Secrets from a Medium: Can We All Connect to the Afterlife?
We’ve all asked the question: what happens when we die? Doctors and scientists have speculated what the afterlife could hold. Medium Anna Raimondi says she has the answer, because she’s in constant communication with the other side.In this interview, the author of “Conversations with Mary,” reveals how we can all speak to the dead, and what it can really teach us about the living. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
He kind of is by mountains, but I know there's a port there, and he has on a beekeeper thing.
Do you know who this is?
My father's family had bees.
The Circassian Mountains were in Russia, so they were chased out of there 150 years ago.
Yeah, well, and that's probably why you're allergic to bees.
It's probably also your power animal.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
We've all asked the question, what happens when we die?
Doctors and scientists have speculated what the afterlife could hold, but today I'm here with one woman who says she has the answer because she's in constant communication with the other side.
Author of Conversations with Mary, medium Anna Raimondi, is here to reveal how we can all speak to the dead.
Let me just go over her credentials real quick.
She has a bachelor's in clinical psychology, hypnotherapist, grief counselor, spiritual counselor, well-educated woman, obviously, who talks to dead people, which is not what you'd expect.
So how do you deal with the skeptics?
You know, I love the skeptics because they come in trying to shoot it down, and then I say something, and they just look at me like, what?
How did you know that?
So to me, they're the best because they're my challenge.
That's truly getting people to see the light.
I've heard that about you, even in preparation for this interview, because you talked to some members of my staff, and I know, and I have been personally impressed at how...
How I can't understand what you do.
I can't even say that it's right or wrong.
I just can't figure it out.
And this is true, I think, of other mediums that I've had the honor of working with.
What is a psychic?
How do you define it, or a medium?
You know, I do not predict the future.
I feel like everybody has free choice, and although I can see things in the near future, so I don't really go into the psychic side of it.
Mediumship is just, I hear those on the other side.
They talk to me.
When push comes to shove, if I were to define myself, I'm a healer.
So the information that comes through to me is in some way to help the person who's normally sitting across from me.
And when did you first realize that there was something that gave you an ability to tap in to an existence most of us can't understand?
I was born this way.
So I was born to very hardcore Italian Roman Catholic parents, which doesn't always go hand in hand with what I'm doing, but they couldn't deny it.
How could they deny it?
Their little kid was saying things to people that I didn't even understand what I was saying.
So this has been my whole life.
It was when I got to about high school or middle school that I realized, wow, I'm a little bit different than everybody else.
Have your parents reconciled with this?
Oh, my parents were fine because they couldn't explain it.
They didn't know why.
You know, I mean, my uncle thought I should be institutionalized, you know, but yeah, they're fine with it.
My father's actually a path.
My mother's fine with it now.
And why do you think you were chosen?
Or does everyone have a disability?
I don't think I was chosen.
I'm not one of the chosen few.
I think we all have this ability.
It's important, and we choose our parents.
So I chose these people on a soul level that would help me help others, help me go forward.
Most people are blocked by fear.
You know, when I teach, like, how to come into your intuition, most of it, most like the first two hours of what I'm teaching is get over your fear.
It's the unknown.
What if I go there and I can't come back?
What if I become a lunatic?
I didn't have that experience because I was like this from the get-go.
What do you mean we choose our parents?
We choose our parents.
On a soul level, we choose our parents.
We choose the people who are going to help us or help us learn or settle karma, help us in this life, whether we follow by their example or we do the opposite.
You know, it's a learning.
Maybe we take a step back and give me the bigger cosmology.
Because if we choose our parents, then we have an existence before we're born.
So what happens when we die?
Do we go to the same place we're born from?
Pretty much.
When we die, we go to this place that is all love, you know, heaven, paradise, whatever anybody wants to call it.
It's just a dimension that's right here.
So it's not up there.
It's right here.
We go there.
We have a review of life.
We see what we did, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, whatever we've done.
And then we kind of, our soul is being cleansed.
And we have a choice whether to come back here or not.
And it's really based upon the soul wanting to embrace that perfect love.
You know, we're never going to be perfect, but as perfect as we can to be with that perfect love, the highest vibration of love, which is God.
So there's no hell?
Hell is something that happens in kind of the mind space.
So when we die, it's the torture, the torture that goes on, the emotional, or this is the best way I can describe it, or the mental torture of seeing what we've done.
You know, like in the terms of, say, Hitler, okay?
Hitler's still in that place, and he'll be in that place until the last person dies.
Passes that he has affected directly or indirectly.
There's no free ride.
You can't come here and just do what you want and then say, oh, well, now I'm going to that great place.
Like I always tell my kids, you're responsible for your actions.
I wasn't quite sure.
Is that a Swedenborgian-type view of hell?
There are elements of it that are similar, yeah.
So that's the pull to Sweden with you.
Is this a religion that you follow?
Yes.
Okay, because when I was meditating for you last night, I kept feeling Swedish.
Well, yeah, my grandfather was Swedish.
Swedish.
Yeah.
You know, whatever it is around you, they're very happy that you're following this.
And you follow this very seriously?
I do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Swedenborg was, and I married into this knowledge because this is religion, but her family for generations has been Swedenborgian.
And he was a minister of minds.
He was a very powerful cabinet member.
That was arguably the most powerful position to have in Sweden at the time besides being the king because you ran the most lucrative part of the economy.
It was energy.
It was in charge of the energy businesses of Sweden.
And he began to have these visions.
Similar to what you actually are describing, where he could see people who had passed on, who were living in a life where there was heaven.
I'm not doing it justice.
At least one of the theology school knows this much better than me.
So I was trying to get her to talk about it.
So explain.
But he would have been considered a medium now, right?
Because he could see things happening.
He wouldn't have been.
Well, I mean, there are elements that are medium.
He was a mystic.
And he did have visions of the other world.
Are most of the prophets in the monotheistic tradition mystics, and therefore able to see over?
Yeah.
If an angel's speaking to you, you're somehow connecting to the other side.
Yeah, we just call it a medium now, I guess.
Yeah.
And then the high-level idea was that there wasn't actually hell.
Hell was something you create for yourself.
Well, there is, but it's difficult, but it's not a different place.
It's a state.
That's exactly what I was trying to say.
It's a state of being.
It's a state of being.
It's not a place that you go to.
And the spiritual world we're existing in right now, our actual communication is taking place on a spiritual level, not even on this natural plane.
And we can be in hell right now or we can be in heaven right now depending on where our loves are.
I'm speaking to Anna Raimonde, who's a trained professional, but also is a medium.
And therefore, I'm curious about how you see the passage from hardcore Western view of the world to seeing something that most of us don't want to acknowledge.
Why is it that you think we're so hesitant of acknowledging that some of us have the ability to see over?
And what do the rest of us need to do to be able to see over, to communicate?
Well, I think that those who were raised in hardcore religions, it kind of prohibits some of this stuff.
You can't, you can't do, which I got to tell you, I mean, I'm booked till 2020 and everybody seems to have followed some religion and they're doing their own thing now, but the religion tends to prohibit it.
You know, it's the unknown, it's the losing people to something else that cannot be validated, okay?
And so we're afraid of it.
It's the unknown.
I think people are just, I think they're just afraid because it doesn't fit so neatly.
You know, now to me this fits very neatly, you know, but not to many people.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
We've done programs around past life regression.
you.
I first heard about this when I was doing the Oprah show.
This is my 10th year of my show, so it's more than 10 years ago.
And I remember being taken through a process by a physician in Miami who seemed like a pretty reputable guy, and he interpreted what things I was seeing when I went through this.
What are your thoughts on it?
We both had no past lives.
That was crazy.
I wasn't, you know, Genghis Khan's descendant.
I wasn't Cleopatra.
I didn't have anything fancy-dancy happening to me.
I just was a nobody, you know, a serf.
But everybody's a somebody.
That's the thing, is that everyone talks about that.
I know.
I can't tell you how many people want to be Moses and Cleopatra.
You know, I regress people.
I'm a hypnotherapist.
You know, it's fascinating, you know, to hear some of the stories.
And some people speak different languages, you know, that they're coming up with.
because our past life, you know, it's only important for us to remember to help the life we're living now.
Otherwise, it's not really important.
I have a question in that because I would, just how do you reconcile talking to someone who's past, who still has their same memories and character and identity with a past life?
Because you're not the, if I was Cleopatra, if I were Cleopatra in a past life, she certainly didn't have the same characteristics We're not going to have the same memories.
How do you have past lives and still have a specific personality?
But your past life affects your personality.
So you may not, you know, be running a country, but maybe you're a powerful woman and you're running a business, okay?
Cleopatra-like.
my grandmother comes talk to you if she were Cleopatra she's gonna come talk to me as my grandmother not as Cleopatra right you know it's it's where do you keep what identity it's kind of it you keep both but if your grandmother's coming to you if Mary is coming to you your grandmother's Mary yes I have a So if Mary comes to you, okay, she comes through as Mary, okay?
She doesn't come through as Cleopatra because you know her as Mary.
It's almost like there's a holograph.
You know, they go, they kind of can split and it's hard to, I think, conceptualize because this is my grandmother and she has one soul.
And so if she's Cleopatra, why is Cleopatra over here and my grandmother's over here?
Because you don't know Cleopatra.
I was doing a reading with somebody, and in the middle of the reading, I said, I don't know how I know this, but William the Conqueror is here.
And I thought, this is crazy.
You know, sometimes I see things representing other people, like maybe there's a William in her family.
And she looks at me and she says, no, he's in my family tree, and I'm writing a book about my genealogy right now.
So, I mean, obviously, William the Conqueror has reincarnated.
He's not been hanging out there, you know, for all this time.
But he wanted to come through saying something about what she was writing.
And so what I saw was William the Conqueror, not the other people that he has reincarnated into.
Do you understand?
It's a little bit complicated.
Where does this come from to you?
And how do the rest of us tap into it?
So if we're living in a spiritual world, and there are angels around us all the time— And some of those angels might be William the Conqueror or his descendants or your dad who might be his descendant.
Somehow they're tapping into you.
Is it because your antenna is a bigger antenna?
You hear more?
I'm a portal because they know that I'm going to talk about it.
I'm not afraid.
So they sometimes bombard me because, I mean, I'll get messages for people I don't even know and think, okay, I don't know how I'm going to help you because I don't know who you are and I don't know who you're connected to.
I'm just a portal for it.
So they tend to go more to people who are going to speak about it, even if you're only going to speak about it to your wife.
You know, if that's some way that you can help her, you're getting messages for her.
It doesn't matter.
You don't need to be speaking to the masses.
But that's what they tend to do.
And again, it's all about fear.
If people just would meditate, get down to their souls.
You know, when you meditate and you're able to go deeply and you can put like yourself over here and just be in your soul, you can hear so much.
If you want to teach me right now how to open myself up, I know it's not going to happen instantaneously.
Do I meditate to it a bit?
Do I go through a process where I free myself to be able to hear it?
Do I go to a place of silence?
Or does it one day just happen if it's right for me to be hearing?
For you specifically, in writing the book Conversation with Mary, the one thing she repeats over and over is keep it simple.
We tend to over-process.
We tend to over-complicate everything as human beings.
Keep it simple.
Breathe in, breathe out, however you meditate, and set out an intention.
I want to open myself up.
I want to hear.
I want to feel.
I want to see.
I want to use my senses to tap in.
And then just see what happens, you know?
If it may happen immediately, it may not happen for a week, but it'll happen, you know, as long as you can keep the fear at bay.
Why, if you're an average person listening right now, why...
Would you want to open yourself up to that communication?
How does it benefit?
Well, not everybody does want to open up, but it benefits if you're trying to put closure on a relationship.
If you want to learn something from those on the other side, whether it be relatives or angels or whomever it may be, you know, you want some help with your life in that way.
They can come through to it.
Some people just want to talk and say, I love you.
By the way, they hear all of us.
People will be sitting there and saying, is my grandmother still here?
I want to tell her something.
And it's like, okay, well, can you tell her?
You don't have to tell me to tell her.
You can tell her.
She hears you.
So we're all really communicating with them, but not everybody lets them in to hear.
There's a lot more where that came from, but first, a quick break.
And I'm curious about what it's like to live in your brain.
So as you sit here with us, do you feel anything?
Do you sense anything?
Is it about us?
It could be from people in the control room outside, someone you passed in the elevator coming in here.
Oh, I absolutely feel it.
Who are the friends in the room with us?
Well, I can tell you this.
This room is filled with bees.
Bees.
Bees.
Bees, bees, bees.
And I'm seeing a man.
He kind of is by mountains, but I know there's a port there.
And he has on a beekeeper thing.
Do you know who this is?
It's your family.
How old?
This is like great-great-grandfather.
It's the people who lived in the mountains.
What side are the wealthy?
The people who lived in the mountains.
The wealthy side?
There's one wealthy, there's one not wealthy.
This is the wealthy side.
It's Circassian Mountains in Russia.
Okay.
Because I'm seeing somebody there, but I'm also seeing bees around him.
And so he's keeping the bees.
He's doing something with the bees, okay?
He's very proud of what you do with bees or animals or something.
So I don't know what you do.
He complains about our bees is what he does.
Oh, yeah.
Because he's allergic to them.
I'm allergic to bees.
We have bees.
But my family, my father's family had bees in...
Other side.
They're the poor side.
In the central villages in Turkey.
I think they both did.
Yeah, they may have.
The Circassian Mountains were in Russia, so they were chased out of there 150 years ago.
Yeah, well, and that's probably why you're allergic to bees.
It's probably also your power animal, especially since they seem to be around you and you don't like them.
No, he loves them.
I like them.
He does.
He just complains that I have them.
I like them, but they might kill me.
Well, you know, that's it.
It's a love-death relationship, better than love-hate.
And I'm also seeing bottles of pills, and it's between the both of you.
Like bottles of pills, like bottles of medicine.
Bottles of medicine?
Did somebody work in a drugstore or a pharmacy?
My grandfather was a pharmacist.
His grandfather was a pharmaceutical founder.
Okay, because they're in between you, but your family, I feel like they sell cards and they sell, it's like a drugstore type of thing.
So it's like, who's Joe?
My grandfather.
My grandfather.
Did he own this?
Yes.
Okay.
Because he's showing me it all and he's smiling from ear to ear.
He wants you to know that he loves you and he's very happy with how you bring everything in.
So was he from Italy?
He was.
Okay, because he has an accent.
No, no, no.
He was born in America.
Okay.
He has a Staten Island accent.
Oh, that's the accent.
Because I'm hearing an accent.
It's Staten Island.
Okay, yeah.
There's an accent here.
He's saying he was a great success.
A great success.
Now, he's not a bazillionaire, but I feel like whatever he did, he feels like, I did it, I'm a great success.
Did he have a son named Joe?
Yeah.
Is he also passed?
No.
No.
Is something going on with him?
Like some kind of transition before?
Is he going through something like retirement or something?
He kind of feels a little lost.
Uncle Mickey?
I mean, I don't know.
I'll ask him.
He wants you to connect with that side of your family.
Okay.
It's important.
Okay.
We'll head over to Donald.
I'm going to tell on you after the episode.
What?
And I had to tell you, you got to be careful of your predisposed to diabetes.
She's talking to my producer.
Yeah, Jessica.
You've got to be...
Her father's a diabetic, so...
Okay.
Does tend to run a family.
Yeah, you've got to be careful.
So what's it like when you're walking down the street and you get a sense of someone who's in trouble?
Do you intervene?
Do you ever go up to strangers and say, I'm sorry I don't want to intrude, but you should just be careful of diabetes?
Or you figure, I'm ruining their day.
You know what?
I'm gonna get arrested.
Well, maybe.
Yeah, you know what?
If I'm sitting, I don't do that very frequently.
Only because, you know, there's privacy issues.
Like, they may not want to hear it.
You know, maybe they know about it.
If somebody asks for me to help them, I'm there.
If somebody, you know, comes into my office for a reading, I tell them whatever I'm feeling, I'm there.
But I typically don't go over to people.
Every once in a while, like if I went to a diner recently and there was a woman sitting by herself and I went over to her and just said, I want you to know Frank is with you.
And she looked at me and she started to cry and she said, I miss him so much.
You know, I think it was her husband, you know, so, but it's not like I go into a butcher and start reading everybody in the butcher.
First of all, we don't even have butchers anymore.
Can you turn it off?
For the most part, but I had to learn to do that, you know, because they were always bombarding me.
Yeah, because sometimes you just don't want all those voices.
I don't.
Not all the time, you know, and I have my own life.
The problem I have is falling asleep at night, because that's when they, like, love to talk to me.
But I have a contract with the universe.
They're not allowed to wake me up.
They're not allowed to scare me.
Do your own relatives come hang out?
Yeah, they do.
But, like, it's very hard for a medium to, like, have the conversation with our own relatives.
But my father definitely hangs around my house.
You know, he does, like, funky things, you know, where my kids, when they were little, would say, make him stop.
You know, like, he'd play around with the TV, make him stop.
And then he would do something in my house and do something in my mother's house, and it would be the same thing.
There must be millions of people who are mediums.
I would think so.
So what happens?
Again, I'm struck by this because...
Well, look at little kids.
I mean, you go to a baby and they're a year old.
Like Nika, she sees something that we don't see.
She's smiling to herself.
And sometimes the two-year-olds will talk to somebody who's not in the room at all.
You wonder if maybe they're seeing another dimension.
Well, you know what?
A long time ago, they would call that imaginary friends.
I don't believe that.
You know, I think they're seeing those on the other side.
And the imagination is part of the soul.
You know, I mean, it's all kind of one.
Little kids have an open window between birth and sex, where it's like they see them, they're comfortable with it, and then they become socialized.
Oh, so when you have sex, it's all over?
You meant age six.
Age six.
Oh, six.
It sounds like she said sex.
Oh, no.
I was thinking, oh, wow.
It was Lisa who lasted for a while.
No, it was six.
That's a Long Island accent.
Oh, okay.
I want to understand how the audience, the listeners right now, can heal themselves based on what you're saying.
So if someone's struggling, especially emotional struggles, how do they tap into this energy?
You know, they need to keep it simple.
They need to say any kind of prayer.
So it could be a conversation, you know, with whatever they believe in, the highest power, to help them open up and bring it into their bodies.
You know, it's energy.
Bring the energy in.
We're made of energy.
It can't be destroyed.
This energy is all around us.
You know, bring it in that way and sit with it.
You know, a lot of it has to do with, you know, do you believe this?
Do you believe it can happen?
Do you believe that you are made of love and you are love and that, you know, the purpose is for us to share that love and live in abundance and be healed and lift it up and surround yourself with them?
You know, it happens.
I've seen people, miracles happen all the time, all the time.
Anna, thank you very much for joining us.
And check her out, conversations with Mary.
Messages of love, healing, hope, and unity for everyone, which I think we should aspire to.
The amazing thing is that we accept mystics were alive thousands of years ago.
That's right.
I don't know why we've disconnected from the possibility that it's happening even today, but it's something that's worth tackling.
