Katya Giannini explores near-death experiences in a podcast

Katya Giannini was just 14 when a serious road accident profoundly changed the course of her life. She spent three days in a coma, underwent 17 operations and a long rehabilitation.

During that time, she says, she had an NDE (Near-Death Experience), an experience marked by deep perceptions and feelings, now the subject of scientific research on consciousness. It left a profound mark on her life and changed the way she looks at life, death and the meaning of human relationships.

More than thirty years later, that experience remains an important part of her personal path and of her work in raising awareness. Today, through her books, public talks and the podcast Una Vita alla Volta ("One Life at a Time"), Giannini promotes a dialogue between personal accounts, scientific research and human reflection, giving a voice to experiences and questions that touch on some of the great mysteries of existence.

Katya Giannini is an author, a speaker on near-death experiences, a podcaster and an expert in personal growth and self-awareness. For more than thirty years she has devoted herself to studying the inner dimension of human beings, guiding people through paths of awareness, self-discovery and personal growth. Her work spans Switzerland and Italy, with bases in Locarno and Lugano.

She is the author of four books, including «Il profumo dell'Anima» and «Fra cielo e terra io nel mezzo», and created the Soulfullness® Method, an original path of personal growth whose name is a registered trademark.

As reported by Fortune Italia, Giannini scored 30 out of 32 on the Greyson scale, a scientifically validated tool researchers use to identify and characterise near-death experiences. During her NDE, she says, she received a message that would go on to guide her life: to know her mission and now go back home.

Today she combines her professional work with raising awareness of NDEs. The podcast, in Italian, launched with a trailer in February. Episodes come out weekly, on Thursday mornings, on the author's YouTube channel and on Spreaker, followed by short clips in the days after. By mid-October it had reached its twenty-third episode, and a community of listeners has grown around the show, following its making up close.

Accounts, medicine and research: the many voices of consciousness

Una Vita alla Volta, created and hosted by Katya Giannini, follows three main strands, offering a space for dialogue and reflection on near-death experiences, consciousness and the great questions of existence.

The first gives a voice to people who have lived through extraordinary experiences, such as Domenica De Maio, who survived a twelve-metre fall at the age of five, on 16 August 1995. In the episode she describes the fall, the feeling that time had stopped and a presence she sensed during the accident, and how becoming a mother led her to look back on that past. Other guests have told of a father's return after being given up for dead, or of the decision to seek assisted suicide.

The second is devoted to Giannini's own reflections. In episode 22, «La mia NDE», she goes back over the serious accident she had at fourteen, the near-death experience and the emotional difficulties of returning to life, including the anger of having to face a profoundly changed reality. Other episodes explore guardian angels, spirit guides and the meaning such experiences take on in people's lives. In episode 18, for instance, she explains the difference between a guardian angel and a spirit guide and recounts meeting what she describes as archangels during her NDE.

The third strand opens the conversation to medicine and science, with interviews with doctors, researchers and scholars of consciousness. In episode 21 the psychiatrist Antonio Metastasio examines the differences between NDEs and hallucinations, the role of substances such as DMT, ketamine and psilocybin, and research on cancer patients. He also asks why near-death experiences resemble each other all over the world and what doctors can learn from those who have had them.

In episode 23 the physician Piero Calvi Parisetti, who moved from disaster medicine to psychical research, addresses the relationship between mind and brain and whether consciousness can exist without it. He talks about shared death experiences, in which people at a dying person's bedside say they take part in their passing, about contact with the dead and about the value such information can have for the bereaved. A separate episode is devoted to NDEs experienced as distressing, the less-told side of the phenomenon.

The podcast does not aim to offer definitive answers but to create a meeting place for human experience, scientific knowledge and the search for meaning. It is a dialogue that invites listeners to listen, to question and to look at life from different perspectives, leaving room for personal sensitivity as well as critical thinking.