Sitting in the Power: Becoming Familiar with Your Own Condition of Consciousness
Sitting in the Power is one of the foundational practices of mediumship development. Its purpose is not to reach toward Spirit, produce communication, enter trance, or create a particular inner state. It offers something more fundamental: repeated experience of being with your own condition of consciousness without requiring that condition to become anything else. Through that familiarity, students gain an increasingly reliable reference point for understanding change when it occurs.
Book One: Foundations of Mediumship
A Common Question
What am I supposed to do during Sitting in the Power?
Answer
Very little in the sense of producing an outcome.
Sit comfortably. Remain present. Allow thoughts, sensations, emotions, bodily experience, and changes in attention to come and go without trying to improve them.
You are not waiting for Spirit to arrive.
You are not trying to make communication happen.
You are spending time becoming familiar with your own experience.
That familiarity becomes important later, because it is much easier to notice that something has changed when we have first learned what our own experience is like without trying to change it.
Introduction
Chapter Five established an important distinction.
Our conscious experience can change without trance occurring.
Attention can shift.
Thought can become less prominent.
Time may seem different.
The body may feel different.
We can become deeply absorbed.
None of these experiences, by themselves, tell us that trance mediumship is taking place.
This leaves the developing medium with another question.
If change does not automatically tell us what is happening, how do we learn to understand change more accurately?
One answer begins surprisingly close to home.
Before becoming preoccupied with what Spirit feels like, it is useful to become familiar with what you feel like.
Before trying to identify unusual conditions, it helps to know something about the ordinary variations already present within your own experience.
Before asking:
“Is this Spirit?”
we can first learn to ask:
“What has actually changed?”
This is one of the reasons Sitting in the Power has remained such a valuable practice within mediumship development.
It gives us time in which nothing needs to be accomplished.
No evidence is required.
No communicator needs to be established.
No message needs to be delivered.
No special state has to appear.
We sit.
We remain present.
And over repeated sittings, something surprisingly useful begins to happen.
We become less unfamiliar with ourselves.
Not with a single fixed version of ourselves.
Our condition is not identical every day.
Sometimes thought is active.
Sometimes it is less prominent.
The body may feel settled one day and restless another.
Emotion may be present or absent.
Attention may remain steady for several minutes and then move rapidly.
None of this means the practice is succeeding or failing.
It simply gives us experience.
Gradually, the student begins developing a reference point.
They become more familiar with the ways their own condition naturally varies.
This matters because mediumship also involves change.
Spirit communication may become apparent through thoughts, imagery, feelings, sensations, knowing, or shifts within the overall experience.
Without familiarity, almost any change can appear spiritually significant.
Or the opposite can happen.
A genuine change may be dismissed because it seems too ordinary.
Sitting in the Power helps us move away from both extremes.
We do not need to spiritualize every experience.
And we do not need to dismiss every subtle one.
We begin by learning what is actually present.
Why Familiarity Comes First
Imagine entering a room you have never seen before.
Someone moves a chair several feet.
You might not notice.
You do not yet know the room well enough to know what has changed.
Now imagine the same thing happening in your own home.
You notice immediately.
Not because you were studying the furniture.
Because familiarity already existed.
Our own conscious experience can work in a similar way.
The better we know its ordinary variations, the less we need every new sensation to announce itself loudly before we notice a difference.
This is not about becoming hypervigilant.
It is almost the opposite.
We are not inspecting ourselves constantly.
Repeated experience gradually creates familiarity without the need for constant measurement.
That becomes one of the quiet foundations of later mediumship development.
Something changes.
And rather than immediately deciding what it means, we are better able to notice:
“This is different from what was present before.”
That is enough to begin.