Sitting in the Power: The Practice Nobody Explains Well

If you’ve spent any time researching mediumship development, you’ve run into this phrase. Every credible teacher puts it at the center of their teaching. Ann Theato, who holds the highest certification the Spiritualists’ National Union offers, calls it “the foundation stone of ALL psychic and mediumship work.” Tony Stockwell describes it as “so simple an exercise that at first it seems almost too easy.”

Yet almost nobody explains it clearly enough to actually do it.

Most of what you’ll find online is either too vague (“connect with your inner light and expand”) or too mystical (“merge with the divine source energy of the cosmos”). Neither version helps someone who wants to sit down tomorrow morning and practice for ten minutes. So this post is an attempt to be specific. What the practice actually involves, and why it works.

What it is (and what it isn’t)

Sitting in the power is not meditation. That’s the first thing to understand, and it’s the thing most resources get wrong or skip entirely.

Standard meditation, the kind most people have tried through apps like Headspace or Calm, typically aims for stillness. The focal point is the breath, or a mantra, or a body scan. The goal is to quiet the mind, achieve a state of calm, and notice thoughts without following them. That’s valuable, and it’s a useful prerequisite for this practice (the stillness session type builds exactly this). But it’s not the same thing.

Sitting in the power is active. You’re not trying to empty your mind. You’re trying to build something. Gordon Smith’s teacher, Mrs. Primrose, required students to “work on themselves first before extending their thoughts to the spirit world.” The practice is about connecting to your own internal energy, expanding it outward, and creating a state of heightened sensitivity and attunement. The goal is not peace and quiet (though those often come). The goal is developing the energetic capacity to perceive things you normally don’t.

Think of it this way: meditation is learning to be still. Sitting in the power is learning to be still and then turning the volume up.

How to actually do it

Here’s what the practice looks like, step by step. This isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s consistent with what the major institutions and experienced teachers describe.

Start by settling in. Sit comfortably. Chair, cushion, floor, whatever works. Feet on the ground if you’re in a chair. Close your eyes. Take three slow breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale. This isn’t a formality. The extended exhale activates your vagus nerve and shifts your nervous system toward the parasympathetic state. You’re telling your body it’s safe to be receptive. Do a quick body scan from head to feet and let go of any obvious tension.

Next comes grounding. Spend a minute on it. The most common approach is to visualize roots extending from the base of your spine or the soles of your feet down into the earth. Some people feel this as warmth, some as heaviness, some just hold the image. The point is to establish a sense of stability before you open up. If you do any kind of protection practice, like visualizing light surrounding you, do it here.

Then find your center. Bring your attention to your heart center, roughly the middle of your chest. Not your physical heart. The energetic center. Some people feel warmth here. Some feel pressure. Some don’t feel anything specific and just hold their attention there. All of that is fine. You’re not trying to manufacture a sensation. You’re directing your awareness to a specific place.

This is where the practice diverges from standard meditation. From your heart center, sense or imagine a light, an energy, a warmth. It doesn’t matter what you call it. Some teachers use “soul essence,” some use “divine spark,” some just say “your energy.” The label isn’t important. What matters is that you’re turning your attention inward to something that feels like it belongs to you at a level deeper than your thoughts.

From there, slowly allow that energy to expand outward. First filling your body. Then extending beyond your body to fill the room. Then, if it feels natural, extending further. You’re not pushing. You’re allowing. The expansion should feel like something opening, not something being forced. If you find yourself concentrating hard or clenching your jaw, you’re working against the process. Ease off. The practice is receptive, not effortful.

Some teachers add a step here where you allow your expanded energy to merge with something larger, a sense of universal energy, a divine presence, whatever framework makes sense to you. This is optional and personal. The core practice works without it.

Now sit. This is the actual practice. You sit in this expanded state with no agenda. You’re not looking for anything. You’re not trying to receive messages or see images or hear voices. You’re just being in the expanded state and noticing whatever arises. If thoughts come, let them pass the same way you would in meditation. If sensations come, notice them without grabbing at them. The instinct when something interesting shows up is to focus on it, try to make it clearer, hold onto it. That usually makes it disappear. Let things come and go.

This is the hardest part for beginners because it feels like nothing is happening. That feeling is normal and it doesn’t mean the practice isn’t working.

When your time is up, close down. Gently draw your energy back to your center. Some people visualize dimming the inner light to a comfortable resting level. Take three grounding breaths. Feel your feet on the floor. Open your eyes. Stretch if you want to.

The closing matters. You’re establishing a clear boundary between the practice state and daily life. Skipping this is one of the reasons people report feeling spacey or ungrounded after practice.

What to expect (honestly)

The biggest mistake in most guides is overselling what happens early on. So let me be direct about the timeline.

First few weeks: Probably not much. You might feel relaxed. You might notice warmth in your chest during the heart center step. You might feel slightly “different” when you open your eyes, like the room looks a little sharper or softer. Or you might feel nothing at all and wonder if you’re doing it wrong. You’re not. The early practice is building subtle capacity. It’s like going to the gym for the first time. You don’t see results after three sessions, but the process has started.

Occasionally, something unexpected comes up. A sudden emotion, an unfamiliar sensation, a feeling of unease. This is normal. You are in control, and you can end the practice at any time by drawing your energy back to center, grounding, and opening your eyes. Nothing about this practice requires you to push past what feels safe.

One to three months: If you’re practicing consistently (and consistently is the key word here), you’ll likely start noticing shifts. A sense of expansion beyond your physical body. Warmth or tingling, especially in the hands and chest. A deepening sense of inner quiet that feels different from ordinary relaxation. Some people report that their perception of time changes during practice: what felt like five minutes was actually fifteen.

Three to six months: This is where the practice starts to differentiate from meditation in a way you can feel. The expanded state becomes easier to access and sustain. You might begin noticing what practitioners call “shifts in energy quality,” moments where the feeling in the room seems to change, or where your awareness picks up something subtle that wasn’t there a moment ago. These are early signs of the perceptual sensitivity the practice is designed to develop.

Six months and beyond: The practice deepens in ways that are harder to describe in advance because they become increasingly personal. Your dominant clair type shapes what shows up. Clairsentients might feel presences. Clairvoyants might see images. Clairaudients might catch fragments of words. Claircognizants might have sudden knowings. Or none of that, and the practice remains a deep, grounding, centering experience that supports everything else in your life. That outcome is also legitimate.

How long should you practice?

Every credible teacher agrees on one thing: consistency matters more than duration. Five minutes every day is worth more than an hour on weekends.

That said, there’s a general progression. Start with five minutes. If that’s all you do for the first month, that’s fine. You’re building the habit, which is harder than building the skill. Once five minutes feels natural, extend to ten. Most developing practitioners settle into a daily practice of fifteen to twenty minutes within the first six months. Experienced mediums often sit for thirty to sixty minutes, but that’s years into development.

Tony Stockwell’s guided sitting-in-the-power meditation runs eleven minutes. That’s a reasonable target once you’re past the initial habit-building phase.

The most important thing is that you show up. A five-minute session where you actually sat and practiced counts for more than a twenty-minute session you kept putting off until you skipped it entirely.

Why this works (the neuroscience)

You don’t need to care about the neuroscience for the practice to work. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to know why, there’s real research behind the core mechanics.

The progression from focused attention (concentrating on your heart center and inner light) to open monitoring (sitting in the expanded state and noticing what arises) maps directly onto a well-documented meditation pattern. Lutz and colleagues published on this in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2008. The focused-to-open progression activates the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula while reducing activity in the default mode network, the part of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking and mind-wandering.

In plain terms: the practice quiets the part of your brain that’s always narrating your life and amplifies the parts responsible for present-moment awareness and subtle perception. That’s exactly the state practitioners describe when they talk about “being in the power.”

The grounding and breathing exercises at the start of the practice have their own research base. Extended exhales stimulate the vagus nerve and shift the nervous system toward parasympathetic activation. This is measurable and well-established. You’re not just “calming down.” You’re changing the physiological state your body is operating in.

There’s also research on interoception, the ability to perceive subtle internal body signals. What mediumship traditions call “energy sensing” is functionally interoceptive awareness. A 2025 meta-analysis in Nature Scientific Reports confirmed that mindfulness-based practices produce significant positive effects on interoceptive ability. When you’re learning to sense energy, you’re training a measurable, researchable capacity.

The Windbridge Research Center has studied mediumship directly under controlled conditions. Under quintuple-blind protocols, certified research mediums demonstrated accuracy significantly exceeding chance. This doesn’t tell you how to practice, but it does tell you that the state the practice develops has been studied by serious researchers using rigorous methods.

The common mistakes

Skipping the grounding

Especially once the practice starts producing noticeable effects, grounding becomes more important, not less. People who skip it report feeling spacey, emotionally raw, and ungrounded for hours after practice. If grounding isn’t yet part of your routine, start there.

Inconsistency

Practicing intensely for a week and then dropping it for two weeks is less effective than five minutes every single day. The nervous system needs repetition to build new patterns. So does the subtle perceptual system this practice develops.

Not closing down

If you skip the closing and go straight from the expanded state into checking your phone, you’re training yourself to walk around in a partially open perceptual state. For clairsentients especially, this leads to absorbing other people’s energy without realizing it.

Where your clair type comes in

Your dominant clair type shapes how you experience this practice. Not what you do (the mechanics are the same for everyone) but what you notice during and after.

Clairsentients tend to experience the practice physically first. Warmth, tingling, heaviness, a sense of the room’s energy shifting. Their body is their instrument.

Clairvoyants may see colors or images behind closed eyes during the expansion phase. The visual channel opens more readily when the mind is in the open-monitoring state.

Clairaudients sometimes notice a quality of inner silence that’s different from ordinary quiet. When something does come through this channel, it tends to arrive after the practice rather than during it.

Claircognizants often report that insights or knowings drop in during the sitting phase, seemingly from nowhere. The open, non-grasping state is exactly when this channel is most active.

If you don’t know your dominant type yet, that’s worth figuring out. Not because you can’t practice without it, but because understanding your receiving channel helps you recognize what’s actually happening during practice instead of wondering whether anything is.

Sitting in the power is one of five session types in Umbral, alongside grounding, stillness, energy awareness, and clair development. Each one serves a different purpose, and your clair type shapes the prompts and cues within each session. The assessment takes about three minutes and shows you where your natural strengths sit.

Take the free clair type assessment →