Working with Spirit(s)

I don’t talk about the spiritual part of my work a lot, but I should since I’m in the “spiritual industry.” More than that, I should talk about the spiritual part of my work because almost all of my work is spiritual to me, even when it has non-spiritual outcomes, such as my recent Page of Pens challenge and upcoming Tarot for Writers course designed to help you use tarot to write your story.

Like so many folks outside the mainstream who come from evangelical families, I have experienced organized religion to be fundamentally more damaging to people than helpful. (I understand the value of spirituality and of community and of finding common purpose, but you can find that outside of organized religion.) As a result of my own baggage, I have often explained away the spiritual experience of my work through the psychological value of whatever metaphor is most relevant. When I speak about intuition, it’s usually about “intuition and/or your subconscious” as if that’s somehow more rational. When I speak about being in alignment with your highest self, it’s usually about “acting in accordance with your values” as if that’s not a deeply spiritual behavior.

There’s something magical about creating meaning while reading books. How could creating meaning from cards be somehow less magical?

But to avoid the spiritual is not fair to the work that I do, and it’s not fair to me as a spiritual person (or to potential clients who don’t want to support a "spiritual person”). I still invite clients and students to work with spiritual practices in mundane ways if they want or need to do so—and maybe you’re one of them—but my best work is done with those who have accepted that there’s something more beyond them, even if they can’t explain it beyond the psychological metaphor. They’ve started the work. They may (and hopefully do) maintain a healthy degree of skepticism, but they’re open to the possibility of what else is out there for them.

As an aside, I’ve found that skepticism is crucial to spiritual development. Without it, we’re too likely to find meaning in everything and anything. It’s easy to be lead astray when we’re too open to believing anything.

I’ve spent a lot of time working through my shadows surrounding spiritual leadership. I’m not only a skeptical person, but I’m also an ethical person. And it’s hard to be in the vague realm of “the spiritual industry” without thinking about the ethics of the work that we do. There are so many unethical leaders out there who prey on fears that they instill. I’ve been in the room and in the stands as people feel the overwhelming energy of a cultish figure. And I’ve seen enough people warped by their desperate search for meaning and guidance from unethical leaders to not save room for giving the benefit of the doubt. And yet here I am, wanting to become a leader in the spiritual industry, despite the many bad role models out here on the hunt.

What does it mean to find alignment with your higher self? That’s a question for you as well as any spiritual advisor working with you.

I was recently working on a visioning exercise for my business, and I was forced to strip down all the caveats and the qualifiers that I normally place around what I do. It was remarkable. I was left with the simple vision of helping people align with their higher selves. It’s a simple vision. But even that was not easy to articulate as I tried to avoid certain language that either felt too culty or that might exclude people who are not interested in the spiritual components of the work that I do. The former is a valid concern, but the latter is not. When I think about my work, it’s hard to imagine how anyone would expect there not to be some spiritual belief, or at least some suspension of disbelief, involved in communicating with ancestors, past lives, and the more recently dead (not something I advertise or explicitly sell here for various reasons), and in petitioning the gods to see into the year ahead.

Now legally I can never promise that I, as a service provider, am contacting spirits or divining wisdom from gods—I’m a writer, coach, and retailer according to official documents., not a psychic medium And honestly, my own ethics wouldn’t let me promise I can do those things because I don’t know for certain what’s happening. That’s where belief comes in. I have sincerely held spiritual and religious beliefs about what is possible for diviners like me and what it is that I believe I’m doing. And it’s very spiritual.

I asked Midjourney to create an image of Persephone dreaming in a field of poppies. She is one of the deities I petition prior to mediumship work.

Among other things, I teach people how to find connection points to their ancestors and past lives so that they can communicate with them and serve as a medium for others. And I help people awaken beneficial energy within themselves based on pseudo-archetypes found in the tarot. That’s spiritual and magical work. I find it legally safer to charge people for other components of that work, such as root cause analysis, self-reflection, and goal-setting, but it doesn’t take away from the source in Spirit or spirits.

And really it was only by allowing myself to reconnect with the explicitly spiritual, esoteric, and occult of my practice that I discovered what I could do for people. It’s something that I knew was coming for years. If you look back at my earliest Instagram posts, you’ll see me reading the need for spiritual connection in the cards, and you’ll see my reticence because I was in a place of “purely psychological” practice (or so I thought). But when I let myself slip back into a world where coincidences and alignments were less easily dismissed and there was room for the magical possibility of what-if (and the necessary skepticism that keeps us grounded), I could find new and powerful ways of using tarot and other forms of divination.

It’s not the first time that I’ve shared my complex relationship to the world of Woo. And sharing that here again doesn’t change the work that I do. After all, I will continue to teach people how to read tarot like a nerd, solely through mundane means because it’s valuable for everyone. And I still fully believe that you can use the wrong birth chart to create powerful change for yourself, proving that the magic of personal astrology is not inherently more important than the mundane practice of reflection, goal-setting, and action-taking. But to once again share the spiritual side of my work seemed important in light of some of the things that have been going on in my own personal life, as well as in the professional development I’ve been doing through coaching and reading. I wanted—maybe even needed—to reclaim my magical and spiritual self in the face of much more vocal and toxic religious figures and in support of the witches and weirdos I love.