Tyler Henry first discovered he was a medium when he was just 10 years old. “It almost felt like a memory that hadn’t happened yet,” he tells Tudum. He woke up feeling like his grandmother had died, and while he was telling his mother about this strange feeling, his father called, letting them know that she had just passed away. 

Though Henry learned about his gift at a young age, it took him more than a decade and thousands of readings to hone it. Now he uses his method in his new unscripted series, Life After Death with Tyler Henry. The 26-year-old sits down with the clients, begins to draw and sees what messages “come through.” 

But how does receiving these messages actually work? “I don’t see dead people walking around,” he says, “though my job would probably be a lot easier if that were the case!” Ahead, Henry himself breaks down exactly how he communicates with the dead — and the process starts even earlier than you’d think. 

Before

To control for any biases, Henry says it’s crucial that he knows nothing about the client before going to a session. Most times, he won’t even know where he’s going — in the show, his mother or assistant, Heather, drives him to and from readings. 

But about 45 minutes before the session, Henry says he’ll begin to get “impressions” of who he’s about to receive. These feelings can come in many different forms: They can be a feeling of whom he’s about to receive from the beyond, or they can be physical sensations somehow related to the deceased. Henry compares sensing these impressions to having a song stuck in his head. But the impressions are always important to a session. “Very often, even if I’m struggling to read the person one-on-one, it’s those impressions that came through in the car that I know I can rely on more than anything,” he says. 

For example, in Episode 4, he feels an older woman coming through on the car ride over to a reading. Turns out, she wasn’t a relative of the client. Rather, she was the mother of the homeowner where the reading takes place. 

During

When Henry gets to a reading, though, it’s a whole different story. To concentrate, he begins scribbling in a notebook — a meditative process he says turns his gift, essentially, “on and off.” He first discovered the trick while doodling offhandedly while on the phone with a friend as a teenager. But it’s not the artwork that allows him to focus; rather, it’s the repetition. “You actually see that in a lot of other aspects of theology,” he says. “Most spiritualities or religions have some aspect of repetition that allows people to open up or connect.” Henry points to the Catholic practice of using rosary beads to count the repetition of prayers as an example. 

But, during a reading, how does Henry actually receive messages from the other side? To put it most simply, he says his “sixth sense uses the other five senses to communicate.” So, during a reading, Henry says he’ll get visuals, sounds, feelings — sometimes even tastes and smells — from deceased loved ones trying to communicate from beyond. Sometimes, an impression will come through as a physical sensation that corresponds to the way a loved one died. Other times, it will be a mental image that Henry says “feels akin to a memory that’s mine, but is actually somebody else’s.” His job is to then translate these sensations into a reading that makes sense for the client.

To Henry, each reading adds to his “symbolic word bank,” a collection of data points that he can go back and reference during future sessions. For example, he says if he sits with someone who’s father’s name is George, oftentimes he’ll begin to see another client who’s father was also named George. Then, he knows that those messages he gave in his previous reading most likely apply to the current client. 

To strengthen Henry’s connection with the afterlife, clients will sometimes bring in an object belonging to whomever they want to connect with — a practice called psychometry. Though an object typically helps to foster a connection between Henry and the deceased, even he is not sure how it all works. “I’m at this stage in my life where I’m unsure of whether the energy is connected to the object or if the energy is really just connecting to the person I’m reading, and the object acts as a reminder of who they’re there to hear from,” he says. “I’m kind of inclined to think it might be the latter.”

During readings, Henry says he nearly always has someone come through. In fact, he can count on one hand the number of times he’s had to end a reading early because it “didn’t feel right.” But sometimes, the person who comes through is completely unexpected. In fact, mishaps happen so often that Henry has a running joke about it. “People will come wanting to connect with their mother, and then they’ll hear from their mother-in-law. They’re like, ’I don’t want to talk to my mother-in-law!’” he laughs. “But I find that people often hear who they need to hear from, sometimes even more than maybe who they want to hear from.”

After

There’s no one way to tell when a reading is done. Henry says both he and the client simply feel it. He compared it to sneezing three times consecutively; after the third sneeze, you know it’s over. 

But sometimes, he says spirits communicate after readings with what he calls “meaningful coincidences.” For example, in Episode 8, Henry completes a session with a woman whose mother used to volunteer at the Taoist Temple Museum in his hometown of Hanford, California. During the reading, Henry warns her to stay away from fire. Less than 24 hours later, an arsonist burned the museum down. “That structure had been there for a century and never burned out, and right when I left, it did,” he says. “It’s all kind of synchronistic in its timing.” 

And even after thousands of readings, Henry says he genuinely thinks back to every reading “on some level.” “When I lay my head on the pillow at night, I’m thinking back to clients I had six years ago, sometimes,” he says. “I feel like I really hear these people’s stories, and carry them all with me.”