Why Mediums Should Keep Their Eyes Open When They Work

If you've watched a lot of mediums work and noticed that most of them close their eyes when they're connecting with spirit, you've probably assumed that's how it's done. It's certainly how it's most often taught. The eyes shut, the head tilts slightly upward, the medium goes quiet, and then the message comes through.

I want to suggest, gently but firmly, that this is the wrong way to work. I teach my students to keep their eyes open. The first time they try it, they tell me they've taken three steps backwards. A week later, they tell me they can't believe they ever worked any other way. The eyes-closed convention is one of those traditions that's stuck around for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it produces good mediumship, and once you see why, you'll probably never want to go back.

Let me walk you through the case.

The short answer

Eyes-closed mediumship slows the energy down, creates a meditative state that makes the connection sluggish, and excludes the sitter from a conversation that's supposed to be about them. Eyes-open mediumship keeps the energy active, the connection alive, and the sitter present in their own experience. The eyes-closed convention exists mostly because of how mediumship was historically taught in Spiritualist churches, not because it produces better work.

The shift to eyes-open feels like a step backwards at first because you're used to using the closed-eye state to filter out distractions. Once you adjust, you'll find your work has more energy, your sitters feel more involved, and the meditative drift that was quietly making your mediumship less effective stops happening.

Why eyes-closed slows everything down

Try this for a moment. Close your eyes and pay attention to what happens to your state. You'll notice your breathing slows. Your shoulders drop. Your sense of time stretches a little. You move toward a calmer, more inward, more meditative state. This is what closing your eyes does. It's a biological response that tips you toward stillness.

Stillness is brilliant for sleeping, meditating, or sitting with yourself. It's the wrong state for mediumship.

Good mediumship is active. It runs on energy, momentum, presence. You want to be pumped up rather than slowed down, alert rather than drifting, engaged rather than withdrawn. The pace of a good reading is more like a conversation with a friend than a meditation session. You're receiving information quickly, processing it, sharing it, checking it, moving on. That requires energy. That requires being in the room rather than retreating from it.

When you close your eyes, you're walking into a state designed to make you slower. You can do mediumship from that state, but you're working against the grain of what the channel actually needs. Most developing mediums who close their eyes report that their readings feel sluggish and that the connection takes longer to build. That's not a coincidence. The state they've created with their eyes is the wrong state for the work.

Eyes open keeps you alert. It keeps the energy moving. It keeps you in the active, engaged frequency that mediumship actually runs on.

What closed eyes do to your sitter

Here's the part that matters most, and the part nobody talks about.

When you close your eyes during a reading, your sitter watches you go quiet, go internal, tilt your head, and seemingly have a private conversation with their loved one. They are sat right there, in front of someone who is communicating with someone they desperately miss, and they have been completely shut out of the moment. They can't see your face properly. They can't see your engagement. They can't tell if you're with them or with their person. They feel like they're outside the conversation while the conversation is supposed to be for them.

This is a real problem. Reading clients often describe feeling like they were just watching a one-person performance rather than being part of an encounter. The energy of the room becomes you and spirit on one side, sitter on the other, with a wall between you that closed eyes have built.

When you keep your eyes open, the wall isn't there. The sitter can see you. They can see your face responding to what's coming through. They can feel the connection happening with them in the room rather than around them. The reading becomes a three-way thing: you, spirit, and the sitter, all in the moment together. That changes the quality of the experience significantly, and not just for the sitter. It changes the energy you have to work with, because the sitter's presence is part of what fuels the reading.

When the sitter feels excluded, they pull their energy back. When they pull their energy back, you have less to work with. The reading gets harder, not easier, with closed eyes, because you've cut off a significant source of what was meant to be flowing into the connection.

Where to actually look

The most common objection from developing mediums when I tell them to keep their eyes open is "but where am I supposed to look?" Because looking directly at the sitter's face feels too intimate, too pressuring, and risks the medium getting psychically pulled into reading the sitter's expressions rather than receiving from spirit.

The answer is: look above them, off to the side, into the middle distance. Not at them, not at the wall behind them, but at a soft spot somewhere in the air above or beside them. You're letting your eyes rest on something that isn't going to give you visual feedback, but you're keeping them open. The sitter sees your face, sees your engagement, sees you with them, but you're not staring them down or reading their micro-expressions.

This is what I do. I usually pick a spot just above the audience when I'm demonstrating. With a one-to-one sitter, I'll look somewhere off to the side, in the air, not at them. The sitter doesn't experience this as evasive; they experience it as natural. The medium clearly has their attention on something specific, and they're not being scrutinised. It works.

If you've been closing your eyes because looking at the sitter feels too intense, this is the solution. You don't have to make eye contact. You just have to keep your eyes open and looking somewhere that isn't directly at them.

Why this is hard at first

I want to be honest about the transition, because most developing mediums struggle when they make the switch.

The first few sessions of working eyes-open feel like you've lost something. The closed-eye state was acting as a filter. It was helping you tune out the room, focus on the spirit, and ignore the distracting reality of the chair and the lamp and the cobweb in the corner. Without that filter, you'll notice everything in your visual field, and you'll feel like the noise is interfering with the connection.

It's not. The noise was always there. You were filtering it with closed eyes. The work is to learn to filter it with attention instead, while keeping your eyes open. This takes a couple of weeks of consistent practice. During those weeks, your work will genuinely feel worse. You'll think you've taken steps backward. You'll be tempted to revert to closed eyes because the work felt easier.

Push through. The version of you who can work eyes-open with the same focus you used to get from closed eyes is more capable than the version who needed closed eyes to function. You're not losing skill; you're upgrading the level at which the skill operates.

Most of my students go through about two weeks of this discomfort and then settle into the new way of working. After a month, they report cleaner readings, more energy, better sitter engagement, and a noticeable shift in how their work feels. The temporary regression is real, but it's the kind of regression that precedes a meaningful upgrade.

Why this convention exists in the first place

Worth understanding, because the eyes-closed tradition isn't arbitrary. It came from somewhere.

Mediumship in the English-speaking world has been heavily shaped by the Spiritualist church tradition, where mediums work from platforms with a particular ceremonial style. The eyes closing, the head tilting, the visible going-quiet, all of that was part of the visual presentation of trance work and platform demonstration in that setting. It was performative as well as practical: it signalled to the congregation that the medium was now in spirit communion, and it created a respectful pause before the message came through.

In the church context, with a quiet, reverent audience and time to settle into the work, the eyes-closed convention had a place. The medium had time to sit and prepare. The energy of the church was already settled in a particular way. The convention fit.

Outside that context, in modern reading rooms, on Zoom, in someone's living room, in venues where you're managing your own setup and your own time, the convention stops fitting. You don't have a congregation waiting in respectful silence. You have a sitter who's nervous, an audience finding their seats, a Zoom screen with people fiddling with their settings. The eyes-closed pause that worked in a church is just dead air in those settings.

If you're trained in a Spiritualist church tradition, the eyes-closed style is what you learned. There's nothing wrong with that history, and many fine mediums have come out of it. But the convention isn't a universal truth. It's a stylistic choice that suited a particular setting, and it transfers badly to most of the settings modern mediums actually work in.

What about meditation before mediumship

A related point, since they often come as a package.

Many traditions teach that you should meditate before doing spirit work, to prepare your energy and enter the right state. I disagree with this for the same underlying reason I disagree with eyes-closed working. Meditation slows you down. The state it produces is good for many things, but it's not the optimal state for active mediumship. By the time you've meditated yourself into a deeply still place, you've taken your energy in the opposite direction from where the work needs it.

I don't meditate before I work. I might play loud trance music in the car on the way to a demonstration. I might do a brief acknowledgment of spirit while I'm sorting out chairs and microphones. But I don't sit in stillness to prepare. The work is active, and the preparation should match that.

If you've been told you need to meditate before mediumship to do it properly, you've been told something that suits a particular tradition rather than something that's universally true. Try working without the meditative preparation for a few sessions and see whether your work changes. Many developing mediums find it changes for the better.

What this looks like in practice

If you're going to try working eyes-open, here's what I'd suggest.

Pick a low-stakes practice session to try it for the first time. Not a paid client, not a public demonstration. A practice reading with someone you trust, where you can experiment without consequence.

Sit naturally. Don't tilt your head upward in the dramatic way some mediums do; that's another church-tradition affectation that doesn't really help. Just sit normally, eyes open, gaze settled somewhere off to the side or slightly above your sitter.

Don't try to look serene or spiritual. Your face can do whatever it does. If you're surprised, look surprised. If you're confused, look confused. If something lands and you're moved by it, let your face show that. The sitter benefits from seeing your real responses.

When information arrives, share it the same way you would in a normal conversation. Don't pause dramatically. Don't go into a special voice. Just say what came through, check it with the sitter, keep going.

Expect the first few minutes to feel weird. The closed-eye habit is strong, and breaking it feels exposing at first. After about ten minutes you'll usually settle. After a couple of sessions, the new way feels normal.

A last honest word

If you've been working with closed eyes because that's what you were taught, please consider that you were taught a stylistic convention rather than a universal principle. The convention has costs you may not have noticed: a slowed-down energy, a sitter who feels excluded, a meditative drift that makes the work harder than it needs to be. Those costs aren't visible from the inside of the work, which is why so many mediums never question the convention.

Eyes open changes the texture of the work. It keeps you in the room, in the moment, in the conversation with the sitter that the reading is supposed to be. It's uncomfortable at first and almost always better within a few weeks. The mediums I respect most all work eyes-open, and the more I've watched developing mediums make the switch, the more confident I've become that this is the right direction.

Try it. Give it a fortnight. See what happens.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should mediums close their eyes when they're working? In my view, no. Closing your eyes slows your energy down, creates a meditative state that's the wrong state for active mediumship, and excludes the sitter from a moment that should include them. Eyes-open mediumship keeps the energy alive, the connection active, and the sitter present in their own experience. The eyes-closed convention exists for historical reasons that don't transfer well to modern reading settings.

Why do so many mediums close their eyes if it's not ideal? Mostly because it's what they were taught. The eyes-closed style comes out of the Spiritualist church tradition, where it was part of the visual presentation of platform demonstration. It became standard within that tradition, and most mediums trained in that lineage inherit the convention without questioning it. The convention has stuck around long after the church context that justified it.

Where should I look during a reading if my eyes are open? Above the sitter, off to the side, into the middle distance. You don't want to stare at the sitter directly because that's intense and risks you reading their micro-expressions rather than receiving from spirit. A soft gaze somewhere in the air near them works well. The sitter doesn't experience this as evasive; they experience it as natural focus.

Won't keeping my eyes open distract me from the connection? At first, yes. The first few sessions of working eyes-open feel like the visual noise is interfering. After a couple of weeks of consistent practice, the noise stops being noise; you're filtering it with attention instead of with closed eyes. The temporary regression precedes a meaningful upgrade in the quality of your work.

Should mediums meditate before doing mediumship? In my view, no. Meditation slows you down, which is the opposite of what active mediumship needs. The state meditation produces is good for many things, but it's not the optimal state for spirit work. Most working mediums who get good results are not deeply meditative before they work; they're alert, engaged, and pumped up rather than slowed down.

Will my mediumship get worse if I switch to eyes-open? Temporarily, probably yes. The first one to two weeks of working eyes-open feel like you've lost something, because the closed-eye state was acting as a filter you've learned to depend on. Most developing mediums settle into the new style within a couple of weeks and report cleaner readings and more energy afterwards. The dip is real but short-lived.

How does eyes-open work in platform demonstration specifically? The same way it works one-to-one, with the gaze settled above the audience rather than directly on any specific person. This helps the medium avoid getting pulled into reading audience expressions and keeps the work focused on receiving from spirit. The audience sees the medium engaged and present rather than withdrawn into a private conversation.

Is there ever a reason to close your eyes during mediumship? A brief moment of closed-eye settling at the start of a session is fine if it helps you tune in. What I'd caution against is staying with eyes closed throughout the reading. Brief settling and persistent closing are different things. If you find yourself spending most of your reading with eyes closed, the work would benefit from the change.

If you want a curated community where techniques like this are discussed openly and the realities of working mediumship are taken seriously, Spirit Social is the app I built for exactly that. Includes a monthly online development circle with me where I'll help you make changes like the eyes-open switch in real time, plus ongoing community of developing mediums working through the same practical questions. The kind of teaching that doesn't fit into a single blog post tends to happen there.