Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ivy Sunderji. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ivy, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
I get my resilience partly from psychic visions and paying attention to the quiet nudges of my intuition.
I grew up in a conservative town in rural Idaho where the common expectation was that girls like me would grow up and get married and have babies instead of a career. For most of my life I couldn’t explain how this was possible, but I have always had a “picture of the future” in my mind’s eye guiding me forward and helping me to make hopeful choices in the face of uncertainty and bet on myself.
In addition to my work as a psychic medium, I am a professional TV writer, and a creative collaborator of mine recently told me that I’m particularly “strong-headed for a woman.” I found this amusing and took it as a compliment. The cultural model I had as a child from the community in which I was raised was largely one of passivity, selflessness, and being overly pleasing and compliant. My resilience is probably partly a product of defiance. I grew up to be someone who is extremely stubborn and strong-willed when it comes to my aspirations and personal values. Although I believe “no” can be a gift of needed redirection, or at times even a source of protection, when my intuition nudges me toward something of great importance, I’m flexible about what success looks like, and I try to remain humble about the work required, but I have a hard time taking “no” as a final answer.
My mom was a big early model of resilience for me. She became a mother very young, when most women are still finishing school. When I was in high school, my mom pursued a later in life graduate education, which meant I went to three different high schools in three different states while she earned two masters degrees and a PhD. Our family was lucky that we have always had the strong foundation of love and emotional support from each other, but we lived a very, well, I guess you could call it a very bare-bones existence when I was growing up. I’m the middle of three sisters, we’re all close in age, and our family survived mostly on my mom’s meager graduate school stipends. As soon as I was able to get a job, I started working at fast food restaurants and later became a restaurant server because earning money felt like a way to have more agency over my life.
When I was in high school, I won a scholarship to attend Interlochen Arts Camp for the summer, and I worked at Dairy Queen after school to save up to buy the plane ticket so I could go. At the end of the summer, I ended up winning a big award for my artwork, it was called the Maddy Award, and this success, built on my hard work and my belief in myself in the face of uncertainty, was an important early deposit in my mental bank of future resilience.
I had a great time at Interlochen and got to develop my abilities as an artist with sustained focus, and I’m very grateful for what a big gift this was when I was young. One strange footnote to this memory is that Jeffrey Epstein had a dedicated cabin at this camp, and I remember he attended the ceremony where the award I won was presented. After I walked off stage, he came up to shake my hand and congratulate me. He was perfectly polite, but my intuition sounded the alarm something was off. Prior to this, I had heard vague rumors from other girls at camp about how he was a “great patron of the arts for young women” but it came with “certain strings.” I shudder now to think of even this minor brush with him, but I am proud of how I handled it, too, because the simple choice to kindly disengage from him was a big gift to my future self. The art of mastering this kind of attentional focus is a key part of what I would call “mindful resilience.”
There are times in life we must all take an active stand against what is wrong when it is around us or when it happens to us, sometimes standing up for oneself comes at great personal cost, but what I learned from this early experience is that in many situations, ongoing resilience is made possible by being strategic about what open doors we simply choose not to enter. Being able to recognize when a door of opportunity has arrived is a necessary skill to build success, and nothing in life is perfect, no stepping stone of opportunity is perfect, but when the known cost of admission is too high before you even open the door, if the intuition sounds the alarm something is wrong, if you know before you enter that going through the door will erode your integrity or take up too much of your emotional energy, if the resilience required to stay afloat in a space don’t match the normal demands that arise in similar conditions, such as what happens in abusive work environments and other abusive relationships, etc, it is truly okay to bypass that door, stay focused on bettering yourself, and have faith another door will appear in time. Most costly doors don’t announce themselves so clearly at the outset, and it’s okay to be wrong, and it’s okay to admit a door didn’t work and pivot.
I believe having fun and being joyful are both great forms of resistance that foster resilience particularly when life is hard. Your time, attention, work, loyalty, and love are all big gifts, and learning to give your gifts wisely, and to stop giving your gifts and take them elsewhere when they aren’t a fit where you are, is part of maintaining resilience, as is building like-minded communities built around mutual support and care.
No matter what happens in life, your soul is your own. We need resilience not just to endure tough times but so that we can actively create what our visions for the future show us is possible. The value of resilience is that it helps us build personally meaningful lives and do what we are passionate about despite obstacles.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
For most of my career, I have worked steadily as a TV writer, and my big passion is still being a filmmaker because I think there is tremendous value in holding the great megaphone in Hollywood. I have a new script I just finished co-writing that illuminates through a fictional lens the nuanced emotional realities of how disorienting it was for me to come to terms with the fact that I have abilities as an an evidential psychic medium, which is another side job I have in addition to my career as a writer. Before I embraced this part of myself, I was a life-long skeptic, and as my mother said, “the last person alive anyone would expect to claim such abilities.”
I also have a reality show I’ve been developing with a few beloved collaborators that has a unique twist on the mediumship genre. My goal with this show, if it ever comes to fruition, and I hope it does, is to be completely transparent about what the work of mediumship is actually like. I’m not the only one with this idea, and it’s something that seems to come into being organically in the culture, and I think there are others who are already doing an amazing job of demystifying mediumship. I am loving watching “Live from the Other Side with Tyler Henry” on Netflix, and I feel very confident as a fan of this show in the authenticity, integrity, and good hearts of everyone involved in it on screen.
In my work as a medium, I am actively taking on private clients looking for this kind of services as a form of grief support. Anyone interested in getting a reading from me can book one with me on my website at ivysunderji.com. Right now, my calendar is set to schedule new appointments only a couple weeks into the future, and at least right now, it shouldn’t be a long wait to get a reading with me. I work hard to have careful policies in place to ensure the work is done ethically and with great care and consideration for the well-being of all my clients.
One of my big goals with mediumship, beyond providing comfort and hope to people who are grieving, is that I also want to help raise the profile of mediumship as a legitimate, if still mostly unregulated, form of grief care. I hope to continue the work being done already to demystify and de-stigmatize this fascinating work. I believe an incredible tipping point happened in the body of human knowledge, from a scientific standpoint, in December 2022: a successful replication study with a larger sample size about mediumship was completed by researchers at the University of Padova in Italy and achieved peer-reviewed publication.
One of the best things that happened to me recently was a Halloween event I attended on October 30th, 2024 at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. I was lucky to be one of several storytellers who got to share my true ghost story live to a sold-out audience for a panel of podcast hosts from Spectrevision Radio. I shared a brief version of the true story from my not-yet-published memoir, “The Magic House”, and in the aftermath of this event, I’m feeling so thankful to be featured on several new podcasts, including a brand new one called “Dead and Breakfast” that I recorded with its wonderful hosts over Veteran’s Day weekend that’s available to listeners now. I also have a podcast episode on “Tell Me Your Ghost Story,” that will be out soon. I recommend checking them both out if you want to hear more.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three qualities I think anyone needs to have a meaningful life in balance are humility, self-love, and a sense of humor.
My fiancé died unexpectedly in 2021, and I remember after he was gone, it was really hard to take care of the home we shared and do tasks I had happily done when they were for both of us. The one thing I really didn’t want to do was haul out the garbage bins to the curb on Sunday nights, even though it was a chore I regularly did for both of us when he was here. It was so much easier to motivate to do these kinds of things as an act of service and love for him. Somehow, it was so much harder to do them as an act of love for myself. Anything in life can go too far, including self-love, but most of us don’t seem like we love ourselves enough. Self-love, self-acceptance, self-trust, self-compassion, self-esteem, and self-focused drive are all helpful qualities when they are in balance with humility and good boundaries, both. The longer I’ve lived and tried to make a living as a writer, the more I’ve learned that healthy self-love is really the key to maintaining your personal integrity. No one else gets to credibly dictate your personal ethics or private sense of morality or ethics, you know better than anyone else what is right for you, and your own intuition is often the doorway for your soul to make itself known and serve as your guide as you move through life.
Humility goes a long way in life because it is usually the doorway to compassion and tolerance. Being willing to remain humble makes space to be vulnerable, and showing vulnerability is one of the ways others have an opportunity to show us love. Everyone alive is important and worthy of love and joy simply for being born into this life. Humility is also the key ingredient to a lot of hard work, and it can be an antidote to overconsumption and the expectation for special treatment.
A sense of humor is helpful to cope with making mistakes. We all make mistakes, and being able to laugh it off is a key ingredient for self-compassion and humility, as well as tolerance. It is okay to be wrong, but when our egos get bruised and we double down on mistakes instead of learning from them, even when we know better, that is when life gets harder than it has to be for us and even the people connected to us, too. A sense of humor and being able to laugh at yourself and laugh off your mistakes is crucial. It’s also just important just to laugh and have fun, period. Fun is a big part of why we are alive.
We were given the gift of life to enjoy it, and I hope everyone alive tries to have fun every day and enjoy the ride while they’re here!
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
Writing my not-yet-published memoir, “The Magic House”, profoundly changed my life and the lives of many of my loved ones, and I’m going to take this question as an opportunity to hype it up (I’m looking for a good book agent! If you know of someone great, or if you are interested in reading my book, please reach out to me at ivysunderjiassistant@gmail.com).
I learned a lot from writing this story about what I now believe is the true nature of reality. This was not the book I ever thought I would write. My journey to writing it, as someone with a very skeptical mindset, helped answer some big existential questions about whether there is anything after death. On the other side of documenting the profound experiences I have had in my own life with what I now know are called “after death communications,” I have amassed an incredibly compelling body of evidence for the reality of this phenomenon.
“The Magic House” is the true story of how the missing person case I knew about as an evidential medium, six months before the police did, helped me to accept my uncanny abilities and gave me profound hope to go forward in the face of the grief I was living with after the unexpected death of my fiancé in a surfing accident. What I came to see as I lived out the incredible experiences in my true story is that we are all seen and loved from the “other side,” and with that awareness, I now see there is no logical reason to live a reactive, exploitative, or fear-based life, even when the present moments in life feel hard, discouraging, uncertain, scary, or bleak. We don’t need to be as afraid as most of us are most of the time.
The core theme of my book is that having a belief in this loving continuation of consciousness after death is not only helpful but rational based on all the different data points we now have. If we are open to taking in what all the evidence that exists so plainly shows, that knowledge of our spiritual reality and the loving unity that exists underneath all of this, it is a powerfully compelling argument for making more hopeful life choices.
Going back to the theme of resilience that opened this interview, all the evidence I’ve documented about the afterlife, and the hope and faith that is possible from knowing it exists, can be an incredible source of resilience for all of us to find comfort in. It can be hard to have faith and endure through tough times when there are not yet any outer validations we can see for reasons to have hope. Especially when times are tough, when there are not yet any outer signals yet of the better world waiting to be born, it can be hard to hold onto hope and make good choices, but there is so much evidence that it makes sense to have hope and go forward with faith that our pain will not last. When times are tough, just try to hang on the best you can, and keep the faith there is tremendous good still yet to come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ivysunderji.com
- Instagram: @ivy_sunderji
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ivysunderji8565
- Other: https://substack.com/@thehappymedium
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