Taking the Leap: What Happens When You Finally Follow the Call of Spirit?
There are some changes in life that happen gradually.
And then there are the ones where, almost overnight, you realise that the life you have spent years building no longer quite fits the person you have become.
The last few weeks have felt a little like that for me.
If you have followed Soul Sync for any length of time, you will probably know that this year has been a period of enormous change. After ten years of building and running my own legal recruitment business, I recently walked away from it.
That sentence looks remarkably straightforward written down.
The reality has been anything but.
A business you have spent ten years building doesn't simply occupy your working hours. It becomes part of your identity. Your routines, your relationships, your sense of security and, if you're not careful, even your measurement of your own worth can become wrapped up in it.
For years, so much of my life revolved around building, achieving, solving the next problem and moving on to the next target.
Then suddenly there was space.
And into that space came mediumship.
Not that mediumship was new to me. Far from it. But for perhaps the first time, I had given myself permission to ask a very different question.
Not:
What should I do next?
But:
What actually feels like me?
And the answer has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
What happens when we stop filling every available space?
One of the strangest things about stepping away from my business has been noticing what happens when the mind is no longer permanently occupied.
We live in a world that seems almost suspicious of empty space.
If there is nothing in the diary, we fill it.
If there is silence, we reach for a phone.
If we're not producing something, there is often an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps we're wasting time.
I had been moving at speed for a very long time.
So this summer I did something that was actually rather unusual for me.
I stopped.
I gave myself time.
And I decided that if there was one thing I was going to devote myself to, it was my mediumship.
The change has been quite extraordinary.
I'm cautious about making grand statements about one's own development because I think mediumship has a wonderful habit of humbling us the moment we think we have understood it.
But I cannot ignore what I have experienced.
My awareness has changed.
My confidence in recognising information has changed.
I have become much more conscious of clairaudient impressions. I am noticing the difference between information that seems to arrive through thought, feeling, imagery or simply a deep sense of knowing.
Most importantly, the communication has begun to feel more alive.
And that word matters to me.
Because mediumship is not, in my view, simply an exercise in collecting facts.
There is a person on the other side of the communication.
There is a life.
There are memories.
There are relationships.
There is personality.
There is emotion.
And increasingly, I want the way I work to honour all of that.
A week completely immersed in mediumship
At the end of the summer, I spent a week at the Arthur Findlay College devoted entirely to mediumship development.
I went there at a particularly interesting moment in my life because I had already left my business, but I had not yet completely decided what came next.
In many ways, I arrived at the college standing at a crossroads.
I left feeling as though somebody had turned all the lights on.
There were many individual experiences during the week that moved me, some of which I have already written about. But what stayed with me wasn't simply any particular piece of evidence or exercise.
It was the sheer intelligence of the spirit world.
That phrase keeps coming back to me.
The intelligence of spirit.
When a communication works beautifully, there can be such extraordinary precision in the way information is placed into the medium's awareness.
It may arrive as an image.
A sensation.
A memory.
A sudden piece of music.
Something seemingly random that you saw earlier in the week.
An emotional response that briefly takes you somewhere completely different.
And then suddenly the sitter understands it.
That fascinates me.
Because the more I experience mediumship, the less interested I become in trying to force it into tidy boxes.
Perhaps our job is not to control mediumship
One of the biggest changes in my own development recently has been learning to interfere less.
That sounds simple.
It isn't.
The human mind likes certainty.
If I suddenly become aware of something while working mediumistically, there can be an almost immediate temptation to interrogate it.
What does that mean?
Who is that for?
Why am I seeing this?
Is that right?
Is that me?
Have I imagined it?
But the moment the analytical mind starts trying to solve the communication, we can very quickly move from experiencing mediumship to thinking about mediumship.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
During the final part of my week at the college, I became aware of a young boy in the spirit world some time before I was due to work.
I could feel the temptation to start exploring the communication immediately.
But something in me knew simply to leave it alone.
To hold the awareness.
To trust that if the communication was meant to develop, it would do so when it needed to.
When the moment eventually came, the experience moved me very deeply.
For the privacy of the person involved, I will leave the evidence itself with those who were present.
What mattered to me afterwards was what the experience had taught me.
Sometimes the medium's greatest contribution is simply to get out of the way.
What does it really mean to be “in the power”?
This is something I expect I'll spend years exploring.
There can be a huge difference between delivering pieces of information and actually feeling the presence and power behind a spirit communication.
Evidence is essential.
I believe deeply in evidential mediumship.
If we are claiming communication with another consciousness, there should be information that has meaning and relevance to the recipient.
But there are moments when something else happens.
The atmosphere changes.
The communication stops feeling like a list of facts.
The person in spirit seems somehow to become present through the essence of what is being expressed.
That, to me, is where mediumship becomes incredibly beautiful.
It stops being about demonstrating what the medium can perceive and becomes about allowing somebody in the spirit world to express something of who they are.
It is one of the reasons the phrase “in service to the spirit world” has become so important to me.
Service changes the emphasis.
It reminds me that I am not the most important person in the communication.
I've also learned to appreciate the word “no”
There is another, slightly less glamorous, part of mediumship development that I have been thinking about recently.
Being wrong.
Nobody particularly enjoys delivering information and hearing:
“No.”
Especially when you're learning.
There is often a fear that a no means the whole communication is falling apart.
I've started looking at it very differently.
A yes confirms that something has been understood.
A no gives us something to investigate.
Perhaps I interpreted the impression too literally.
Perhaps I added a conclusion.
Perhaps I felt something correctly but described it incorrectly.
Perhaps the spirit communicator was using a reference from my own consciousness and I hadn't yet understood the language.
Or perhaps I simply got it wrong.
And that's okay.
Mediumship development should surely involve curiosity.
That's why I increasingly like using the word experiment.
If we call everything a test, there is pressure to pass.
If we call it an experiment, we become interested in what happened.
That subtle shift can change everything.
Why psychic development deserves more attention
Another area I find myself returning to is the relationship between psychic development and mediumship.
They're not the same thing.
But I do believe learning to understand our own psychic awareness can provide an incredibly useful foundation for mediumistic work.
Before we can confidently recognise another consciousness, surely it helps to understand our own.
How does my imagination operate?
How do I experience intuition?
How does my body respond when I encounter another person's energy?
What does memory feel like when it suddenly surfaces?
What does an intuitive knowing feel like compared with a thought I've deliberately created?
How does clairvoyance present itself to me?
Those are personal questions.
And I think that is important because mediumship is personal.
Two mediums can work very differently and both communicate beautifully.
One may experience vivid clairvoyance.
Another may barely “see” anything internally at all but have an extraordinary ability to feel the emotional essence of the communicator.
Development, for me, is becoming less about trying to imitate somebody else's mediumship and more about understanding the language of my own consciousness.
The spirit world appears to know our minds remarkably well
One of the things that continues to fascinate me is the way spirit can seemingly use our own lived experience as part of the communication.
Our memories become a vocabulary.
Our emotional experiences become a vocabulary.
Films we've watched, songs we've heard, places we've visited, people we've known — all of it potentially becomes material through which something can be expressed.
During a reading recently, I suddenly became aware of a very personal image from my own life.
I saw my grandmother during the final period of her illness, with my mum beside her holding her hand.
It was not simply a picture.
That image carried an entire emotional meaning for me.
And through that personal reference, I understood what the spirit communicator was trying to convey about the sitter's own experience.
I find that extraordinary.
It suggests, at least through my own experience of mediumship, that the process is far more creative and collaborative than simply having a spirit person dictate information into somebody's ear.
The medium's own consciousness becomes part of the language.
And the more conscious we are of ourselves, perhaps the more intelligently we can understand how that language is being used.
Leaving one identity behind
All of this has been happening alongside a much more human adjustment.
I have had to get used to no longer being the person running the company I built.
For years I was incredibly commercially driven.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with ambition or money.
Money gives us freedom. It allows us to live, create, help other people and experience life.
But I realised that somewhere along the way my relationship with it had changed.
Instead of money serving my life, at times my life seemed to be serving money.
You earn more.
The overheads grow.
The responsibility grows.
Then you need to earn more again.
And the wheel keeps turning.
Eventually I had to ask myself a question that was far more uncomfortable than any financial one:
Is this still making me happy?
The answer was no.
And once I had admitted that to myself, it became very difficult to pretend otherwise.
Following a soul's path doesn't mean knowing the outcome
I think there can be a temptation when we talk about “following our soul” or trusting intuition to make the whole thing sound beautifully certain.
It isn't.
Taking a leap means precisely that.
You don't necessarily know where you're going to land.
I haven't stepped away from one life with every detail of the next one perfectly mapped out.
There is uncertainty.
There are practical realities.
There are moments when the analytical part of me asks exactly what I'm doing.
But beneath all of that is something I haven't felt in quite the same way for a long time.
Excitement.
Ideas are appearing constantly.
I want to explore mediumship more deeply.
I want to demonstrate.
I want to work privately with people through psychic and mediumship readings.
I want Soul Sync to continue moving into the deeper questions around consciousness and spirit communication.
I want to create conversations and experiments that help other developing mediums understand their own awareness rather than simply copy somebody else's way of working.
Most of all, I want to see where this goes.
So this is my little update from the middle of it all
I deliberately wanted to write this now.
Not in six months' time when I can look backwards and construct a perfect narrative where every decision obviously led to the next.
Because life rarely feels like that while we're actually living it.
At the moment, I'm still in the middle.
I have left the business I built over ten years.
I have spent a summer giving myself permission to explore my mediumship properly.
I've returned from a week that affected me deeply.
I've opened more availability for readings.
I'm working on new ideas.
I'm continuing to develop.
And I have decided that rather than treating mediumship as something sitting around the edges of my “real” working life, I'm going to give it the chance to become the work.
That feels significant.
It also feels strangely peaceful.
Maybe resistance has something to teach us
One of the reflections I shared in the Soul Sync episode was about the feeling of life beginning to flow again.
I've thought about that a lot since recording it.
We should be careful not to assume that every difficulty means we're on the wrong path.
Life contains difficult seasons.
Grief is difficult.
Change is difficult.
Building anything worthwhile can be difficult.
But there is another sort of difficulty.
The exhaustion that comes from constantly forcing ourselves into a shape we've outgrown.
The friction of knowing, somewhere underneath everything, that something needs to change while continuing to resist it.
Sometimes we can't immediately change our circumstances.
But perhaps we can at least become curious about what that resistance is trying to tell us.
Where am I forcing?
Where do I feel alive?
What nourishes me?
What have I quietly known for a long time but been frightened to acknowledge?
They are questions I wish I had asked myself earlier.
Mediumship, for me, remains an act of service
I don't know exactly what the next ten years will look like.
And perhaps that's the point.
What I do know is the intention I want to carry into them.
I want to keep learning.
I want to remain curious.
I want to be willing to get things wrong.
I want to respect the intelligence behind spirit communication rather than believe I've somehow mastered it.
And when I work as a medium, whether that is privately with one person or publicly on a platform, I want to remember what moved me so deeply during my week at the college:
What an honour it is to be a voice for the spirit world.
For me, mediumship is not about being special.
It is about service.
It is about connection.
It is about trying, however imperfectly, to bring two worlds a little closer together.
And for the first time in a very long time, that feels like a path I genuinely want to follow.
Thinking about a reading?
As part of this new chapter, I have opened further availability for online psychic, mediumship and psychic tarot readings.
My readings are held privately via Zoom and are available wherever you are in the UK or internationally. If you are unsure which type of reading is right for you, the Psychic & Mediumship Blend allows space for both your own life, energy and direction as well as communication from the spirit world where it naturally arises.
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I never know exactly what a reading will bring — and, to me, that is part of respecting the intelligence of the process.
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Prefer to read? Open the full transcript of this episode of Soul Sync below. The transcript has been lightly cleaned for readability while keeping the original conversation and meaning intact.
Jason Paul:
Hello and welcome back to the Soul Sync podcast.
I feel like it's been absolutely ages since I've spoken to you, my dear listener. And the last time I did speak to you, I was trying to keep my voice down in a bedroom at the Arthur Findlay College, somewhere I'd thrown myself into to spend a week completely immersed in my mediumship.
And I knew psychically — my medium sensors were going off — that it was going to be a special week, because it was the first time I'd immersed myself in an environment like that since leaving the legal recruitment business I built.
The company was even named after me. It had been my identity for the last ten years.
And that week touched my heart in many different ways.
Despite wanting to come on and speak to you earlier this week, I've actually been bowled over by the intelligence of the spirit world, by how much they moved me last week, and by the number of signs, synchronicities and moments of life just seeming to flow since leaving the course.
So it's taken me a few days to actually get myself into a position to record this episode because I've been doing quite a lot of reflecting.
But it's lovely to talk to you today. I have missed you, my darlings.
And I want to tell you what I've been doing since the last time you heard me in that bedroom trying to keep my voice down.
I'm recording this on September 11th — or 9/11 for my American listeners — and it is my birthday.
I've just got in from having an absolutely lovely curry with my mum and my brother. And it's the first birthday I've ever had without a card from my dad, bless him, now that he's in the spirit world.
So we went out, had a very nice meal, and I've just got back.
I'm feeling incredibly full and I was originally going to come on and do this tomorrow, but I thought, you know what? I just want to come on and have a chat and tell you what I've been up to.
So where am I in my life right now?
I have left my business.
As I said, it had been my identity for the last ten years.
And I didn't necessarily get the outcome I once wanted. Earlier in the process I think I'd had ambitions of never having to work again!
But eventually it became much more about what I felt my soul was calling me to do.
I wanted to be happy in what I was doing.
And the decision I made is a decision I very much stand by.
I've been at something of a crossroads since that point, and I've essentially taken the summer off.
The thing I've really dedicated myself to during that time is my mediumship.
And one thing I've noticed since leaving my business is that my mediumship has really taken off.
I've received so many lovely comments about it, and sometimes I've almost bowled myself over with what has happened.
I could say, “Well, yes, maybe I'm more present,” but I think there's more to it than that.
I'm hearing clairaudiently. I'm finding my readings have become incredibly felt. I feel like I've had so many penny-drop moments.
The last time you heard from me, I was still at the Arthur Findlay College and I think I had around three days of the course left.
And I was already struck with awe by the intelligence of the spirit world.
For those who are earlier on in their journey — and I know some people listening are in places where there aren't spiritualist churches or development circles nearby — I receive emails from lots of lovely souls who are trying to navigate their development almost entirely online.
And that can be difficult.
I do believe you can get a long way online. I do plenty of online practice myself. I do lots of readings, and I take almost every opportunity I can to work because I learn something every single time.
But spending that week completely immersed in mediumship just blew me away.
My passion has always been demonstrating mediumship.
I've got the kind of voice which, if you're listening quietly through headphones, you might think is lovely and gentle.
In reality, it is rather booming!
My mum quite regularly has to tell me to turn my volume down because I don't always realise how loud I am.
But actually, I think my voice is one of my gifts.
And I had opportunities during the week to demonstrate mediumship, and I just love it.
I'm beginning to understand more about how to build and work with the energy in a room.
Because ultimately everything is energy.
That's what mediumship is.
I want the energy in a room to rise through joy, laughter and connection, and then to allow the communication from the spirit world to move through that.
I've also had lots of light-bulb moments around things I do within my own mediumship.
One thing I've been thinking about for quite a long time is what happens when I get a “no”.
What have I actually done within the communication to misinterpret something?
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with a bloody no.
I'd rather someone tell me no than simply agree with everything.
A no gives me an opportunity to understand what I've interpreted incorrectly.
That's how you learn.
You don't necessarily learn anything from yes after yes after yes.
So I've had a real penny-drop moment around that.
I'm going to be doing a series of episodes about mediumship where I talk about different aspects of spirit communication — how I experience it, how I interpret it, how I convey it and how the power behind the communication feels.
Because I think you can sometimes tell the difference between a medium who is really in the power and touching people through the presence of spirit, and someone who may be giving evidence but where that power isn't necessarily behind it.
And let's just say I want to be in the power category.
I'm a powerful person, and I want that power of communication moving through the work.
On the last day of the course, I thought all my opportunities to demonstrate had been and gone.
I didn't think I was going to get another opportunity.
But then one appeared.
Around twenty minutes before I was due to demonstrate, I became aware of a little boy in the spirit world.
He got my attention.
And it taught me a very valuable lesson.
There were lots of parts of me that wanted to start engaging with him, understanding things and working out the communication.
But I realised that if I did that, all I would do was put myself into my head.
Then when I eventually stood up, I'd be giving information from my memory rather than experiencing the communication freshly in the power of spirit.
So I simply held the energy.
And, to cut a long story short — and also to respect the privacy of the person the communication was for — what happened completely blew me away.
The circumstances of how it came through, the power behind it...
I think there was barely a dry eye in the room.
It really moved me.
And for several days after leaving the course, I remained completely blown away by the intelligence of the spirit world.
We did lots of experiments during the week.
I actually prefer the word “experiments” to practices or lessons because an experiment can have an outcome either way.
You're curious.
You're exploring.
It stops you immediately putting everything into a box of “I got that right” or “I got that wrong”.
If you want to develop faculties such as clairvoyance, clairaudience or clairsentience, you have to understand how they work for you.
And you can only understand them by using them.
I'm also going to be doing some episodes very soon about my belief that if you want to develop mediumship, you first need to understand psychic awareness.
Now, said as modestly as possible, I am a very sharp psychic.
Even as a little boy, I was highly intuitive.
But I've also always worked with people.
Whether that was cabin crew, policing or spending years working with lawyers — selling, encouraging people, reading people and empowering them to believe in themselves — I've always been able to read people quite naturally.
Some people jump almost immediately into mediumship.
And that's understandable because we live in a world of information overload where everyone wants to move quickly.
Whereas many older teachers will tell you that, traditionally, development involved a great deal of sitting.
Sitting, sitting, sitting.
You might spend a year simply developing the energy before attempting spirit communication.
I've heard stories of people spending two years working psychically before mediumship properly came into it.
Because if you try to link with a spirit communicator before you understand your own energy, your own soul and your own awareness, you may be missing a fundamental part of development.
Psychic work involves another form of awareness.
Not all psychics are mediums.
I work both psychically and mediumistically, and through my own development I've learned to understand the difference in how those things feel for me.
But I do believe a strong psychic foundation is enormously valuable.
And there are going to be some episodes about that very soon.
I came away from the course completely blown away by everything that had happened — the experiences, emails, revelations and synchronicities.
I'd said to myself that after my birthday I was going to make a decision about what I wanted to do.
And, to cut a long story short, I've decided to take the absolute plunge into my mediumship.
To take a leap of faith.
Because I do feel that the spirit world has played a significant part in getting me to where I am.
What really struck me during that week was what it actually means to serve the spirit world.
And I will tell you this:
It is an absolute honour to serve them.
I was so touched when I came home.
I kept thinking about what an honour it is to serve a world that is so intelligent.
To be a voice for it.
To be of service.
And I thought: this is what I know I need to be doing with my life.
Shortly after getting back, I recorded a Soul Sync episode with an astrologer who is going to be on the podcast soon.
I'm going to produce that episode, and I'll include part of what she said about my own astrology.
Let's just say that what I'm currently doing seems to be literally written in the stars.
And my mediumship has continued to surprise me.
Honestly, at times it has almost knocked me backwards.
I speak to my spirit team very regularly and I feel that relationship is constantly evolving.
After giving myself some time off following what had been a pretty gruelling ten years, I basically said to the spirit world:
“Look, all I'm doing this summer is mediumship.”
And I feel like I've developed five years in one summer.
I also jokingly said to them that once it got to this point of the year, after my birthday, if they hadn't managed to secure me, I might have to start looking at other ways of earning a living.
I probably sound absolutely crackers.
If this is your first episode of Soul Sync, welcome!
You might think I'm slightly off my trolley today.
But it has been a big week.
I've decided to step into my mediumship.
To be of service.
To go out there and, hopefully, bring some theatre to platform mediumship.
And I am absolutely bursting with excitement to get going.
The spirit world also seems to have given me an enormous amount of inspiration this week.
I've had so many ideas dropping into my awareness that it has almost reached the point of overwhelm.
So I've had to start putting some structure around everything — working out how I'm going to take these ideas, experiments and exercises and actually bring them to you.
Because I feel like I could have a whole team helping me with everything I want to create.
But it's amazing what happens when life begins to flow again.
And if you're in a place at the moment where life feels full of friction or resistance — where everything feels difficult and nothing seems to be moving — I'd encourage you just to stop for a moment and ask yourself:
Am I where I'm supposed to be?
Just reflect on it.
Because I know all too well what it is like to base so much of your sense of success around the pursuit of money.
I felt like a prisoner to money for quite a long time, if I'm being completely open with you.
You need more money because there are more overheads, and then you need more again.
But eventually I had to ask myself:
What is actually nourishing my soul?
Since coming back, I've made the decision.
I've been working on my website.
I've released more appointments for readings, which is really exciting.
And I've done a number of readings over the last few days.
One thing I find fascinating about the spirit world is the way they communicate through the medium's own memory bank — through all of our lived experiences, the picture book of the mind, our emotions and the way we understand different situations.
They can use everything within our consciousness as a language.
Earlier today, for example, during a reading, I was shown clairvoyantly an image of my nan during the final stages of cancer in the hospice, with my mum sitting beside her holding her hand.
Through that image, I understood what the spirit communicator was trying to tell me about the circumstances surrounding their own passing and the sitter who had been there.
And because that image came from my own life, it also reactivated the emotion associated with it.
That spirit person touched me through my own emotional memory.
And that is one of the extraordinary things about this work.
You can be left genuinely touched by the spirit world and by the essence of the people communicating.
And this week I just feel incredibly bowled over and full of love.
I've also got a very large to-do list!
But I wanted to come on and speak to you.
I'm not going to talk forever today because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, it is my birthday.
But I have some really exciting episodes coming over the next few weeks.
And if you would like a reading with me, I'm going to put a 25% Soul Sync listener discount into the show notes for you.
It has been lovely talking to you.
Enjoy your weekend, my darlings.
And I'll be releasing a lovely guest episode for you on Monday morning.