I Was a Teenage Psychic: Transformation at Spiritual Medium School
A Heart Opening Experience that Changed my Life for the Better
Ok, I wasn’t really a teenager, I was 24 and my experiences from that year have taken a long time to digest. In 2008, I lived and trained at a spiritual retreat center (The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies) for seven months and when it was time to leave, I felt that I hadn’t spent enough time contemplating the mysteries of the universe or learning the techniques of energy healing. I felt drawn to take my spiritual education to a deeper and more tangible level. A mentor had put the words “mediumship school” into my mind and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to become a professional healer and spiritual counselor but I felt I needed more professional training. After some research, I spent a week in rural Georgia learning to open my heart, expand my mind, and speak with spirits. This is my tale.
Arrival
After a day of flying and driving, I arrived at Delphi University. It’s a small campus set in the woods next to a river. The 4 or 5 buildings that comprise the campus have a really Southern, homey vibe, with white carpet, floral themed walls, country themed paintings, and lots of bedrooms. The staff of about 18 people juggled multiple duties as teachers, healers, cooks, etc. My first impression was nice, comfortable, secluded, and very safe, which is perfect for the type of work we would be doing.
Orientation was the first group session that we had. It was a small and intimate setting of 8 students and an instructor. Our environment was very relaxed on soft, comfy couches as opposed to the yoga floor classrooms that I had become accustomed to. We had an intensive class schedule from 8am to 10pm with three meal breaks. In retrospect, 80 hours seems like a short time in which to transform your life.
The class consisted of Paula an ice cream truck driver from New Orleans, Donna an occupational therapist from New Jersey, Carol a real estate agent from North Carolina, Janice a healer from New Jersey, Melissa a hypnotherapist from Virginia, Andie a homeopath from London, and Brecht a freewheeling guy from Belgium. Everyone was between 40 and 55 except Brecht who was 27 and me.
One of the teachers told me something very significant on that first evening which informed me about the character of this place, the instructors, and the intention of the course. She said
“at Delphi, we don’t care what the energy feels like. When we ask you how you felt, we don’t care if the energy moves from your head to your foot and all around. Who cares about that? We want to know how you felt in your heart. Otherwise it’s just psychic and that’s not important.”
We spoke about our intentions for the week and for the class and I talked about wanting to flow and be in perfect harmony with the Universe at every moment. The instructor said that what I was describing was living in the heart because living in the heart is living harmoniously. The whole time I was at Delphi, there was a continued emphasis on the heart and being in-tune with one’s heart. I really resonated with this idea, especially because I had been developing and opening my heart so much over the previous months of training. Getting in touch with my heart, my emotions, and my purpose felt like the mission of my life at that time, so this kind of heart-focus made me feel like I had definitely come to the right place.
The Training
In writing this story, I won’t go through a day by day synopsis of what we did because sitting in class meditating for a week makes for a boring story. In general, the days went like this: We would start with an hour of guided meditation. These intended to use language and imagery to go deep inside our minds, hearts, and souls if possible to get us oriented to the state our mind and our inner world and possibly to get some kind of communication going on with our body. Sometimes we would receive some sort of wisdom or message from various aspects of ourself.
We would then eat breakfast (mine was usually oatmeal, fruit, nuts, goji berries, and cacao nibs) and afterwards we would begin our next class. Each class was anywhere from an hour to three hours and each was presented by a revolving group of experienced teachers. The classes would either be a lecture or a practical exercise that consisted of direct experience through a physical technique or internal meditation exercise. There were a lot of symbolic and archetypal activities in these classes, going into mental temples and meeting various aspects of our personality and psyche. The kinds of information they would reveal was also symbolic. Sometimes you would receive magical items or be dressed in certain clothes or colors. Looking back on this now, I realize that some of this language was just to get your thinking and imagination to become more flexible and fluid. The important things that would come from these internal sessions would be the wisdom and teaching that you received from yourself and your spiritual guides (who might also be aspects of yourself). Sometimes also these experiences would make yourself in a different way which is helpful for growing and breaking old habits and self image problems. It’s hard to be very specific about this but let me just give you a quote from my journal so you can understand what I mean:
“We went to the Temple of Higher Self. My meditation revealed that I am coming from the ‘mental’ and into the ‘feeling’. During the meditation I was purified and dressed in kings clothes with a jeweled staff. The first thing I can do to have more love in my life is to be in my heart more. My current purpose was revealed to me as “Mastery” which was very fitting and perfectly harmonizes with all the teachings that I have been reading. The truth is always in harmony, I guess, and that’s a good test for what’s true.”
The 8 day course that I was taking is called In-Depth Channeling. It’s the introductory course at Delphi University and leads into a lot of other subjects that you can learn. The overall goal of the course is for a student who knows potentially nothing about metaphysics to learn to channel, which means to be able to read information in a non-physical way from another being, whether they be alive or dead. To the non-initiated this probably sounds exactly the same as “psychic reading” though Delphi makes a very big distinction between what is means to be a Psychic and what it means to be a Medium and also what it means to channel information. Channeling comes through the heart which is why the school puts so much focus on your spiritual heart. In the beginning, we had to get used to visualizing in our minds, feeling our bodies, and opening our hearts in a metaphysical way. The final goal sounds a little daunting but they introduce all the different components in a step by step way so that by the time you get to day 6 or 7 you’ve learned all these different skills and you can then put them together to create a complex technique that allows you to touch someone else's mind and soul with your heart and read it like a book (or more like a movie, I guess)
As we went through the courses, I felt very comfortable and natural doing these exercises where as some of my peers had difficulties with certain aspects and sometimes got frustrated or discouraged. I’m not sure if that’s a special skill of mine or because I had spent the previous seven months in regular classes of yoga, meditation, and energy work.
Sometimes the classes would be more physical than mental. For instance one night we did a psychic-energy play class. We spent the evening learning to feel each others energy fields, touching them with our hands, and we learned how to keep our energy flowing out when in public places, so as not to be effected by other peoples energy. These classes were very fun because we were up walking around, talking, and laughing a lot. Some of these exercises were more intense than others. For instance, one evening we held hands with a partner, opened our hearts, and looked into each others eyes while taking turns saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me.” These kinds of exercises were intended to disarm us and enable us to trust and open up to each other. We did a lot of different kind of partner meditation which means that we made very deep connections with the people we had class with. A lot of times these practices would reveal some kind of wisdom, which might be things that we already knew about ourselves but don’t always consciously acknowledge. Here’s another recording from my journal:
“Break out of the jar that contains me. When people hurt me it’s OK to defend myself and/or tell them to stop. Use the Ancient Wisdom that I have. Let the magic out. Wizard. I am a scorpion. Don’t be afraid to go deep into love.”
Sometimes we would have an informative lecture so that our brains could understand all the non-verbal stuff we were practicing with our body energy and meditation in other classes. I would say that most of the information in the lectures could be classified as esoteric “occult” teachings. We learned about the different bodies (physical, emotional, mental, and more) and how they interact and support each other. We learned about chakras and we did meditational journeys into each one to heal them and get information about ourselves. We learned how to do automatic writing as a way of “reading” peoples energy without taking the other persons body language into account. We learned about signs and symbolism and how everything in life is symbolic and how we learn through these symbols. We also learned about healing and what it means to heal.
Non-Physical Beings
For the first half of the course, everything we learned had to deal with helping and healing ourselves and our fellow humans. Then one night we had a class on Spirit Communication which is a nice way of saying a Seance. This was the was the weirdest, darkest, and eeriest part of the course. Most of what we did before sounds fairly normal in spiritual circles; meditation, energy work, and heart opening exercises. Directly talking to dead humans crossed a line that no other class I have taken ever has. This part of the course felt especially powerful and potent and I have to admit that it rocked my worldview and scared me a little bit. Even though I had been seeking this type of New Age/Occult knowledge and training, I always approach these types of classes and experiences with a skeptical mind. This is the part of the class that affirmed to me that we weren’t making this stuff up in our minds from dreams and imagination. It’s a bit hard to put into words the sudden affirmation that something is real. For me, I have seen and experienced things that I would not have believed in before I witnessed them. Before I started this journey I didn’t have the experience to be able to believe that you could touch someone’s aura, that you could consciously control energy, or that you could communicate with a departed loved one. So I don’t expect anyone reading this article to believe it because I said so. But this was the experience that I had…
We sat in a circle and we figured out whose loved one we were going to connect to. One student, Melissa, had a friend who had died 7 months ago. We held hands, closed our eyes, and went into a high energy state as we had been taught. Melissa said the loved ones name three times and we all said his name over and over in our heads. We opened our hearts and sent him love in order to draw his energy towards us so that we could connect with him. Eventually, we felt him arrive. The way it works is that his whole energetic presence was there (mind and spirit) was there in the room and everyone picks up on it according to what their particular strength or talent is. My strength is feelings and inner visions. When the spirit feels sad and nervous, my legs would start to shake uncontrollably and my eyes would water as if I was sad and crying. If he is visualizing something, I see it as pictures or movies in my mind. If you can imagine, this was happening for all eight of us at the same time in different ways. It was intense to say the least. After a bit time, we got locked in and comfortable with the spirit and were then able to facilitate a real time dialog between client and spirit, functioning as the medium of communication.
People were sometimes talking simultaneously. There was a moment when Melissa asked the spirit a question and the answer came to me and I said it out loud. At the exact same moment, another student said the exact same sentence that I said and it sounded like an echo in my ear. All the hair on my arms raised. It was one of the weirdest feelings I’ve ever had. We went on like this for almost an hour; Melissa would talk to him and he would talk back through us. In order for this type of communication to work, you have to communicate anything you feel or know in your mind. The feelings of the dead person were felt in us. His words were heard and spoken by us. His thoughts were seen by us. It was incredible but it gave me a very weird feeling.
This deceased friend was in a very bad space. He had committed suicide and was lingering around lost and confused in an empty space. He didn’t really know what was going on or where he was. After the conversation was over and Melissa had gained some understanding and inner peace from the communication and there was nothing more to be understood, we worked on helping the spirit. We knew he was stuck and disorientated in the Other Place so we created a column of light in the middle of the circle and helped him step into the light. Then we used our love to help lift him up and up into the light so that he could get out of his own personal “hell” of lost disorientation and into another place where there were Spirit Helpers that could help him “move on.”
The implications of this class were deep and heavy and took me a long time to process and accept. This one night of exercises left me with the ability to perceive occasional spirits in my life for the next few years and lead to a few really weird moments with friends because of it. Eventually I decided that spirit communication was not a comfortable area for me to work in and I sort of willed the ability to turn off and haven’t felt a spirit since.
There was another exceptionally intense and powerful class we did. They told us we were going to go on an internal journey to see our spirit guides, but it was so much more. This exercise was different than all the rest. We did it as a one-on-one session with a teacher. We would lie down and hold hands with the teacher so that our energy fields could mingle and so she could help us get to higher levels of energy and consciousness than we would normally be able to do by ourselves. From my journal, I wrote this immediately afterwords:
“I can’t believe what just happened. Everything in my life has led me up to this moment. This was huge. We went up and up and up. We were so high. We were in the clouds. The archangels were there, all my personal guides were there. This was a huge initiation. The vibrations were getting so intense. My body was filled with energy and vibrating. I had no muscle control. My body was just ecstatic. My muscles were curling up. My guides were holding one hand and the teacher was holding my other. I got so much wisdom and insight. I was taken to another level of awareness. I saw flashes from childhood and as an infant and I was communicating with these guides back then. They have been helping me my whole life. I leveled up. I can’t even describe it.
We did a Past Life Regression on one of the last days. I had a long, informative and visually rich experience of myself in another life and in another part of the world. I learned a lot about that other person and also witnessed my own death in that life and the feelings that come along with dying. That experience of death made it seem very casual and nothing to fear, like taking off dirty clothes at the end of the day before going to bed.
Real Readings
Towards the end of the course, we put all the exercises we had learned over the week together and discovered that they had taught us all the steps to be able to read the informational auras that surround each person and speak insights back to them accordingly. We spent an afternoon doing practice readings for each other. Then the teachers surprised and shocked us by telling us that after dinner we would be doing real readings for people that were coming from a nearby town. The pressure was suddenly on us. We had been in training for a week and this was our final test.
After dinner, we all got in our nice clothes and did a group meditation to get us focused for the two 25 minute readings we were about to do. We were all very, very nervous. 25 minutes is a long time to give information to a client with no prompting at all. They didn’t tell us we were going to have to do this until the day it happened. Suddenly, we were no longer in the safe play-space of meditation and learning. We were going to interact with normal people from the real world. I was confident because I felt good about all the practice we had done over the previous seven days but I was not at all prepared for the existential shock that I was about to get.
I got situated in my room and in came my first client. His name was Ron and he had never had a channeling session before. I tuned into his energy, as I had been trained to do, and I started telling him what I saw. Ron confirmed that the information I was seeing was accurate but as we went on, the session got darker and darker. It turned out that six months prior, Ron’s three year old son was hit by a car driven by drunk teenagers and was knocked into a creek where he drowned. The whole session was about how to move on in a healthy way and how to handle the grief and pain that he and his wife were going through. When he left, I felt like I’d really helped him, but my head was spinning. It hit me hard that in this line of work, a lot of people would be coming for guidance and help on really tough situations. This had never occurred to me before. It made me reconsider if this was something I really wanted to get into. It was really heavy and intense to talk to people about tragedy and their darkest problems but it also felt like really important work to be doing. I felt so much compassion for Ron and his wife after the session. I felt like I had never felt compassion before because it was now so strong and deep in my heart. The session left me with a low feeling but I had to bring up my energy and mindset because I had to get ready for another reading right away!
Luckily, the next reading was a lot easier. My second client was 23 and his whole reading was light and fun, all about travel and adventure. I also did an accurate reading for him which encouraged me. He was very experienced at that sort of thing, being the son of one of the teachers, but he recognized that I was very talented as a Medium and told me so.
Graduation
The final morning was my 25th birthday. We had a closing lecture and a ceremony where we received our certifications. As I got my certificate, everyone sang happy birthday to me. We all hugged and said our goodbyes, knowing that we had made some very deep friendships that week. I came home with the gift of mediumship, a new connection to Spirit, the wisdom of my soul, and my personal initiation into manhood. I was 25 years old and it seemed that my life was only at it’s very beginning.
Looking back on these events 10 years later, it’s hard to put in words the effect that these experiences had on my life. It’s also hard to separate their impact from the other things that were also happening in my life, from the seven intense months in the retreat center to the year long Shamanic healing training that I went on to do in Chicago. All I can really say is that at the time, it was really important for me to delve deeply into this aspect of the Universe. It seems like the years following mediumship school were full of moments where people revealed secret stories and beliefs to me that they had never told anyone before. I learned a lot about people, humanity, culture, and the spirit world, too. After a few years of dabbling as a medium and giving readings, I ended up choosing not to pursue a career as a healer and spiritual psychotherapist but these studies forever left their mark on my personality. My interest in the occult and the story of human religions and metaphysics still creeps into my daily life, whether that means going on a pilgrimage in order to write a book about the sacred landscapes of the wizard Merlin, delving into the worldwide expression of Sufism, or acknowledging the parallel narratives between the rise of the occult and the development of gem cutting in Renaissance Europe. Magic transformed my life for the better which I think is what it’s supposed to do.
About the Author
Justin K Prim is an American gem cutter and gemologist living and working in Bangkok, Thailand. He has travelled all over the world, studying various types of meditation techniques, psycho-spiritual healing therapies, as well as his trade skills of audio engineering and gemcutting. He is in the process of publishing two books, the first is about a spiritual quest through the UK to find the hidden heart of Merlin the wizard, and the second is a book about the worldwide history of gemstone faceting. He has explored careers in spiritual counseling and energy healing but now works as a Gemstone Faceting Instructor in Bangkok as well as writing articles, producing videos, and giving talks about gem cutting history.
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