Today we’d like to introduce you to Ivy Sunderji
Ivy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I live and work in Los Angeles as a TV writer, producer, and evidential psychic medium.
I graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College and earned an MFA in Writing for Screen and Television from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where I have taught screenwriting for several years in addition to writing cable dramas. I have worked as a writer on the TV shows Greenleaf and Delilah, both on OWN. More recently, I’ve developed and made various deals for several original series and pilots as an aspiring showrunner. I’m passionate about improving working conditions in Hollywood and increasing inclusivity and equity behind the scenes in the way content is produced. I believe ethical production practices have a meaningful cultural impact that is increasingly critical to global well-being and the future stability of democratic governance.
My work as a medium arose due to organic demand from word-of-mouth referrals. As a medium, I love getting to help people who are carrying grief to change the narrative around loss and death to something that is often lighter, less scary, and more hopeful. I work as a medium part-time and offer readings as my writing and teaching schedules allow.
I also offer a private writing workshop called Intuitive Writing. It’s a 5-week class held on zoom that integrates intuitive work into the creative ideation process for students who are writing short screenplays. It’s a really fun class that is very rewarding to teach, and I love getting a chance to combine my three professions like this. It’s been wonderful to write my own rules to my professional life and do meaningful work I actually enjoy. It’s not always easy being in business for yourself the way I am, but I wake up every day proud of myself and the substance of my work.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
In many ways my career has been a relatively smooth road, although it’s been a bit challenging to focus more on entrepreneurship as a medium instead of relying on established companies for a paycheck. I can’t control demand for medium readings or when I’ll sell writing projects, so creating stability for myself financially has been a challenge recently, as it is for everyone who aspires to work for themselves. I’ve had to give up a lot of financial security to build a life that feels right for me and in alignment with my personal values, and it’s been scary to take that leap of faith in the face of the uncertainty of what may or may not come together.
I was never really comfortable asking other people for help, and one of the big challenges for me in recent years has been accepting that I need to ask for help and support to keep moving forward.
The hardest thing for me has been learning to say “no” to opportunities and working relationships where I’d have to compromise my integrity for a paycheck. It’s one thing to be collaborative and have tolerance for different points of view and ways of doing things, but it’s another to compromise your ethical lines and integrity to have a job. In the past few years, I’ve become very itchy about anything that feels blatantly exploitative, and that’s resulted in less writing work because I’ve become more picky about choosing work with ethical partners who care about creating healthy work cultures in addition to creating quality creative projects.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m an evidential psychic medium, screenwriter, professor, and I aspire to add author to that list with my not-yet-published memoir, The Magic House. Although these details are not yet for sure, I may also be adding reality show star and podcast host to that list of professional titles soon, too. My sister, Amy, who is a tattoo artist, and I have a joint service we offer through our venture, Enchanted Ink, where we team up to provide a medium reading and memorial tattoo to people grappling with loss. It’s a really meaningful and unique way to help people who are grieving find joy and carry their loss more lightly as they move forward and keep living life.
I was recently featured on the Podcast, “Tell Me Your Ghost Story” talking about my unlikely evolution from skeptic to evidential medium, and I highly recommend checking it out if you like supernatural stories. My mom, Dr. Constance Ford, who is a college professor and writer, also wrote a really moving essay about my journey to self-acceptance as a medium in The Manifest Station. Her essay is titled, “My Mom Drives a Red Race Car.”
As a medium, I provide hour-long readings on zoom, and I consider this work a form of unregulated grief care. I’m known among my clients for my empathy, authenticity, and integrity, as well as for taking as much of a science-minded approach as possible to this work that sits at the intersection of what we now know from most up-to-date research on non-local theories of consciousness and the ongoing mysteries of the divine unknown.
As someone who has lived through profound loss and grief, I give medium readings to help others because it is what most helped me carry my own grief more lightly. I care about doing right by everyone who comes to me for a reading, and I hope my clients will feel safe, respected ,and uplifted from a session with me. One of my favorite compliments to get about my work is when clients can see my sincerity and that I’m real. There are so many real mediums out there who care about giving a gift with their work, but there’s still a lot of stigma around mediumship, too. I’m often described as “guileless,” by clients, and I feel that is true to my heart and my intentions, so it feels really good when others see that.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck is a fascinating thing because we don’t have any control over our luck, and coping with that has been a big part of being able to sustain a creative and dynamic career.
I’ve had a lot of extreme ups and downs in my life with luck. Preparation can make a lucky break more likely, but it can’t inoculate us against the downswings we all face from the ever-changing ebb and flow of fate. My screenwriting career is the result of a series of extremely lucky opportunities that opened up for me, starting with winning the Universal Writers Fellowship in 2014. Talent only gets you so far in life, and luck takes you the rest of the way, or it can also redirect you, too. I’ve been very fortunate in the writing career opportunities that opened up for me. I was fortunate that after winning that fellowship, I got staffed on a long-running TV series so I had several years of steady employment as a screenwriter, and I have a pension to count on from the WGA when I am older thanks to that one very lucky early break.
Luck can also go the other way and does for all of us at times. A string of very painful unlucky events in my life over the past five years required me to reinvent my life in a very dramatic way. I don’t like to judge luck because gifts can come from unlucky things, but I think the most disappointing and painful luck in the world is having your soulmate die unexpectedly at an early age. My fiancé and partner was my rock in life, we shared a home and had a dog together, and he drowned in a surfing accident in 2021. His death happened on the heels of my sister, Amy, barely surviving a devastating paragliding accident that required her to learn to walk again. It took her more than a year and a half to recover from that. My fiancé, Jehangeer, died the exact same day Amy finally was well enough to go back to work, and I have been grappling with the heartache of grief over all of that for the past several years The domino effect of the fallout of my sisters accident and his death shook up my writing career and changed everything for me. I feel like I’ve been on the world’s biggest scariest roller coaster dip, and I’ve had a lot of unlucky breaks during this time with close misses with good writing opportunities. Both strikes in Hollywood in 2023 and the labor unrest that followed when I worked as an adjunct faculty member at USC felt like further bits of hard luck that have tested my resilience.
What I’ve gained from this downturn in fortune is that I discovered and accepted my abilities as a medium, and a new business and world view has been an off-shoot of that. From these experiences, as painful and challenging as they have been, I have come to really know myself better. I’ve learned a lot and had a lot of growth from fumbling my way through grief and trying to heal. One big lesson I’ve taken away is that we cannot find stability or well-being from external rewards, outcomes, or achievements. True well-being comes from having the humility to accept what is happening with a sense of self-trust that we will figure out how to cope with whatever happens to us.
Pricing:
- Evidential Medium Reading, $250
- Small Group Reading, $400
- Intuitive Writing Workshop, $375
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ivysunderji.com
- Instagram: @ivy_sunderji
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ivy.sunderji/
- Twitter: @ivy_sunderji
- Youtube: @ivysunderji
- Other: https://substack.com/@thehappymedium
