Why Your Spiritual Gifts Work When You're Not Trying (And How to Stop Blocking Them)

I hear this constantly, from women who have been circling this work for a while. Not "I have never had an experience." Something more precise: "I feel things, I know things, things happen. But I cannot make it happen when I try. The moment I sit down with intention, it goes quiet."

This is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are trying. And trying, in this work, is the very mechanism that closes the channel.

Why Trying Doesn't Work

Genuine reception is a receiving state, not a producing state. The experiences you have spontaneously happen precisely because you are not watching yourself have them. The moment you decide to pay attention deliberately, a part of you shifts from open to monitoring — and the monitoring is what interrupts the signal. It is the same reason you cannot fall asleep while watching yourself fall asleep.

Think about the moments when you have known things. When you said something in conversation that turned out to be precisely accurate in ways you could not have manufactured. When you felt, with a certainty that had no rational basis, exactly what someone was thinking or feeling. When you dreamed an event before it happened.

What were you doing in those moments? You were not sitting in meditation trying to access information. You were making tea, or driving, or talking about something else entirely. You were not in producing mode. You were in receiving mode — which is to say, you were simply present, without agenda, without the particular quality of effort that closes the channel.

This is what I mean when I say the work runs not through trying harder, but through something that feels almost opposite. The development work is not about generating more effort. It is about learning to get out of the way.

The Story of the Psychic Game

When I was eighteen, working as a hairdressing apprentice, a colleague and I had a morning tea ritual. We would sit in the break room and play what we called the psychic game. It was not serious. It was entertainment.

I would look at her and start talking about what I saw for her life. Travelling. A man she would meet there. Three children. Moving south before moving north. I would finish my tea, go back to work, and forget everything I had said within the hour. There was no weight to it. No framework. I did not think I was channelling or reading or doing anything except making things up in an entertaining way.

Years later, at a wedding, she appeared. She pulled out her phone. "Victoria, do you remember that game we used to play? Do you know what happened?" She had married the man she met travelling. She had three children. She had moved south before moving north. Most of it had happened.

Here is the thing: at eighteen, in a break room, treating it as a game, I was already doing the thing at a level of accuracy that would be remarkable in any context. And the reason it worked was precisely because I was not trying. There was no effort in it. No watching myself. No monitoring whether I was doing it right. I was simply saying what arrived, with no investment in whether any of it was real.

That is the state. Not the break room. Not the game. The absence of monitoring.

What You're Actually Doing When You "Try"

When you sit down with the deliberate intention to access your gifts, several things happen simultaneously that work against reception.

First, your analytical mind activates. The part of you that has spent years being told this isn't real, this can't be trusted, this is just your imagination — it shows up immediately, because deliberate effort is an invitation for it. It sits across from every impression that arrives and interrogates it. Is this real? Did I make this up? This feels too vague. This feels too specific. How would I know this?

Second, you shift into producing mode. You are trying to generate something rather than receive something. Production and reception are different states. Production requires effort. Reception requires surrender. You cannot make Spirit speak to you. You can only make yourself available to what is already trying to reach you.

Third — and this is the one that catches most people — you become aware of being watched. Even if you are alone, the act of deliberate intention creates an internal observer, a part of you that is watching whether you are doing this right, whether something is arriving, whether you are succeeding or failing. That observer, however well-intentioned, closes the channel. The channel requires a quality of unselfconsciousness that cannot coexist with being watched, even by yourself.

How to Get Out of Your Own Way

The practical work of developing genuine, repeatable access to your gifts is largely the work of learning to move from producing to receiving. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Begin by noticing the moments in ordinary life when information arrives without effort. The sense you have about a person you have just met. The knowing you have about a situation you have not yet been told about. The dream that felt like a visit. These are not flukes. They are the channel running in its natural, unobserved state. Make a note of them. Not to analyse them — to track the conditions. What were you doing? How were you feeling? What was the quality of your attention?

You will begin to notice a pattern. The information arrives when you are relaxed, present, and not watching yourself. It arrives in the gaps — in the space between thoughts, in the moment just before you speak, in the peripheral awareness of an ordinary moment. Developing consistent access is not about learning to try harder in those moments. It is about learning to recognise when the conditions are right and creating more of them deliberately.

The silence you encounter when you try too hard is not evidence of absence. It is evidence that the trying was too tight. Loosen it. Play with it. Treat it the way I treated the break room conversations at eighteen — as something too light to need defending, too real to need proving.

On Imagination

The images, impressions, and knowings you have been dismissing as imagination? They were not the contaminating variable. They were the channel.

In mediumship, imagination is not the noise. It is the medium. The images that arrive when you enter a receptive state are not fabrications. They are the way information translates through the particular processing system you have. Your mind is not making them up. Your mind is the instrument through which they arrive.

This is one of the most liberating reframes in this work, and one of the hardest to trust. Because you have been taught your whole life that imagination means not real. In this work, imagination is the most reliable access route you have. Learning to trust what arrives through it — to treat it as information rather than fabrication, at least as a working hypothesis — is one of the central skills of genuine development.

You are not making it up. You are receiving it. And the more you learn to stay out of the way, the clearer what you receive will become.