I have been fortunate to be born into a proper, old and wealthy family, but despite this, the first part of my life has been full of ups and downs and defined by countless struggles and a continued urge to fully understand the mind.

I’m from a Sicilian family that is over twelve centuries old. My grandfather invented the method to concentrate orange juice in 1900 and established himself as one of the first Italian industrialists. His invention created the ability to transport orange and lemon juice, greatly boosting the Southern Italian economy. After my grandfather’s death, his grandmother took over and established the Sicilian and Calabria Orange Juice Industry in many international markets and built an empire. She created many charities with the opening of numerous hospitals, schools, and orphanages. My grandmother was deeply loved by many, and more than thirty thousand people attended her funeral.

My grandmother was as influential in business as she was connected to God, and she gave me a precious gift. One of her good friends was a powerful medium able to channel a High Master, who became my spiritual teacher and life coach from the age of eight through the age of twenty-eight. I received thousands spiritual and practical lectures about life, spirituality, and purpose. With a perfectly essential dialogue, the channeled teacher educated me step by step, offering precise spiritual teachings, and responded to questions with clarity and exhaustive answers about philosophies, religions, and theories of life. This precious knowledge is the foundation of much of my current thinking, activities, and work.

During the first few channeled sessions, I remember my doubts about the channeled stories that sounded odd to me as a kid, even though I was mature and open-minded for my age. The medium was a lovely woman, fun and very opinionated in her theories and language, but as soon she was entered into the medianic trance and the Teacher was taking over, her language was transformed into the most accurate Italian that I ever heard; not one single word was obsolete, and every expression was concise and precise to the limit. My doubts dissolved eight days after my grandmother’s death, when I heard my grandmother’s voice through the medium asking me about things that only she and I knew. This convinced me, and I surrendered—capitalizing as much as I could on that priceless gift.

I spent the first twenty years of my life in a large house in Messina Sicily with my brother Pepy and a bunch of domestics. My half-sister Adriana came several years later. My mother left when I was six months old, and my beloved father traveled the world for business and was rarely home. After a series of mean nannies, from the age of ten, we grew up on our own. Then, our financial situation changed dramatically. The American and Spanish orange juice market became mature and so aggressive that it strangled the business. This, combined with unfortunate speculations, pushed my family into sudden bankruptcy. It was a difficult time. With the intent of salvaging some of the family’s assets, my father and uncle were obliged to travel the world. At twenty-three years old, I was left alone to single-handedly rescue our family’s main company in Sicily. This was a big operation that fed fifteen hundred workers and over twenty-five thousand farmers and their families. I was young and inexperienced, and the local environment was not helpful. It took three years, but I succeeded to find a solution to save the jobs. We lost everything, and we had to start from scratch, but the understanding I gained by rescuing the company resulted in precious experience and knowledge. A few years later, I started applying my skills to turn troubled companies around.

This allowed me to establish an investment portfolio based in Luxembourg that I managed from London and New York. The portfolio specialized in investments in equities of companies that were in early expansions. This gave me the time and money to travel the world, meet gurus and charlatans, see many real and phony miracles, and search for answers about the mind. I spent most of my life trying to understand the mind, the bundle of software that determines every aspect of our lives, probably to solve my personal issues and to apply the training from my Spiritual Teacher. At a young age, I already realized that I didn’t agree with most of what was written about the mind. At thirty, I had a solid understanding about the behavioral system, the way it is formed and how it works, and had already engineered strategies to repair behavioral mistakes. But when I tried to use these models in order to help people struggling with their minds, it didn’t work. I found this rather frustrating.

One of the people I tried to help was anorexic. I didn’t succeed, but someone else did. In just a couple of sessions, the woman was back eating and free from her illness. The guy who helped her was a clinical hypnotherapist called Michael Joseph, with a practice next to Piccadilly in London. I was intrigued and asked him to teach me. Michael agreed, and we booked a one-on-one course that lasted six months. I learned everything I could learn about clinical hypnotherapy. Michael was an excellent and well-respected teacher; today he is the president of the clinical hypnotherapists in the UK, and two universities accredit his school. When I started practicing clinical hypnotherapy, I realized the power and the adaptability of hypnosis for different uses and situations. I tried to apply it to my mind-healing model, and it worked beautifully. It was in 1990 when I started successfully using the therapy I created and named CognitiveOS Hypnosis.

For many years, I carried on with my investment firm and, at same time, helped people in trouble with CognitiveOS Hypnosis. It felt great; I had created a methodology that really worked. I didn’t have much time to practice, but each healing became faster, totally effective, and permanent. Clients started to send friends and family, and I found myself in the position of having to deny help to many people because of the commitment required by my investment portfolio. I loved Venture Capital. I learned enormously from it, as every day I was dealing with new inventions, great minds, and new challenges.

Eight years ago, I felt the call from my old Teacher and decided to change everything. I felt that I had a healing methodology able to change people’s lives, and it was wrong to deny this to many because of my financial commitments. I sold my operation and became a therapist at service to people in need. It felt strange and very different at first, but then it became a wonderful mission that I enjoy immensely every single day.

I suffered most of my life from my mother’s abandonment and this was reflected in all of my relationships. I felt that I was unable to properly love. I helped so many others solve this issue but couldn’t clear my own. In my constant search for new solutions, I met Sarah Eaglewoman, an Apache medicine woman. She was extraordinarily good, and she worked my energies with so much power that I found myself, for the first time, in a deep state of hypnosis. In this state, I used my techniques to clear the abandonment issue, and it worked. I was finally free. About three months later, she asked me to attend her sacred space for a private ceremony. The purpose of it was to restore in me the power of a medicine man, a Native American shaman, as it seems I was in past lives. I didn’t know what to expect. I was curious but also suspicious. I always received special treatment from gurus and spiritual healers because of my personality and wealth; so I feared the same here. But this seemed to be a direct request from her spiritual guides.

She and I celebrated the ceremony in her sacred healing space. It was a clear day in the month of May around five o’clock. As soon she called the Higher Spirits, the sky opened in a violent storm, with hail, powerful lightning, and thunder. It lasted just a few minutes, and then the sky returned like by magic to its initial intense blue. I came out of the experience feeling stoned but rather normal; I didn’t really appreciate the changes until that night when I experienced a new type of vivid dream, colored like old films and packed with precious information provided by my old Teacher. I woke up ecstatic; the Teacher that trained me in the first part of my life was back through a different channel. I discovered another surprising outcome the day after when I started working. As soon as I brought the first client into deep relaxation, I realized that the priestess opened clairvoyance for me. I was suddenly able to see auras, animal spirits, spirit guides, spiritual purposes, and so on. Despite all the spiritual teachings, I have always been pragmatic and doubted clairvoyance, and the gift was unexpected but rewarding.

A few days later, I met my wife, Nadine, a wonderful and powerful being who has been my partner since we met, the woman I love unconditionally. We have two young children and our relationship is strong, clear, and equal; we walk together, moving forward, bound by a great partnership based on respect, trust, and love.

From the book The Mind Shaman.