There's so much more to intuitive thinking than just psychic readings and spirit guides. While that's the end goal, developing yourself and your mind so you can be more in touch with the universe, here's a few things developing your intuition can teach you along the way.

(image is "Intuition" by Bente Hansen) 

• Pay attention. The world has so much to say to you if you look around and see what it's telling you. You have so much to say to you, if you only tune in. If you learn to listen, you'll be open to more points of view and more possibilities.
• Slow down. We're so wrapped up in the world around us that we don't always take time to really see and feel what we're doing. Slowing down puts us in touch with our own bodies, with the things we want and need - which means we can take care of ourselves in a more profound way.
• You know more than you think you do. Gurus can point you in the right direction, and you can learn a lot from an outside perspective, but ultimately you're just as in touch with inner wisdom as everyone else. If you believe you'll see results from trusting your instincts, then you will, whether that's achieving your heart's desire or learning more about yourself to make it happen.
• The world is out to give you good things. Really. Even when everything is going horribly. There are no "bad" cards in Tarot, and there are very few 100% "bad" events in life. Our mistakes and our tragedies are tools to learning and developing into something greater than we are. Listening to your intuition means you have an internal guide all the time telling you how and why that is, and it makes the true lessons of the moment far easier to access and believe.
• You are magic. Listen to your intuition, and you'll realize all the miraculous things you've seen in movies are already part of you. As you unlock more and more of your own psychic potential, you'll realize that all the incredible things you ever wanted to do were already there to begin with, waiting for you to bring them out.  Will you have natural talent to be an expert at everything? No. But you'll have access to it - to learning lessons from it, tapping into it, and growing from it. And you can make anything you want a part of the magic of your world.

"And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.
For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire." - The Charge of the Goddess, Doreen Valiente

Sometimes the way Tarot evolves has nothing to do with a system of magick or Jungian archetypes. Sometimes it comes in the form of an in-joke from a Simpsons episode. Episode 2F15, to be precise, where the dialogue goes like this (transcription compliments of a thread on Aeclectic.net):

Woman: I've been waiting for you, Lisa.
Lisa: [gasps] How did you know my name?
Woman: Your nametag. ["Hi, I'm Lady Lisa"] Would you like to know your future?
Lisa: Heh, sorry, I don't believe in fortune telling. I should go.
Woman: What's your hurry? Bart and Maggie and Marge are at the joust, and Homer is heckling the puppet show.
Lisa: [gasps] Wow, you can see into the...present.
Woman: Now we'll see what the future holds. [turns over a card from what looks like a Tarot deck]
Lisa: [gulps] The "Death" card?
Woman: No, that's good: it means transition, change.
Lisa: [relieved] Oh.
[the woman turns over another card]
Lisa: Oh, that's cute.
Woman: [gasps] "The Happy Squirrel"!
Lisa: [timid] That's bad?
Woman: Possibly. The cards are vague and mysterious. 

There are now at least ten different decks with the Happy Squirrel card, including the gorgeous Shadowscapes Tarot shown here. 

As a complete nerd, I love stuff like this. It makes everything feel like it has its own weird little in-jokey fandom culture. Are there any other modern in-jokes that have built up around the cards? Tell me in the comments!

One of the many awesome things about Tarot is just how diverse it is. Even when a lot of what's out there is copying the familiar images of the Rider-Waite Tarot, its variations are like giving a new spin to a familiar friend. And when Tarot does step out of that box? There's a whole list of things you can discover. Here's a few on my wishlist.

• Astrology. The Golden Dawn and other esoteric organizations found that with a tiny bit of wiggling, Tarot corresponds to astrology and makes a pretty excellent teaching tool. The Celestial Tarot talks about those direct associations, and has some really gorgeous art to help you learn a little about Tarot and the stars.
• Crystals and Herbs. Magickal types love associations, so I'm going to give you a two-for-one here. The Crystal Tarot links Tarot to gemstone therapy, and if you want to learn herbcraft, there's a Tarot for that too.
• Fairy Tales and Myths. Modern Tarot interpretations are all about archetypes, and there are some universal archetypes - and some that change based on the time and nation of the telling. Fairy tales? Here, have two decks with tales from all over the world. Religion and mythology? (To be inclusive, let's say one man's myth is another man's gospel.) Arthurian, Celtic, Christian, Greek, Egyptian, Norse, even a well-researched deck about several Native American tribes, the Tarot runs the gamut.
• Recipes. There are two different decks that create recipes based on the cards, one with just the Major Arcana and one with 78 different recipes for an entire deck. And as a bonus? A deck that tells the entire history of chocolate. I'm pretty sure that's something I never knew I always wanted.
  
• Science. I'm pretty useless when it comes to science and math, but the Quantum Tarot somehow combines Tarot with quantum physics, and that is pretty damn awesome.

Did I leave out any of your favorites? Anything on the same subject with better research? Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear from you!

I've been rewatching a lot of Fraggle Rock lately, since my girlfriend with a decidedly HBO-deprived childhood has never seen it. Yeah, yeah, I'm a grown-up and I'm supposed to be above these things. But screw my credibility. There's a lot of simple wisdom in kids' stuff that we don't really remember to touch as adults, and it's Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets and Sesame Street, which should say it all.

And Fraggle Rock? Has to be the most pagan show I've ever seen. A living, breathing system of caves that teach about the interconnectedness of life? A festival where you compose tributes to the full moon?  And if you want to teach a newly-minted teenaged Wiccan about why she can't be initiated just yet, just show her "Mokey and the Minstrels".

Then there's Marjory the Trash Heap, the "all-knowing" oracle who pings me quite a bit for obvious reasons. She demonstrates some genuine power and insight towards the end of the series, but mainly Marjory is kind of a shyster - someone who gives you not-quite-groundbreaking sayings or junk objects in the form of talismans. She does claim to be all-knowing, but the Trash Heap doesn't really take payment for her services. She's more than happy to dispense a little bit of cryptic practicality, watch the Fraggles mistake it for deep wisdom, and then let them work out their own problems with this new bit of direction. Her ultimate goal is the goal of all great oracles: to no longer be needed.

And often, the magic works. Anxious Boober feels a surge of courage when clutching a bottlecap inscribed with the words "no deposit, no return." Red and Wembley learn the charm of spilling a bottle of milk and pointedly not crying over it, which gives them the confidence to finally stop worrying and make a plan.

What Fraggle Rock knows, and what Tarot readers know, is that objects and sayings aren't the important thing. There are literal "junk oracles", where you draw discarded odds and ends out of a bag and make observations based on what you find/the meanings you attach. And they're much the same as Tarot's lovely, inspiring, and extremely subjective art. The power is in the reader, whether that's intuition or just plain common sense. It connects us to the magic of the world, taps us into something bigger.

The insights from divination are personal insights, a little nudge in the right direction. They encourage someone to understand the situation and get moving, with the confidence that they knew a little more about themselves and their path than they did half an hour ago. There's a tremendous, often magical power in that. And the greatest power of all, of course, is that you can put a little of your focus and intention into the world - and get a great deal back out of it, no matter what tools you use.

"No deposit, no return." 

It's nearly a year ago to date. Attending a Lammas celebration, I go to a Tarot reader participating in the festival. She gives me a lot of wonderful advice about the new direction my life is moving towards, and the evolution I'm about to go through. She rightly tells me that in just six months, my entire outlook on life will be different.

She then speaks in extensive warnings about the man who will enter my life that I shouldn't trust with my heart, as he's just looking for a handout. She explains that I'll then meet a man I slowly grow closer to, and enter a more serious relationship with him.

I don't remember the exact details because at that point I had zoned out - when I wasn't exchanging glances with my long-time girlfriend of eight years, who was sitting on the chair right next to me.

As it happens, we did experience a period of growing much closer right around the timestamp this reader gave me. And some male friends were involved, but not in the way the reader said. It's not that this person was completely inaccurate in terms of my reading. She wasn't dead-on, but if you thought outside the box some of her advice was invaluable. But right away she'd made some assumptions about who I was and what I wanted out of life. And that was where she'd lost me.

It's not that this person was homophobic, or a bad person in any way. Really, any time we fail to be inclusive, we're a product of our environment. Ignoring the way our whole society focuses on one kind of person: how many decks that aren't made specifically for gay men feature a heterosexual Lovers card? How many genderqueer or trans people can you find in any Tarot deck? People over a certain weight? People who aren't white, which is thankfully becoming less of a problem, but I still see decks where there's not a single brown, black, or Asian face to be found.

Hell, you could even argue that the very construction of a Tarot deck - the quiet, intuitive High Priestess and the motherly Empress, the power-wielding Emperor and forceful Magician - is rooted in a certain set of gender roles. And Tarot came from the 15th century, so that's to be expected. But when do we challenge that, and what does it do to our preconceived ideas?

When you read for strangers, even if you're divining their lives, it's important to not assume the way those lives work. Even if we're not licensed therapists, a lot of us consider ourselves to be in service positions. That means we're meant to illuminate and empower the lives of our clients - and we can hardly do that when we don't realize a client is in a poly relationship, or asexual, or only feels female some of the time. It's not really our business to ask, but it's our job to know that these are possibilities - and that if we're operating in the web of life, sometimes there are strands we never even imagined we'd land on.

You know how some people get brilliant flashes of inspiration in the shower? My completely un-brilliant flash went like this:

By all evidence, history shows us that Tarot originated in the mid-15th century as a card game called tarocchi. Each card in the Major Arcana represented a different rule that applied to the actual game. There's a lot of discussion about whether the Tarot also hid certain pagan ideas (unlikely, since earlier decks were very medieval Christian), or was used in teaching religious allegory to kids. But as far as history suggests, Tarot became used for divination because a lot of things are used for divination: tea leaves, entrails, playing cards (a method that pre-dates Tarot cards as a game or an oracle, I believe). 

Now, this doesn't overturn Tarot's legitimacy one bit. First of all, Tarot spoke to people as a teaching tool and an oracle because it works with archetypes, very universal figures and ideas. The images were inspiring, and really that's all divination takes: taking a look at something as a lens through which you view your life and your future. You can divine using toothpicks, coins, or clouds, so long as you have a consistent meaning attached to them. The magic is in you and in the Universe. Tarot is just a very creatively inspiring tool, one that happened to link up very easily to a lot of pre-existing ideas, and became a very effective method for teaching them.

So effective, in fact, that Tarot's popularity as an oracle grew in the 1800s, when a man named Antoine Court de Gebelin was convinced that Tarot originated in Egypt and represented Egyptian mysteries. He wrote a paper alleging a lot of connections, and others picked up on it. (Scholarship was like that a lot, back then, and Egypt fever was alive and well.)  And the idea that Tarot came from Egypt, and even Atlantis, survives to today.

Now, my grand revelation? Tarot started out as a card game with a series of characters that can alter the rules of what each player is allowed to do. And amazingly, we have card games like this all the time today, mainly in the form of trading cards. Pokemon has a card game similar to this, and an American version is Magic: The Gathering. And my absolute favorite weird bit of synchronicity? A card game from Japan called Yu-Gi-Oh, where the game's fictional mythos is that it was originally played in Egypt, commanding real magickal forces, and slowly evolved into a children's game years into the future.

In some ways, Tarot is a reverse-engineered Yu-Gi-Oh - a game my now-adult brother played a lot as a kid. When I informed him of this connection, he burst out laughing. And then, after a pause, he added: "History is weird."

I had to agree.

When you're first starting out while reading Tarot cards, there's a tendency to second-guess yourself. I can still remember all the things I used to say to myself in the beginning.

"I haven't shuffled enough, that's why this card keeps reappearing." 

"There's too many reversals for this to really be accurate."

"I really need to learn to shuffle better, a card just flew out from the deck mid-way through. Now I can't possibly draw it or it's a biased reading in some way."

Here's the thing: in Tarot, there aren't really mistakes.

I'm not saying you can't give a bad reading. And not everyone's going to agree with me - I remember Dan Pelletier's "The Process" saying that once a card flies out of a deck during shuffling, "you've lost all credibility with your sitter," and I can understand exactly why he'd say so.

But I also remember The Devil practically shooting out from my hand during one shuffling. And I proceeded to lay it on the table, and ask if addiction had recently come into play for my sitter. As it turned out, her son was in prison for some of the things he'd done while on drugs. I pay attention to the cards that shoot out of my hand as additions to the reading now, and it never fails.

Repeating cards? Those are a capital-M Message for you, one you need to really grasp the meaning of when they show up. They'll haunt you across multiple decks until you really figure it out. Too many reversals? Maybe see reversals in a different light for this reading - as cards that are blocked/scattered energy, or energies you need to pay attention to.

Ask three Tarot readers and get five different answers. But the important thing here is that Tarot reflects what's going on in the world, and inside you, so it's a beautifully adaptable tool to whatever might happen. What's important is really your reaction, the connections you make. Your mistakes might tell you more about your question than a reading that's perfect, smooth sailing.

Agree? Disagree? I'd love to hear your personal interpretation of events like these in the comments!

Everywhere you go, it seems like there are different Tarot readers with different styles and approaches. And there's a ton of information about the cards on the Internet, with a lot of different approaches and ideas. It's a bit easy to get caught down the rabbit hole when you're getting started.

Here are five of my favorite Tarot resources that I use over and over again, all of which are really great for beginners - but can also provide some new ground to cover for experts, too.

Aeclectic.net - If you want to review a deck before you buy it, this is place to go. There are thousands of decks sorted by categories, types, trends, and even the top-voted decks for each year. The site also has a really big, popular forum that can be overwhelming at first, but has a ton of information on pretty much everything Tarot you can think of - and takes a look at oracle and Leormand decks, too.

Facade.com - Online Tarot readings work just as well as the in-person kind, and this site offers the biggest variety of decks and spreads I know to give incredibly detailed Tarot readings. The site also provides readings for runes, I Ching, biorhythms, and more. It's easy to spend hours there!

Learntarot.com - This is one of the main sites I used to learn Tarot, and it's still one of the most comprehensive sets of free beginner lessons I know. Joan Bunning provides helpful exercises, great insight, and useful sets of keywords for each card. The only problem with this and any Tarot site is it's easy to get caught up in one author's version of keywords, and not explore the full complexity of what the Tarot has to offer. Make sure you keep things diverse!

Masqued Man's Tarot Bible - Sadly there isn't really a hub page for this awesome resource, so I've got to start you with his page for the Magician. But this site shows comparative images from hundreds of different Tarot decks, spread across the entire deck. It's great for looking before you buy, and also for comparing different ideas and symbols across the various decks, deepening your understanding of each card. (I have to confess, I'm not sure how copyright works for the images this site uses, or if it does. So if that worries you, by all means, don't visit. But it's out there, it's free, and I've found its resources make me a better reader - and more likely to buy a deck because I know I'm going to love it.)

Tarotguild.com - The Tarot Guild is the best site for Tarot professionals I know. It has tons of great podcasts, classes, and resources for both students who want to learn, and professional readers who want a boost in their businesses. There are classes exclusively on social media, which is a huge part of online Tarot these days, and there's an Endorsed Readers Program where you can work for the guild in providing readings for pay. It's taught me so much in the time I've been a member, and while there's a fee for membership, it's very reasonable. And the podcasts are all free!

Sorry I'm not really tackling individual readers here, but I wanted to keep this as more of a learning resource. What are some of your favorite Tarot sites out there? And yes, you're free to link to your own!

There are hundreds of sites out there talking about how to read Tarot, and how each reader personally sees the cards. Personally, I love them all. They enhance my own insights and style, they make me a better reader. 

But there's so much more the cards can do. Italo Calvino's book The Castle of Crossed Destinies has his characters unable to speak, telling their stories purely through Tarot images. The archetypes are so powerful, they can do a lot of speaking for us in the ways we least expect.

Here are five ways Tarot can be turned into a game or a creative tool. 


- Cast your favorite characters into roles.
Think of your favorite piece of media - TV shows, movies, books. If they could fit into Tarot cards, who would they be? My nerdy little heart loves to do this with Disney characters, imagining Dumbo as the Fool, Bambi's mother as the Empress, and Doctor Facilier as a wicked, reversed version of The Magician.

- Create a storytelling Round Robin.
You can do this alone or in a group. It's a lot like campfire stories: after shuffling, one person draws a card, and says "There once was...a great and glorious hero, who drove a fearsome Chariot." (Just for an example.) Then the next card drawn continues the story: "One day this hero came across two children, giving each other gifts." See what comes out of the story you tell!

- Have an interview.
This is especially great to do if you're writing a book. Come up with a handful of questions for a character you're writing, and see what cards you draw for each question. Or reverse it - interview one of the Major Arcana about what they have to teach you, or their philosophy on life. You may be surprised at the new depths you find.

- Expand your vision.
One deck I need to get my hands on is the "Tarot of New Vision", a deck that takes familiar images from the Rider-Waite Tarot and turns them 180 degrees, so you can see a new perspective on the card. Imagine what's happening in the cards just offscreen, or behind the figure you see. Or look at one special detail in the cards, and zero in on it. How did the Magician receive his ouroboros sash? What's in the boats the figure in the Two of Wands is looking at? Write a journal entry or a story about it!

The best part of all this: while you use these games and story ideas to have fun, you're also learning to get closer to the cards, and be a better reader! See what new insights open up for you.

Day 2 of the challenge, and I'm coming in today juuust under the wire, but today has been exhausting. It is roasting out here in Boca Raton, and just a few hours of errands in the heat left me feeling wiped out. But I'm here in all my night owl glory now, hard at work!

The card featured here is The Fool from the Morgan-Greer deck, one of my favorite beginner-type decks. The Fool's always been about the Hero's Journey and the quest through life to me, so he seemed only appropriate to include today.

Like I said yesterday, I've been working on something really big, which is why I've gone so quiet - but I'm really excited about it, so i want to give a little preview to you all. I think I'm really creating something unique here, and if you're a course junkie like I am, you're going to feel like you've had a really awesome, transformative experience. 

It's called "Tarot Journeys".

Imagine taking a journey through the Major Arcana, card by card, working with the archetypical figures of each card as your mentors. While you explore the in-depth meanings of these cards, you'll get stories, quotes, prompts, Tarot spreads, exercises, and meditations to connect you to each card and establish their places in your life. I want to really show how Tarot can be used as a meditative tool, teaching you the lessons that will make you blossom and thrive.

In the first e-course in a series of four, Mentors and Magic Wands, I envision you:

• Climbing the Fool's cliff face and talk with him about taking the leap. 
  
• Learning the power of your personal elemental tools with the Magician.
• Developing your intuition with the High Priestess.
• Rediscovering your creativity with the Empress.
• Learning how to own your personal power with the Emperor.
• Finding rituals that support you and breaking harmful traditions with the Heirophant.

Okay, now the plug: the course isn't ready yet. This is a really big project, and my goal is to have everything developed and ready within the next two months. But, if you sign up to my list (and get my awesome free e-book, "Five Ways to Connect With Your Tarot Deck"), you'll get a first look at Tarot Journeys. News about its development through my newsletters, a first look when it premieres, a discount for early subscribers, and a look at an accompanying coaching package that'll really enhance your experience.

I am really, really excited about this, and as I'm putting the material together, I keep finding new ways to really bring home the themes of each card and put together a totally new, unique experience. It's going to be fantastic.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments! Once again, thanks so much to everyone from the Ultimate Blog Challenge for stopping by. I really loved getting to know some of you yesterday, and I hope we'll all be good friends friends by the time the month is up!