*Talking to the Dead | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 29, 2025*
Four and a half years after my mom died, I signed up for a mediumship course. Maybe I realized that waiting for her to show up in my dreams wasn’t enough. Maybe I felt that longing doesn’t go away - it accumulates. Maybe I’d come to terms with her death, with the fact that she wouldn’t return, and understood that it was time to establish a new way of communicating. We were living in Canada. I typed “channeling ” into Google and found that a well-known teacher from California was coming to our area. I didn’t think much about it. I signed up.
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Only after paying did I read the fine print: it was taking place in the woods. It lasted three full days. It was very strange. Maybe the people were strange. I’m sure I seemed strange to them, too. The instructions were odd, but I was an excellent student. Honestly, that whole chakra of mine just opened up instantly. As if I had always known how to do it, I breezed through every exercise with ease.
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At the end of the course there was a little graduation ceremony. The teacher from California congratulated us on completing Level 1 and said that if we wanted to learn how to communicate with the dead, we were welcome to enroll in Level 2. Only then did I realize that all the exercises we’d done were about communicating with trees, stones, beings, and our own bodies. I didn’t want to sign up for Level 2 - three more weird days in the forest. I’d already felt like I had a mild flu the whole time. So I took everything they’d taught us, and for the first time dared to reach out to my mom. That was actually my first real attempt at communication with her:
“Mommy, should I sign up for Level 2?”
And she answered right away: “No way, Mikey. I’m here. That’s enough.”
It sounded so much like her. “I’m here, that’s enough.” That’s how I knew it was her. In the course, they’d taught us how to recognize when you’re going off-track, speaking with the wrong entity, getting drawn into unwanted dialogues. How to finally get rid of the idea that your brain is just inventing these answers. The brain doesn’t know how to make things up. Or anything at all.
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After the course, I began teaching my daughters everything I had learned. They were still little. Before climbing trees, they would ask the tree if it was okay. Later they began communicating with stones on the beach. And eventually, they started talking to my mom, their grandmother. Usually with questions like, “Grandma, do I have to take a bath today?” And even from the world of the dead, my mom upheld the strict hygiene standards of this one and always answered: “Yes. Now.”
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I know this not because I heard her, but because they did. And because they went to take a bath.
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Communicating with my mom, which later expanded to my grandmothers, my friend Orit, and others, transformed the way I grieved them. It’s not that I stopped being sad about their absence. But I found a new place within that sadness. After all, they were responding. They made me laugh. They helped me solve problems. They returned to being full participants in my life, in my dilemmas. Full partners, just without bodies.
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Eventually I began speaking about it at public events. At first I was afraid the audience would walk out, or roll their eyes. But that never happened. Quite the opposite. I especially remember one event with neuroscientists. One of them suddenly broke down in tears. Then he explained he’d been mourning his father for years, and in his environment, this kind of thing - mediumship - was completely taboo. But now that I had stood tall and talked about it, at a scientific conference no less, a new path opened up for him. His tears were ones of regret, and of relief.
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In fact, after almost every event I give, whether it’s a poetry evening or a feminist talk, someone reaches out to me to ask for more. And it makes sense. We’ve all lost someone close. We all long for a connection. And if someone ordinary like me can do it, then anyone can. I think for many people, the very fact that I say this out loud, on a stage, frees them to take the next step they hadn’t dared to before.
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Anyway, I’m telling you this because this week I listened to a podcast with Dr. Tara Swart, a British psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who would have been the last person to speak about mediumship. But then she lost her husband in tragic circumstances, and in the depths of her grief found herself communicating with him. This month, four years after his death, she’s releasing a scientific book about channeling, called “The Signs”, in which she provides neurological evidence that it is real and scientifically valid.
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Dr. Swart says some truly revolutionary things. She explains, for instance, that we have far more than five senses. In fact, she counts 34 of them, most of which we don’t use at all, and some of which allow us to communicate easily without words or physical bodies.
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She reminds us how blind people develop areas of the brain that compensate for sight, learning to sense their surroundings through other means. How dogs can smell disease and how, it turns out, some humans can too. And these are just two of many examples. It turns out that senses are far more flexible than science has defined them. And Dr. Swart argues that channeling is, in fact, a kind of sense.
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She also explains, in scientific terms, what a “gut feeling” really is. This is particularly fascinating because intuition and gut instinct are often culturally coded as feminine, and therefore seen as unreliable or unserious ways to make decisions. Intuition isn’t “rational,” it’s “unproven” and “emotional.” But Dr. Swart demonstrates the deep connection between the brain and the gut: how our gut bacteria transmit information; how the fascia -the connective tissue around our organs- stores and conveys data; how the vagus nerve is a knowledge conduit; and how what we call a “gut feeling” is actually a data-rich transmission that travels along sophisticated, proven pathways from the head to the gut. The question is whether we activate the right one of our 34 senses to listen.
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Anyway, the way information moves between people, and between bodies and other entities, is, in Dr. Swart’s view, not spiritual at all. Certainly not new-agey or mystical. It’s entirely scientific. And her personal story is so heartbreaking and beautiful that I highly recommend you listen to the episode yourself.
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What struck me most were the comments on her interview. One sentence kept coming up, in different forms: Thank you for making this something we’re allowed to talk about. Thank you for giving it legitimacy.
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And I thought again of that scientist who cried. And of all the people who contact me every month to ask if I know a teacher of mediumship. I don’t know any. But I do know that anyone can do it. Maybe there are online guides? All I know is that countless conversations are being missed because we don’t try. So many senses go unused. So many relationships are missing their continued dialogue; mothers and daughters who are orphaned of each other. And grandmothers. And fathers. And partners. And best friends.
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I’ve always known this. But now it’s backed by science too. Who would have thought?
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Wishing us all Shabbat Shalom, filled with good words, even with our dead.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*