Channeling is the practice of receiving and relaying information that does not feel like it originated in your own thinking. That is the widest honest definition. Everything after it, who or what is being received from, is interpretation, and different traditions interpret it very differently.
The plain description
A person becomes quiet, shifts their attention away from ordinary deliberate thought, and speaks or writes what arrives. The material has a quality the person recognises as not-their-own: a different cadence, a different vocabulary, sometimes an answer to a question they did not know how to ask.
Notice what that description does not contain. It makes no claim about the source. It describes only the experience, which is the only part anyone can report on directly.
Where the modern practice comes from
The lineage most people are unknowingly drawing on is nineteenth century Spiritualism, a movement that swept America and Europe on the belief that the dead could communicate through mediums. Trance mediumship became widely popular in the 1860s and 1870s. It is worth knowing why it spread as fast as it did: it was one of the very few settings in which women were permitted to speak publicly and be listened to, because the words were understood not to be theirs.
The movement’s later history is also part of the honest picture. From the late 1800s into the early 1900s a great many mediums were investigated and exposed as frauds. Anyone practising this today inherits that history whether they like it or not, and pretending otherwise is not integrity.
The twentieth century brought figures like Edgar Cayce, who described giving readings from a trance state, and the term “channeling” itself came into general use later, in the spiritual movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
Is it studied?
Yes, though not settled. The Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded in 1973 by the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, lists channeling among its research areas alongside consciousness studies, meditation, spontaneous remission and anomalous experience.
What there is not, and I want to be exact here, is a scientific consensus that information is being received from an external source. There are careful people asking the question seriously. There is no answer you could call established.
How I work with it
I work primarily with Christ’s energy and with Archangel Michael. That connection began in 2015 and has deepened since. More recently other beings of Light have joined the work: Saint Germain, Mary Magdalene, and others. I have written about where that comes from here.
In a session, channelling is not theatre. I do not change voice or perform a trance. I go quiet, I listen, and I tell you what arrives, in ordinary language, as it arrives. If something is unclear I say it is unclear. If nothing comes I say nothing came, which happens, and which I would rather admit than fill.
Discernment: the part that matters most
The single most important skill in this practice is not reception. It is discernment: telling apart what is arriving from what you want to be arriving. Four things I hold to.
- Guidance does not flatter. Material that consistently tells you how special you are is usually your own wishing.
- Guidance does not command. Anything that instructs you to obey, to isolate yourself, or to hand over your judgement is to be refused, whatever its claimed source.
- It survives daylight. If it only makes sense inside the session and dissolves on the way home, that is information too.
- It leaves you more capable, not more dependent. The measure of good guidance is that you need less of it over time.
I apply those to my own work, out loud, in front of you. You are allowed to disagree with what I bring. You are allowed to tell me it does not land. That is a normal part of a session, not a failure of one.
What channeling is not
- It is not prediction. I am not telling you what will happen.
- It is not diagnosis. I am not a doctor and I do not name medical conditions.
- It is not a reason to stop thinking. Your own judgement stays in the room.
If you are curious
Channelled guidance is one part of a session rather than the whole of it, and it arrives after the energetic work rather than instead of it. The four movements of a session are described here, and you can write to me here, including if what you want is to ask a question before booking anything.
Sources
- Institute of Noetic Sciences, noetic.org, founded 1973 by Edgar Mitchell; channeling is listed among its research areas.
- Encyclopædia Britannica, Spiritualism, on the nineteenth century movement and mediumship.