerability to just talking to you on a microphone. And in the last 12 months, my life has just been so crazy.
I don't really talk about my business much on the podcast, and that's because I've always tried to keep my business very separate from what I do here, because I think people think I'm a bit barmy as it is. Well, quirky is probably a better word. Let's not be self-deprecating. I just haven't brought the mediumship into work. At one point the cat did get out of the bag, so to speak, because I accidentally sent an email from my Jason Paul Medium email address to someone in the business, and obviously they then saw the website. But I've always tried to keep it quiet, because being a medium and talking to the spirit world is beyond some people's belief system, depending on where they are in their own journey. That's why, as a medium, I've always used my granddad's surname, Paul. It always felt natural to me, and it kept the two worlds very separate.
As for what I do for my day job, let me just have a sip of herbal tea. All of a sudden I've started talking and I've got a dry mouth.
So, what I do for my day job came about after I left the police. My life was in a very bad place when I left the Met as a police officer. I had some truly awful things happen to me when I was in the police, which I will talk more about, but I haven't really been able to talk about it, because there was a Crown Court trial connected to my time in the police that happened in January. So over the last 12 months my life has been crazy. I've had a trial going on connected to something that happened about 14 years ago when I was in the police. My dad passed away. And my business, which I've had for 10 years, has been going through lots of changes, a period of transition.
When I left the police, my life was in a really bad place. My mum was living in my little flat in London that I could barely afford, because I had no money at that time. I think I was living on £50 a week. I decided I just wanted to leave London, because I felt so unhappy there. And what I was struggling with when I applied for jobs was that no one in London could believe I was leaving the police to take, effectively, an entry-level sales job. But I was thinking, what can I do? I need to make money here. What are my skills? What are my attributes?
I've always been good at selling things, even at primary school, from about six years old. The first ever entrepreneurial thing I did was making bracelets. I made these really pretty friendship bracelets from Hobbycraft materials. Initially it was for the RSPCA, for a fundraising day at school, but then I noticed they sold like absolute hotcakes. Before you knew it, I was in the school bookshop every single lunchtime selling them, and I had a production line going in the evenings with my mum and brother threading bracelets that I just couldn't sell enough of. In the end the school intervened and stopped me selling them.
So I've always had an entrepreneurial flair, and I've always worked from a very young age. I've always wanted to earn my own money. When I was 11, I lied and said I was 12 to get a paper round. I used to lug round so many papers for, I think, about £15 a week back then, and the Sunday ones used to absolutely kill my back, I tell you that.
So I went into recruitment, which is a very tough industry, I have to say. For people who don't know recruitment, I went into a recruitment agency, where you charge companies to fill jobs for them. It's very competitive, very dog-eat-dog. You've got to be able to take a hell of a lot of rejection, copious amounts of it. One good thing about me is that I think I've always had a problem with the word no. My mum told me that recently, actually, and it really made me laugh.
So I left the police, moved up to Manchester and took an entry-level sales job. I got a couple of offers from different companies, and I took the role at a senior appointments specialist. They only dealt with roles of £100k plus, at the very senior end of the market, and they sold me a very good dream: that I'd be driving around in a Mercedes in 12 months' time, and my life would never look the same again. It was an Apprentice-style interview, I tell you that. I had to go through several rounds and sit with this very egotistical man. I took the job, and I think they mismanaged my expectations, because it wasn't really a senior appointments specialist. This agency had opened a Manchester office, but they were headquartered in Bristol, and people started leaving. There were about 20 of us, and I was struggling to get up and running, because they had me start a brand new desk: media recruitment in Manchester. I knew nothing about recruitment and nothing about media, other than that Manchester's known for it because of MediaCity. Half the office left, and I was one of the last people there. After about six months, I thought, this is the wrong home for me.
So I started interviewing elsewhere. I had about five offers lined up, and at the very last minute, this lady popped along who owned a legal recruitment agency. My first inclination was no, I don't want to do the law. I've had the most horrendous time in the police, I'm not going to do that. Also running through my mind was, it's quite a family-run agency, do I want to work for a family-run agency? And they were quite corporate. You had to wear a suit every day, and I used to hate wearing suits every day. I still hate wearing suits, actually. Whenever I wear a suit, I feel like a little schoolboy, which sounds really silly. There's something about a suit that just feels itchy, and I feel uptight in it, especially with a tie buttoned up.
But anyway, I listened to my intuition this time, and there's a lot to be said for that, Soul Sync, I tell you. I took the job at that agency. I remember starting on day one, sitting next to the owner. There were about 20 of us, based in Manchester city centre, and I got a day's training on the system and on legal, and then it was off you go. They'd done very well in Manchester and other parts of the country, but what they really loved about me was that I knew London, so they wanted me to help them grow the London market.
So I was sat next to the owner, and she was giving me printouts of emails they'd had in with roles, and I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. It's one of those industries where you really need to think on your feet and be good, or you're not going to make it. I'm going to have to have another sip of my tea now, Soul Sync. Hang on.
What I could really tell at this agency was this. There was a guy sitting opposite me called Dante. Dante was wearing quite a nice suit, and I got to know that he lived in a nice part of Manchester, and he seemed to be doing all right for himself, making good commission. And I was looking at Dante thinking, he doesn't strike me as the most dynamic or competent guy. So I thought, if he can do it, surely I can do it.
So I went into mobile library mode. Everywhere I went, I was listening to audiobooks. I've never been a reader, and I do need to start reading, because I've got so many mediumship books, and I've got this limiting belief about being able to read and concentrate with ADHD. But I went round Manchester listening to books on how to sell. I used to listen to this Richard Denny book. He was a sales guy from the 1990s boom days, and he'd talk about how to prospect and how to sell, and it was very old school. And I'd listen to books on psychology and how to influence people. Everything I could imagine I needed, because what I now know the job really is, is influencing people.
Over about five months, I became the top biller. They used to do this thing where the top dog of the week, whoever billed the most, got a cheesy email sent round with a picture of a dog, and before you knew it, I was top biller every single week, and the agency started to grow very quickly. I feel it was off the back of my success, which sounds very arrogant and egotistical, but the facts are the facts. She was getting me to do presentations in front of all the staff on what I do and what my systems were.
Long story short, we then fell out, because she kept taking clients off me to give to new people, so I decided to leave. I went to another agency in Manchester. This was a time in my life when I'd just come off the back of loads of trauma. I'd come to this city not really knowing anyone. The only time I'd got to know Manchester before was... well, that's a whole other side story, and you know what, I'm not even going to go down that rabbit hole now, because it'll take me an hour just to tell that part. But essentially, I was finding myself. Manchester was a nice place to live, very vibrant, especially for gay people, with its own Gay Village. I really loved the vibrancy of it, and it was what I needed. It really healed me after what had been the worst experience in the police: having such a hard time within the job, but also such a hard time at home, suffering domestic violence. I will talk about that more.
So, I'd fallen out with this lady, started at another agency, built up a bit of money, and everything was going OK. And at this new agency, clients kept following me. I wasn't reaching out to them, because obviously I was aware I had restrictive covenants in my contract. But then I went to Mexico on holiday with my partner at the time, and when I got back there was a great big wad of paper on my doorstep, which I knew wasn't good news. I opened it up, and it was court papers saying she was suing me over the restrictive covenants. She'd had my computer forensically examined and all sorts.
My new employer, who I was doing really well for, took a look at it. I'd come in to build him a London desk, and he was a really nice guy. He got an employment lawyer involved, and they said, "Look, we don't think she's got a case here. Don't settle." But it dredged up all sorts of anxiety for me, because it reminded me of my time in the police and what had happened to me, and I just wanted to settle. So effectively, everything I'd earned in my time with her, I lost in a settlement worth about £80,000. I had to start again from scratch. But I'm very stubborn.
So I ended up doing quite well at this next agency, and he was really good to me, this man. I was with a partner at the time, and we lived together in a house. He was Scottish; I met him at a speed dating night in Manchester. And I decided I wanted to start my own agency. I felt I was more than capable of more than just earning a percentage of what I was billing, and I'd always had an aspiration, since I was very little, of running my own company. What really scared me was the tax side, the business side, the running-a-company side. That just petrified me, because I didn't know anything about running a business. But my partner at the time was very flamboyant and very sure of himself. He'd run a business before, albeit a failed one, but that was good enough for me. I'll take that. And he'd done a business degree at university, and he said he was going to help me.
So I waited at this agency until the day I got a big commission cheque, because my plan was to use that money. I'd worked out on the back of a fag packet that if I had a certain amount, I wouldn't need to borrow. I'd sit out my six-month restrictive covenants and then start trading. Obviously, that meant having enough capital to start and enough to live on, and it meant risking every penny I had to my name. It was make or break. It had to work. Failure was not an option, because failure would mean going back to an agency having spent all my savings.
The day came to hand my notice in, and I was really dreading it, because he'd been very good to me and I felt like I was doing the dirty on him, and I never like things like that. So I gave him my notice and explained that I intended to work for myself. Obviously he wasn't best pleased, and he was very explicit in reminding me about my covenants. I said, "Look, I've been burnt once, I'm not going to do anything here. I want to leave on good terms."
Then I met my partner in town for lunch to talk about the notice, now that I'd been told I was free to go. And it was quite unusual, because my partner worked in marketing for a clothing line and never really worked in Manchester city centre, but he'd told me he had a project on that day. Anyway, I met him for lunch, and he told me he wanted to break up, and that he'd spent all morning taking his stuff out of our house.
This episode is all about change, and I was about to go through the biggest change ever. I'd felt supported, because he was going to help me with everything, and then, like a bang, overnight, my life changed massively. It was as if my whole world was crumbling in that moment. At that time my nan had cancer as well. It was a very difficult time, and every aspect of my life was changing. For a good while I wanted to try to get back with him, almost grovelling on my belly, looking back at it. But ultimately I decided to move to a new city, Bristol, and start the business there, because I knew someone who lived in Bristol, and I'd been for a weekend, to a Massive Attack concert, actually, and really, really loved it.
So I started the business, and it's been an absolute rollercoaster over the last 10 years. It's a recruitment agency that specialises in placing lawyers, and in a short amount of time I got it to be a multi-million-pound company. It's had its ups, downs, trials and tribulations, and it's really taken a lot from me. Even putting myself in that position at the beginning was so much change, and it pushed me so far out of my comfort zone. At times it did break me. I suffered psychosis about three or four years into the business. I can't attribute that fully to my business, but I attribute it partly to struggling and never healing from what had happened to me in my earlier years, because from the moment I left the police, it was a million miles an hour. I had to make money, because every single month I was spending more than I was bringing in, so I was just getting further into debt. It was really tricky at that time.
Anyway, up until recently I'd been working in my business and everything had been ticking along, and then something happened, basically two weeks ago, that was so unexpected. I'm not going to go into all the twists and turns of it right now, because the timing just isn't right, but essentially I'm now unemployed, having been in the process of selling my share of the company. If someone had told me that two weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed them.
But what is interesting... I've got to have another sip of tea. This is the thing with solo episodes, you just don't stop talking. On the subject of change, I've been feeling change coming for so long now. It must have been the start of last year when I kept feeling that I needed change, that change was necessary, and that there was going to be lots of it. And I remember, it must have been around April last year, I pulled one card, and it was the Tower card, and I knew instantly it was connected to change. If you know the Tower card, for me it immediately invokes, "Oh no, not this card of all the cards." And this particular tarot deck is so accurate. It just calls everything. It's made so many unbelievable predictions over time.
At the start of each year, I always pull a few cards as an overview of the year ahead. The first card I pulled this year was the Five of Swords, then the Three of Swords, and then the Devil. My attention was drawn back to these cards the other day, because I'd taken a picture of them and stuck it in the front of my diary. I journal every day. And when I saw it, I thought, oh my goodness, this makes total sense. It was calling so accurately what's happened in my business situation.
I've been saying for a long time, for instance to my mum, "If I had all the time in the world and my business wasn't a thing, I'd be doing this with my mediumship. I'd be putting much more time into Soul Sync. I can see the potential here, and here." And now I've unexpectedly been put in that situation, and I'm like, well, Jason, I feel like I've got so many things I could do, and I feel so excited about it. And it feels scary at the same time, because my business has been everything I've known. The other day it was stirring up emotion in me, knowing that I'm going to receive a last salary, and then that's it. And I must admit, the amount I've got for the sale isn't what I would have thought I'd be getting in other circumstances. So it's like, OK, you've got a completely blank canvas. And that is very, very exciting.
I must admit, Soul Sync, I've had so many ideas in the last few days, and I honestly feel so much lighter. So much so that since this news came to light, I've found myself doing quite a few mediumship readings, and my mediumship, I kid you not, is just flowing so much better. The evidence I'm getting from the spirit world, my clairvoyance, it's ignited. And it really made me stop and think about just how much I've given to my career and my business. I feel so much lighter and able to just be in the present moment, because there was always this residual thinking about the business in the back of my mind. There's always something going on. And recruitment is exhausting, because you're in the land of the ego. People who do recruitment tend to be characters themselves, and it's a very egotistical environment to be in. Since I've been developing my mediumship, for about the last five years, it's been hard to be in that environment all day long and then come home and be the clearest channel for spirit, especially because things have been very stressful at work for quite a while, and it takes it out of you.
So I'm in this period now of change, working out what I want to do with my life. Right now I'm just dedicating myself to having time to actually rest, but I'm also so excited to be able to do more mediumship. I never thought things were going to happen the way they are now, but I so felt the presence of spirit, and my granddad standing strong in me, when I made the decision I made to go down this path.
And do you know what? Mediumship has given me so much, because the decision I had to make took a lot of courage and a lot of trust and belief in myself, and I really called on my mediumship to guide me through this period of change. Mediumship has made me so aware of energy, and so aware of protecting my energy. Even in the heightened, stressful situation of a couple of weeks ago, when this deal was all coming about, I could have let my mind run away with me. But I really made sure I didn't let my energy be drained from me, and mediumship has helped me understand that. I feel I owe so much to mediumship and to spirit for how much they've helped me on my own journey.
So I wanted to come on and talk about change, because change can feel so scary, even when you know it's a positive change. There's something about us as human beings, and I've noticed this in my work in recruitment and in the police. I look at my talent as being a very strong psychic, because I was developing my psychic skills in the police in my younger years, and even in recruitment. I used to just put it down to having a hunch, a gut feeling. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I knew I was very good at it. I used to say I was very good at reading people, and I really have honed those skills.
But change can feel very scary. And there's something about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. You don't achieve anything in life when you're comfortable, and comfortable doesn't necessarily mean happy. So if you feel something in your life is shifting, I encourage you to really trust in yourself. I knew something needed to change in my life. I wasn't feeling fulfilled in my work, I wasn't feeling fulfilled in my soul, and I was struggling to be in that land of money, money, money, deals, deals, deals, and have that be my motivator. But I had fear pulling me back at times. Fear does that. The ego is not helpful so much of the time.
And there's so much work I have to do on myself, even with these solo episodes. I've been saying for the last few days, "Right, get on with it, Jason. Come on now, get to it." What I've learned is that there's a process happening at the moment where I feel I'm cutting cords, even with the old Jason: the Jason who would worry more, and hold back from speaking, because there was always an element of feeling I couldn't speak my full truth, working with lawyers every day. So now I'm like, fuck it, Soul Sync. I can do what I want. I can do what I want.
When it comes to change, always trust your heart. That's what I'd say to you. And if you're feeling fear, really look at it and ask: is that really serving you? Is that really reality? A lot of our fears are just make-believe. They're not even real situations. We allow our imagination to draw on things that aren't real a lot of the time.
So I just wanted to come on and say hello to you all, and to say how excited I am to be on this journey of feeling like, overnight, I've been thrust into full-time mediumship. It feels so, so, so exciting. And I want to say that I love you all so much, because I've received so many beautiful emails, thoughts and suggestions. There's a really beautiful community here on Soul Sync that lights up the globe. It really does, with the light we all emanate.
I want to leave you today with some music, actually. Unfortunately, if you're watching this on video, I won't be leaving you with music, but if you're listening, there's music. It's a beautiful track, and if you want to find out the name of it, it's in the description. It's called "For Another," by Harry Keyworth. And until the next solo episode next week, lots of love, my darlings.
[Music: "For Another" by Harry Keyworth]
