Today we’d like to introduce you to Ivy Sunderji
Hi Ivy, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My mom has said I am “the last person anyone would ever expect” to claim to be an evidential psychic medium.
I am a graduate of Dartmouth College and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where I have taught screenwriting part-time for the past three years, and I originally moved to LA to be a screenwriter, which is still work that I do professionally, and I have a few great TV writing credits under my belt.
I was a writer and producer working on the TV series Delilah when my fiancé and partner of almost seven years, Dr. Jehangeer Sunderji, died in a surfing accident in Ventura. After he died, I “woke up” to my life-long ability as a medium. The day he died, I heard him talking to me, and I thought I was hallucinating from grief. I thought Jehangeer, who had been a psychiatrist based in Santa Monica, would have been the right person to help me figure out how to handle what I believed was a mental health crisis brought on by his loss, and soon after this, I also started “hearing” other dead people, too. It was so loud and intrusive I could hardly focus on anything else.
Therapists who I talked to early on in my grief helped me open my mind to the fact that I could be a medium, and looking back, I am so grateful for them. I remember one started crying when I told them what I was hearing and told me to buy a book on mediumship, and another said the person I was describing was her deceased father.
I was not a believer in anything after death, so I was skeptical of myself when I started having these experiences as a medium, but I am a naturally curious person who loves learning, and in grief I had nothing but time to read and explore a topic I had never thought worthy of exploring before.
I got my start as a medium when I started giving medium readings for free to members of a young widows support group I was in, as a way to understand myself better. My work as a medium took off from there from word-of-mouth referrals. After this went on for a while, my therapist, who had also been documenting psychic information I had told her in sessions that proved accurate later on, told me I either needed to set up a business and charge money for my time, or stop doing readings. I had to overcome my own assumptions about mediums being “frauds” and grapple with the ongoing stigma that exists around this work, and I was embarrassed to tell people about it at first. But I found my own experiences with mediumship helpful for my own grief, and if I could give that same gift to other people I wanted to do so. I was terrified that my colleagues at USC would judge me if they found out, but when I confided in one of them about it, he was perfectly kind and revealed that his best friend’s wife is also a medium.
I have since participated in a qualitative research study organized by Dr. Lenore Matthew about people who experience hearing from their deceased loved ones, and the collective results affirmed my own anecdotal experiences that hearing from the dead has helped me move forward after loss and continue to live a joyful life.
I was lucky that my journey happened alongside an explosion of research on the broader topic of consciousness. There was a successful peer-reviewed replication study about mediumship published in 2022, that came out of University of Padova in Italy, and that data affirmed and supported my anecdotal experiences as a medium.
The thing that really gave me a “felt sense” that mediumship was a real phenomenon was a very strange experience I had with a missing person’s case that I eventually sent tips to the police about. I knew a little girl from Manchester, NH named Harmony Montgomery was missing thanks to a mediumship experience I believed was happening with her, and I became aware she had died six months before the police even knew or opened an investigation about her death. On the urging of both my sister and my therapist, I sent info I had as a medium to the tip line for her case after it opened, and eventually, a detective had to interview me about how I knew so many private facts of their investigation. To my great relief and surprise, he was very kind to me too, and he told me he found it all fascinating.The night before an arrest was made for her murder, the details of which later confirmed what I had heard as a medium in shockingly specific detail, I had a visitation dream in which Jehangeer appeared to me and said, “Now you’ll now I really am still right here with you for the rest of your life, and that death is nothing to fear.”
I was so moved by this experience that I wrote a memoir about it called “The Magic House,” and I am in the process of trying to sell it right now.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In terms of how fast being a professional medium has happened in my life, that has felt like a very smooth road. When I am ready for something with this work, it usually just seems to show up.
I am attached to star in a new reality show about mediumship that I hope will present a more grounded and accessible window into what being a medium is really like. I love Tyler Henry and many of the other shows about famous mediums that are out there, and what sets me apart from them is that I was just a very regular person for 35 years before I started doing readings, and I understand what it feels like to be a skeptic about mediumship and how to speak to that perspective.
Trying to figure out how to be a responsible and ethical medium in an unregulated industry is an ongoing challenge because I care a lot about treating people well. No one is perfect, but my hope is that everyone who comes to me is better off from having gotten a reading with me, and I have a refund policy in place to make sure people feel safe knowing they won’t get ripped off if anything doesn’t go as planned.
How to charge money for my time as a medium is something I have wrestled with in therapy. It takes a lot of emotional energy for me to give someone a reading, and I don’t know any medium who can do readings 40 hours a week. I come from a modest background, and I am conscientious about people’s financial circumstances and anxieties about paying their bills, and I would never want anyone to forgo what they need to pay for a reading with me, so I try to be thoughtful about what it costs both clients and myself to make a reading happen.
I also come from the film industry which has a lot of known problems with exploitation, and I have worked as an adjunct at USC where I am so in debt from my student loans from the same school that my entire paycheck from teaching is less than my monthly loan payment. My student debt has been so difficult to manage that I didn’t have children with my partner before he died, and in light of what I have experienced feeling exploited in other industries, it has been hard to put myself out there in a field like mediumship that has an ongoing stigma as being “exploitative”. I have set up careful policies to try to ensure that is not the case for my clients, and I hope people who come to me for readings feel safe and like I care about their well-being. Honestly, nothing makes me angrier than people who blatantly exploit others for profit. I know that may sound like an unexpected sentiment coming from a medium, but it’s the truth of my life.
The cultural stigmas that persist around mediumship are not up to date with the latest research that now exists, and they can raise the anxiety level both for clients seeking readings and for mediums themselves, and that can make it challenging to give a good evidential reading if someone feels too anxious or mistrusting to listen to what is being said during a reading. Personally, although I mostly have many wonderful colleagues in Hollywood and have had lots of good experiences, too, I’ve encountered far more predatory con artists in the film industry than in my work as a medium.
If a medium has a good reputation, a refund policy, and places an emphasis on being evidential or makes a point to share about other training or certifications, if there is care in how they present their work, most likely they are trying to run a real business using their authentic gifts in an under-regulated and still too often poorly understood industry.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am an evidential psychic medium, a TV writer and producer, a memoirist, and I have worked as a screenwriting professor at USC for the past three years. I have often been told by others that I am “guileless” and that is one thing that sets me apart in all the work I do.
I genuinely do place a premium on being as honest I as possibly can be, and I wouldn’t work as a medium if I didn’t truly believe it was both real and helpful. I pride myself on having the courage to tell important truths. It can be hard to speak up when no one else is willing to with both confidence and humility, but being a medium has helped me have the self-trust to try to speak up when it matters.
Working as a writer and producer in Hollywood is an enormous privilege. My big dream is to one day combine all my abilities and professional experiences to start a studio that will empower more voices and expand on the work of culture-reform happening behind the scenes. The access this industry gives to the great megaphone of the media is an unparalleled opportunity in history to rapidly shift hearts and minds. My theory of impactful leadership in the media is that the culture behind the scenes amplifies in the culture at large. Workplaces will be healthiest and most dynamic, they will create the most impactful products with the most sustainable profits, when leaders take care of the people inside from the bottom up instead of focusing on the top down “winner take all” model too often running the show. Positions of power in Hollywood are seen as glamorous, but these coveted opportunities for leadership have an outsized cultural ripple effect, and I believe they ought to be reframed as an opportunity to be of service to the greater good rather than an opportunity for personal enrichment, power, and fame. I cannot wait for the arrival of the age of responsible and ethical influencers of substance who are democratically accessible teachers and thought leaders.
Another thing that sets me apart is that despite having had quite a hard road in life, I am still very optimistic about the future. I think we are right on the cusp of a more peaceful era of greater global stability, and we are just entering a cultural and scientific renaissance where we are going to see a lot of rapid advances in healthcare and technology that are going to vastly improve quality of life. Profit-at-any-cost capitalism is a rudderless ship captained by senseless greed born from needless fear and the residual effects of our threat-attuned “fight or flight” anxious brains that are no longer rational in our current age of abundance and interconnectedness. The lie of scarcity and cutthroat competition can make it feel like we can’t choose the forces that shape the world we live in, but we are so much more powerful than that. We will live in the world we show up for. To survive the challenges coming in the future, we need to shift our collective mindset to a more proactive and mindful human-first model of capitalism that encourages competition and striving to be great without habitual exploitation, algorithmic market manipulation, or excessive and senseless wealth hoarding as a ticket to power and influence. I believe the human spirit is resilient and we will adapt as we have to, but it is time to embrace building caring communities as a source of collective strength.
My mentor, James Van Praagh, once said, “The world needs mediums,” and I think he’s right. I believe I am a small part of the greater integration of aspiring leaders with greater spiritual awareness across influential industries that are struggling and in crisis. Empowering more leaders who are “tuned in” can be a powerful antidote to what isn’t working as well as it could be, and I have so much hope that many good things are coming soon!
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who took a big risk that might not ever pay off when I moved to LA to go to film school at USC when I was 24. I honestly didn’t think I’d get in, but when I did, the door that opened felt like too rare of an opportunity to turn down even though I had to take on an absurd amount of federal student loan debt to go to graduate school. Most of the work I do, both as a medium and as a screenwriter, requires many leaps of faith and calculated risks to achieve things most people wouldn’t consider for themselves as realistic because they don’t have obvious traditional markers of “stability.”
I think the pandemic has started waking people up to the illusion that anything is actually truly stable in the big picture. The ability to find stability inside myself inside a life of uncertainty with a lot of ups and downs has been how I’ve found the resilience to keep going forward and create a unique and evolving professional life for myself. I’m also lucky because I have my older sister, Amy, a well-regarded tattoo artist in Las Vegas, to look up to as a model for how to thrive on a non-traditional path.
It’s easy to be myopically focused on the financial side of risk-taking because self-responsibility is such a prized value in our society. The interplay between that and asking for help is one that I am constantly navigating. I really don’t like asking for help, but it’s necessary to ask for help to take big swings in life, we all need to learn how to ask for help and give it graciously while maintaining healthy boundaries, and the truth is we all need each other. People thrive best inside caring communities. Being empowered to spend my time focused on my ambitions and my joy is a higher priority than how much of a financial return I will get from any risk I take in life. For me, risk-taking is about living an impactful life of substance, and money is an imperfect tool we are all still wrestling with in our culture for how to make it work better for more of us.
If I ever happen to make a lot of money from any of the “big swings” I am taking, I plan to put it back to work in Hollywood to empower more voices coming after me and help shape the more hopeful future I know is possible.
Pricing:
- an hour-long medium reading is $250
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ivysunderji.com
- Instagram: @ivy_sunderji
