Why Practice Readings Matter More Than Courses

I want to talk about something I see a lot, and it's worth saying out loud because it might be the thing that's quietly holding you back without you realising.

A lot of developing mediums get stuck. Not stuck because they don't have the ability, and not stuck because they're not doing the work. They get stuck because they've fallen into a pattern of doing the wrong kind of work. Specifically, they've collected courses, weekend workshops, programmes, masterclasses, mentorships, books, oracle decks, attunements, certifications and accreditations, and they still feel like they can't actually do this. They keep signing up for the next thing in the hope it'll be the key, and it never quite is.

I'm here to tell you, with love, that more courses are very rarely the answer. What you need is practice readings, and a fair few of them. If you don't sit in front of real sitters and actually do the work, the courses can stack up to the ceiling and you'll still feel like a fraud, because the bit that builds you into a working medium genuinely cannot happen in a classroom.

Why course-hopping is so tempting

Before we get into what practice actually does, let's be honest about why so many of us end up in this loop. I've been there myself, more times than I'd like to admit.

Courses feel productive. You're learning, you're developing, you're showing up. There's a teacher to follow, a structure to lean on, a clear sense of progress as you tick off modules. Best of all, courses are safe. You can sit in the back, listen, absorb, do the exercises with other students who are all in the same boat as you. Nobody is depending on you to get anything right. Nobody is going to disappoint nan because you couldn't quite land the connection.

Practice readings are the opposite. You're out on a wire, in front of a real human being who has hopes of you, with no teacher to fall back on if it goes wrong. You might say something silly. You might get a name completely off. You might sit there for ten seconds with nothing and feel time stretch into a small infinity. The sitter might say no, no, no, no, and you'll have to keep working.

It's much harder than a course. Which is exactly why it's the bit that builds you.

What courses can do, and what they can't

I'm not anti-courses. I teach. I take courses myself. They have a place.

A good course can give you knowledge, frameworks, language for what you're already experiencing, structure for your development, and exposure to a teacher whose work you respect. It can save you years of figuring things out alone. It can give you community with other developing mediums. It can give you feedback if it's set up to do that (which most circles aren't, but workshops and mentorships are). All of that is real and useful.

What a course cannot do is build the muscle of working in front of a real sitter, in real time, with real stakes. That muscle is built through doing the thing. Just as you can read every book ever written about cycling and still not be able to ride a bike until you actually get on one and wobble around for a bit, you can take every mediumship course on the market and still not be able to work cleanly with a sitter until you've sat with dozens of them.

The bit between knowing how it works and being able to do it is practice. Nothing else fills that gap. Nothing.

What practice actually does

Here's the practical, mechanical reason practice readings matter so much. It isn't just about getting better through repetition (though that's part of it). It's that several specific things happen in practice that genuinely cannot happen any other way.

Your blend with spirit builds. The blend deepens through working, not before. You can sit in meditation for hours and not reach the same state you'll reach in five minutes of working with an actual sitter. The blend needs the flow of information out and confirmation back to build properly. That flow only exists when you're working live.

You learn what your own perception feels like. Every medium has their own way of receiving. Their own clairs that come most easily, their own internal vocabulary, their own quirks. You can't discover yours by reading about other people's. You discover them by working, getting feedback, working again, and slowly building your personal map.

You get used to getting things wrong. This is the big one. Mediumship comes with nos. You can't get rid of them. You can only stop being afraid of them, and the only way to stop being afraid of them is to experience a lot of them and find out that the world doesn't end. The first time you get nos all the way through a reading, you'll feel devastated. The fiftieth time, you'll go "right, let me have another go at that one." Resilience is built through exposure, not theory.

This is also where having a teacher to troubleshoot with can be properly useful, not in place of practice but alongside it. I run a monthly Q&A inside Spirit Social where developing mediums bring the things that have come up in their practice readings, the moments they didn't understand, the nos that didn't make sense, the bits of feedback they couldn't quite interpret. That kind of troubleshooting is what turns a confusing practice reading into actual learning, and it's the bit most developing mediums don't have access to. If you've been working alone, having somewhere to bring the messy real-world questions makes a big difference.

You learn how your own resistance shows up. When you're working with a real sitter, the imposter syndrome voice gets very loud. You discover your specific flavour of self-sabotage, the bit of your psychology that wants to back away from this work. You can't address what you haven't met, and you only meet it when you're actually doing the thing.

Confidence stops being theoretical. This is the deepest one. You can know intellectually that mediumship works. You can have read it in a hundred books. But until you've sat with a sitter, said something you thought was nonsense, and watched their face crack open as they recognise their grandmother, you don't believe it. After that moment, you believe it. Belief is not the same as understanding.

Why people avoid practice

If practice is so essential, why do so many developing mediums avoid it?

The honest answer is fear. Specifically, fear of getting it wrong in front of someone who matters. Course exercises feel low-stakes. Practice readings feel high-stakes, especially if the sitter is hoping to hear from someone they loved.

There's also fear of finding out you can't do it. As long as you're collecting courses, the question of whether you can actually do this stays open. The moment you sit in front of a sitter, the question is being answered live. That's terrifying. So a lot of people keep the question open by keeping themselves in learning mode forever.

I want to be gentle but honest: this is the trap. The question never gets answered until you put yourself in the position of having to answer it. And the answer, almost always, is that you can do this better than you think you can, but only once you've found out.

What "real practice" actually means

Worth being clear about, because not all practice is created equal.

Sitting in a circle taking turns with other developing mediums is helpful, especially early on, but it has limits. Everyone in the room is being kind. Everyone is keen to validate what you give. The "no" might be a polite no that should have been firmer. The "yes" might be a generous yes when it should have been a clearer no. You're working in a slightly cushioned environment.

Real practice readings are with sitters who aren't in development themselves. They have no idea what you're doing, no urge to be kind to the process, no investment in your feelings. They're hoping to hear from someone they loved. That's where the work really starts.

This doesn't mean you should leap straight to charging clients before you're ready. Please don't. Start with friends-of-friends who don't know you, online practice schemes, formal practice sitter exchanges within development communities, that sort of thing. The point is that the sitter shouldn't be your closest mate cheering you on. They should be someone whose face you've never seen before, who genuinely wants what you can offer, and who will tell you honestly if it lands or doesn't.

How much practice is enough

There's no magic number, but a few honest guides.

If you're doing one practice reading every couple of months and the rest is courses, you're course-heavy and probably not progressing as fast as you could. If you're doing one a week minimum, you're in the territory where actual development happens.

Most mediums I know who've developed into working mediums did large numbers of practice readings over a sustained period. Not five over a year. More like a hundred over a year. The numbers matter because the variety matters. Different sitters bring different energies, different spirits, different challenges. You don't grow from doing the same easy thing repeatedly. You grow from doing many different things and finding out which bits you struggle with.

If that number sounds wildly daunting, work backwards. Two a week is a hundred a year. One a week is fifty. Either is plenty to keep you growing. None at all, however many courses you've done, isn't.

The bit nobody tells you: integration matters too

Right, before you go and book yourself in for a hundred practice readings next week, I need to balance this out, because over-practising is its own trap and it's the one I personally fell into.

The healthiest pattern for mediumship development isn't just learn and practise. It's learn, practise, and integrate. Three legs, not two.

Integration is the bit where you step away from the work and come back into being a human. You reflect on the readings you've done. You sit with the feelings they brought up. You let the profound bits land properly in your life, rather than barrelling on to the next reading before the last one has settled. You do normal human things. You make dinner. You walk the dog. You let your vibration come back down to earth.

This matters more than people realise. Mediumship raises your vibration to work with spirit, which is brilliant, but you're not meant to be in that state full time. If you were supposed to be in spirit all the time, you wouldn't have incarnated here. The whole point of being in a body is to live in the body, with all the irritating, mundane, human stuff that comes with it.

A sensible rule of thumb: at least two days a week where you do no spirit work at all. No readings, no development exercises, no consciously moving into an altered state. Just life. It feels like a punishment when you're loving the work, but it's recovery, in exactly the same way rest days are recovery at the gym. You don't build muscle by lifting weights every single day. You build it by lifting hard, then resting, then lifting again. Mediumship is the same.

The mediums who burn out (and there are plenty) are almost always the ones who skipped this leg. They loved the work, they ran at it, and they forgot to come back down to earth. Don't be one of them. The trinity is learn, practise, integrate. All three matter, all three protect you.

Where to find practice sitters

This is the part where a lot of people get stuck, so a few practical routes:

Development communities and circles often have practice sitter exchanges. People in development want practice; people not in development know other people. There's usually a way to swap.

Spiritualist churches sometimes have practice nights where members of the public can come for a free or low-cost reading from developing mediums.

Online platforms and dedicated communities exist specifically for matching developing mediums with practice sitters. Quality varies, so use your judgement about who runs them and how they're moderated.

Friends of friends, with appropriate boundaries. Don't read for your closest people early on (too much rides on it emotionally), but the wider net of people who know someone who knows you is a great place to start.

Your own networks, once you're ready to start being more public about what you're doing. Anyone who's expressed curiosity. Anyone who's hinted they'd love to have a sit with you.

A note on this, because finding safe practice sitters in an aligned environment is harder than it sounds. Open online spaces are mixed bags. Some are lovely, some are full of people who'll happily take advantage of a developing medium's lack of confidence, and the moderation varies wildly. Spirit Social, the community I built, has practice sitter exchanges as one of its core functions, and the whole space is curated specifically for developing mediums who want to grow with real sitters in an environment that's safe, supportive, and free of the politics you find elsewhere. If you've been hesitant to start practising because the available options feel a bit Wild West, that's the gap it's there to fill.

The important thing is to actually do it. Not to think about doing it, plan to do it, prepare more before doing it. Sit down, find a sitter, do the reading. Then do another one.

What this isn't

I want to be clear about one thing, because I can hear the misreading already. I'm not saying courses are pointless and you should never take another one.

I'm saying that if your ratio is heavy on courses and light on actual practice, the balance is wrong, and that's almost certainly why you feel stuck. Courses are seasoning. Practice is the meal. You can't live on seasoning, no matter how good the seasoning is.

A good development life probably looks like: regular practice readings as the foundation, with the occasional course or mentorship to refine specific things, deepen your understanding, or stretch you somewhere new. Not the other way round.

A last honest word

If you've been collecting courses for ages and you still feel like you can't really do this, please hear me when I say: it's almost certainly not that you can't. It's that you haven't done enough of the actual thing yet. And the only way out of that is to start doing it, badly at first, and then a bit better, and then a bit better than that.

You will not feel ready. Nobody does. The medium part of you doesn't get unlocked by a certificate or a course completion. It gets unlocked by repeatedly putting yourself in front of someone who needs you to do this, and discovering, again and again, that you can.

Go on. Book a practice reading this week. The course can wait.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to take a mediumship course to become a medium? Yes, you genuinely do need teaching at some point. Understanding the mechanics of mediumship, how energy works, how to manage your own state, how to recognise what you're perceiving, all of that comes from good teaching and saves you years of guesswork. Courses are essential. The mistake is thinking courses alone will get you there. They give you the knowledge; practice readings turn that knowledge into ability. You need both. The healthy mediums I know have invested seriously in both halves.

So are you saying courses don't matter? Not at all. Courses absolutely matter. Understanding the mechanics of mediumship makes the difference between fumbling in the dark and developing with intention. The right course can save you years of confusion. The point of this post isn't that courses are bad, it's that they're only half the picture. Practice readings are the other half. Treat them as equally important and you'll progress properly. Treat one as the whole answer and you'll get stuck.

How many practice readings should a developing medium do? There's no fixed number, but the people who develop into working mediums tend to do dozens or hundreds over a sustained period, alongside their teaching and learning. One a week is a sensible minimum. The combination of strong teaching and consistent practice is what moves people forward. Courses without practice keeps you in the developing-but-not-progressing loop.

Is it okay to give readings for free while I'm practising? Yes, and it's the most sensible way to start. Free practice readings let you build the work without the pressure of charging for it. Most developing mediums do many free practice readings before they begin to charge, and that's a healthy progression.

Where can I find people to do practice readings with? Development communities, Spiritualist churches with practice nights, online platforms that match developing mediums with practice sitters, and friends-of-friends through your wider network. Start with people you don't know personally to keep the practice clean.

What if I get it wrong during a practice reading? You will, often. Everyone does. Getting things wrong is part of mediumship, not evidence you can't do it. The point of practice is to get used to getting things wrong and learn how to handle it gracefully. Sitters in practice contexts know what they're signing up for.

Should I tell practice sitters that I'm developing? Yes, always. Be honest. Practice sitters who know they're sitting with a developing medium can hold an appropriate expectation and give honest feedback. Sitters who think you're an established working medium will be expecting more than is fair on either of you.

Are online practice readings as good as in-person ones? Yes, the mediumship works the same. Online practice has the practical advantage that you can do it from anywhere, with sitters anywhere, which makes building a regular practice much easier. There's no benefit to insisting on in-person while you're developing.

How do I know when I've done enough practice to start charging? When you're consistently producing readings that you'd be willing to charge for, when feedback from practice sitters is consistently strong, and when an experienced medium or mentor confirms you're at that level. It's not really about a number; it's about a consistent quality of work. Take the time you need.

Can you over-practise mediumship? Yes, and a lot of developing mediums fall into this trap. Practice without integration leads to burnout. The healthy pattern is learn, practise, integrate, with at least two days a week where you do no spirit work at all. That recovery time is when the work properly lands in you.

How often should I take a break from mediumship? Aim for at least two days a week where you don't move into an altered state, do readings, or actively work with spirit. It feels counterintuitive when you love the work, but it's the same principle as rest days at the gym. Recovery is where the strengthening happens. Without it, you'll exhaust yourself.

Want to listen to more on this kind of thing? Loads of the podcast episodes go deeper into the realities of developing mediumship, the bits other teachers don't tend to say out loud. Worth a listen if you're in the development phase and looking for honest company on the journey.

Mediumship Matters