dwhat do you do?
Of several things. I have a BA in Philosophy and a PhD in Indological Studies. So I deal with Sanskrit, Indology, Culture of India. As a writer, I also do creative writing. In 2014, in Padua, where I live, I attended the master’s degree “Death Studies and the End of Life, Studies on death and dying for support and accompaniment”, directed by Professor Ines Testoni; after which I myself became a master’s teacher in the fields of storytelling & death education and the conception of death in India. Three years ago, together with Patrizio Tressoldi and Fernando Sinesio, we founded GRIM, the Italian Research Group on Mediumship.
When did the interest in this topic start?
I have always had a certain interest and curiosity in death: spiritually, anthropologically, experientially and philosophically; so I was also interested in the whole “grey area” of the so-called “after death communication”. Already as a little girl, a dear friend of my father had introduced me to these themes; then, for years, I didn’t think about it anymore, taken above all by philosophy; until one day, after a mournful and in some ways traumatic event, I asked myself again what was going on in this undergrowth of experiences. I got in touch with Patrizio Tressoldi, a former researcher at the Department of General Psychology of the University of Padua, and today a senior scholar at the Studium Patavinum, founder of the Science of Consciousness Research Group, and therefore an investigator of non-ordinary phenomena of consciousness. Tressoldi, together with other intellectuals, was also a signatory of the manifesto for a non-materialistic science. Together with him and the psychologist Fernando Sinesio, who is stationed in Genoa, we founded the GRIM, which would like to investigate the so-called mediumistic phenomena with a scientific method.
You believe?
I like to call myself, somewhat jokingly, an animist. But I don’t belong to any kind of religious denomination. However, I feel called a lot by spiritual themes, especially those related to the interconnection between all living beings.
You and Tressoldi and Sinesio recently published a research in a scientific journal. How does it work?
Two years ago we obtained a grant from the Portuguese Bial Foundation, presenting our research project, both quantitative and qualitative, or rather on the double track of the collection of objective, statistically relevant data, on the one hand, and the analysis of the data obtained by verbal narratives, on the other. The article you refer to was published in Omega – Journal of Death and Dying, a peer-reviewed journal. The results of what we have investigated in recent months with 28 mediums, in as many as 100 channellings, are reported.
What is a funnel?
Channeling is the contact that the medium-channeller makes with the so-called “disembodied entities”.