DHARMA, SAMSARA, AND THE WHEEL

Sometimes life feels like we are running in circles — like a small soul on a great wheel, sprinting with all our might yet somehow landing in the same place again. Buddhism calls this samsara, the endless turning of rebirth, karma, memory, desire, and unfinished lessons.

And when we’re exhausted, it’s easy to believe we’re trapped inside it, doomed to repeat patterns without understanding why. But the teachings say something softer, something more compassionate: samsara is not punishment.

It is curriculum. It is the soul’s classroom. We come back because there is something to learn, something to heal, something to refine in our dharma — our life’s purpose, our sacred work. And the wheel only feels like a hamster wheel when we forget that its turning is meaningful.

Every repetition is a chance to understand ourselves more completely. Every lifetime is another step toward release. We don’t get off the wheel by escaping it — we get off the wheel by learning why we’re on it.

After writing my post When the Cards Became a Mirror, I said the next piece I wanted to share would be about the past-life reading I did — specifically the part that revealed who I once was as a healer. What surprised me wasn’t the imagery or the archetype itself, but how deeply familiar it felt, almost as if I were remembering a role I’ve carried through multiple lifetimes.

This isn’t fortune-telling.
It’s not theatrics.
It’s the symbolic language of tarot, the emotional truth it reveals, and the quiet recognition that comes when something in you finally clicks.

Sitting With My Reader

I didn’t do this reading alone.
When I began asking questions about my past-life work, I sat with a seasoned reader — someone who interprets tarot the way you’d read a topographical map: no fantasy, no projection, just clarity, intuition, and respect for the archetypes.

I pulled the cards;
she interpreted the story.

Disclaimer

What follows is taken from a past-life tarot reading, (circa 1996) that was recorded at the time and later transcribed. These are the interpretations and insights as they were given, preserved in their original clarity and sequence.

A Note About the Reader

It matters to say this plainly:
the woman (Linda Mazuranic) who did this reading did not know me at all.

She didn’t know my history, my beliefs, my relationship patterns, my spiritual frameworks — nothing. This reading was done before social media existed, long before there was any public version of me to reference or research.

She had no access to my past, no information about my tendencies, and no context for who I was or how I lived. Her interpretations came solely from the cards in front of her and the intuitive symbolic vocabulary she had spent decades studying.

The resonance I felt wasn’t because she knew me.
It was because the archetypes themselves held truth.

How I Met Linda

And because every healer seems to enter your life through a story, here’s mine: I met Linda through a recommendation from a place in Columbia, Missouri called The Bosom of Ishtar — I know, right? I worked in a local health food store at the time called Clover’s Natural Market, and the owner’s daughter, Eva, told me to call.

Linda looked like someone who had stepped out of another era — almost like an old Romani gypsy woman from a Hollywood movie. Her salt-and-pepper hair was long and wild in the most unapologetic way, as if age and intuition had shaped it more than any mirror ever had.

I remember her teeth weren’t great, but the effect wasn’t off-putting; it made her seem more real, more human, more rooted in exactly who she was. Nothing about her was curated or polished. She smoked like a chimney — but so did I at the time — and the haze in the room only made the atmosphere feel more like a threshold than a parlor.

She invited me to sit on her old sofa, the same one she had read for countless people over the years. And once the cards were laid out, all of the eccentricities disappeared. She read with a clarity, authority, and intuitive precision that left no room for theatrics or guesswork.

She was exactly who she appeared to be: a woman who had lived long, seen much, and learned to listen to the symbolic language of the world the way other people listen to weather or instinct.  She’s no longer in Columbia, and I saw that she had moved to Pueblo, Colorado and is now a licensed therapist.  So good.

The Apprentice Healer — Page of Pentacles

The first card I turned over was the Page of Pentacles.
She smiled the way someone does when the message is simple and clean.

“This,” she said, “is not just youth. This is the beginning of vocation. This is someone invited into sacred work before they even understood why.”

And when I asked her to go deeper — to explain what that role actually looked like in practice — I pulled another sequence:

Four of Wands, Ten of Swords, The Moon, Nine of Wands, Seven of Swords, Temperance (Reversed), Ten of Cups, Page of Pentacles, the High Priestess (Reversed) and The Empress.

Together, she said, they revealed the lived reality of that apprenticeship.

The Four of Wands showed that I created stability in uncertain moments — an emotional hearth in rooms filled with fear, pain, or transition. The Ten of Swords indicated that much of my work involved endings: sitting with people in their most vulnerable passages, witnessing the final stage of life with steadiness rather than fear.

A Note on The Moon Archetype

In its upright form, The Moon is perhaps the most evocative symbol of the healer I once was. The Moon governs the liminal: the space between breath and spirit, between this world and the next, between what is known and what can only be felt. It is the archetype of intuition, emotional depth, and the quiet, ancient knowing that lives beneath language.

The Moon is where fear softens into acceptance, where darkness becomes sanctuary rather than threat. It is no coincidence that traditional healers and midwives — the women who tended both birth and death — often worked in candlelight or beneath the moon herself.

That gentle glow was believed to ease the passage, to guide the spirit, to cradle the moment of transition with feminine tenderness. In that light, nothing is harsh, nothing is forced; everything becomes softened, honest, and sacred. When I think of the work I once did — sitting beside the dying, underneath the moon, steadying them through their final hours, or comforting those in labor — it is The Moon that feels most familiar.

Her light is the atmosphere of crossing. Her presence is the quiet companion in the room. She is the archetype of the healer who walks with others through the spaces no institution can reach.

The Nine of Wands spoke to the endurance such work required — the emotional fatigue that comes with tending others through difficult thresholds and the commitment to keep showing up anyway.

The Seven of Swords clarified something important: this was not institutional healing. It was the quiet, community-rooted work found outside formal structures — traditional, intuitive, learned through presence rather than sanctioned training.

Tuberculosis as a Moon Illness

In many early communities, tuberculosis (consumption) was quietly known as a moon illness — a sickness that worsened after sundown, when fever rose and breathing grew shallow in the long, dark hours of the night.

People believed the moon pulled at the lungs the way it pulled at the tides, stirring coughs, night sweats, and the terrifying stillness that sometimes followed a coughing fit.

The danger wasn’t the daylight; it was the sleeping hours, when breath could falter and the chest grew heavy with heat. Because of this, healers often kept vigil by candlelight or moonlight, waking the sick when their coughing patterns changed, offering warm herbal teas to open the lungs, calm the nerves, soothe a raw or irriated throat, and coax breath back into the body.

Tuberculosis required a night-watcher — someone who understood that healing in those hours was as much about presence as remedy. It was the kind of illness that called for a moon healer, which is exactly the role the cards described.

A Note on the Temperance (Reversed) Archetype

Where Temperance upright represents harmony, healing, and the gentle blending of worlds, Temperance reversed shows what happens when those natural gifts are disrupted by external authority. In the context of that lifetime, it reflects a healer whose work was constrained, questioned, or forced into secrecy by systems that feared what they could not understand.

Temperance reversed is the midwife pushed out by doctrine, the herbalist forbidden to practice without male oversight, the intuitive woman told that her compassion and skill were somehow improper or dangerous. It reveals a world where balance was not allowed to flow in its natural direction — where healing had to navigate rules, suspicion, and imposed limitations.

This reversal didn’t mean I lacked the gift; it meant the structures around me tried to interrupt it. It is the archetype of a woman who knows how to soothe suffering, yet must do so quietly, carefully, or against the grain of institutional control. In many ways, it is the clearest reflection of what the cards kept showing: the healer was intact, but the world around her was not.

And the Ten of Cups showed that families trusted me, that this role was woven into the fabric of community life. The repeating Page of Pentacles echoed the original message: this was apprenticeship in the truest sense, a calling shaped by direct experience rather than instruction.

A Note on the High Priestess Reversed

If the archetype of The High Priestess describes who I was in that lifetime, then her reversed form describes the world I lived in. The High Priestess reversed is the woman whose wisdom must go underground — the intuitive healer forced to work outside church authority because her knowledge doesn’t fit within sanctioned doctrine.

She represents feminine insight that is mistrusted, suppressed, or pushed into secrecy. In the early-colonial world** implied by my reading, this reversal feels painfully accurate: women who carried natural gifts were often silenced, controlled, or accused simply for knowing what they knew.

High Priestess reversed is not a lack of intuition; it is intuition made dangerous in the eyes of institutions. Her power is intact, but the world around her demands it be hidden. In many ways, that was the conflict the cards showed — a healer trusted by her community, but constrained by the very structures meant to define “acceptable” forms of spiritual authority.

When I think about the role I played in that lifetime — tending birth, tending death, holding space for the sick, the frightened, the forgotten — it is the High Priestess who feels most familiar. She is the one who listens beneath the surface, who steadies the atmosphere, who sees what others cannot. The cards didn’t just describe what I did. They described who I was.

“This,” she said again, looking at the spread,
“is the beginning of the healer you would become.
Someone people turned to when life was changing shape.”

**A Note on the Historical Timing

Part of why my reader interpreted this lifetime as unfolding in the early colonial era is because the cards describe a very specific cultural shift — a period when women who carried intuitive or ancestral healing roles moved from being revered to being regarded with suspicion.

In older, pre-colonial and Indigenous communities, women who tended birth, death, herbs, and emotional transition were essential, respected, and woven into the fabric of daily life.

But there came a moment in history, especially with the rise of religious zealotry and European church influence, when that same knowledge was no longer honored.

Instead, it was monitored, restricted, or labeled dangerous simply because it existed outside male authority and outside the doctrine of the church. The spread in my reading reflected that unmistakable tension: a woman deeply trusted by the people she served, yet viewed as a threat by the institution that sought to control all forms of healing and spiritual authority.

This combination — community reverence paired with institutional suspicion — is one of the clearest markers of the early colonial world.

A Note on the Empress

The Empress appeared in my past-life reading as one of the clearest confirmations of who I was in that lifetime. She is the archetype of the earth mother healer — the woman who nourishes, comforts, tends, and restores through touch, herbs, teas, and presence.

In the context of my reading, the Empress showed that my healing wasn’t mystical or grand; it was grounded, intimate, and deeply human. I was the one families trusted, the one who brewed remedies from roots and leaves, the one who kept vigil in the moonlit hours when illness grew worse, the one whose warmth calmed fear.

She also revealed the emotional truth of that lifetime — the complexity that lived beneath the work I did. There was a tenderness with someone that could not be spoken aloud, a bond shaped more by circumstance than intention, a love expressed more through quiet actions than through words. Someone that I cared for physically, and from the heart. Someone I helped cross over.  It was real, it was beautiful, but it belonged only to us in that life, and it is something I prefer to keep close to my heart rather than share.

The Empress was my role then, and in many ways, she is still my role now: the healer who nourishes body and spirit, in whatever form this lifetime allows.

The Keeper of Grief — Five of Cups

When I pulled the Five of Cups, I expected it to be my grief.

She corrected me.

“This isn’t your sorrow.”

Thought I did have my own.

In the context of my profession, it was the sorrow I accompanied.

“You walked with others through loss. You weren’t a mourner — you were a guide.”

She had me pull clarifiers:

Two of Wands → the threshold
Page of Wands → the spark of hope
Ace of Wands → renewal
King of Cups → emotional steadiness

“You didn’t cure grief,” she said.
“You helped people survive it.”

What surprised me most was the Page of Wands that clarified the Five of Cups. At first I assumed the sorrow in that card was my own, but the Page showed me otherwise. Many of the people I sat with in that lifetime weren’t just grieving — they had given up hope. The Five of Cups is despair so deep it convinces someone there is no way forward.

The Page of Wands, however, is the first flicker of life returning, the small spark that rises when someone is ready to breathe again. That card revealed that part of my role wasn’t only to witness grief, but to revive the part of a person that still wanted to continue. I didn’t take their sorrow away. I simply kept them from drowning in it.

I brought warmth into cold rooms, steadiness into fear, and a tiny ember of courage into hearts that believed they had none left. I was, in many ways, the spark of hope in the lives of those who thought their light had gone out.

A Note on Renewal and the Ace of Wands

The Ace of Wands that appeared in this spread made the message even clearer. If the Page of Wands was the small flicker of hope I brought into a grieving heart, the Ace of Wands was the moment that spark caught fire.

This card is pure life-force — the return of vitality, direction, courage, and the will to continue. It showed that part of my role as a healer was not only to steady people in their sorrow, but to help them remember the part of themselves that still wanted to live.

The Ace of Wands is the soul saying “yes” again after a long period of “no.” It is the ignition that lifts someone out of despair and back into their own strength. In that lifetime, I wasn’t just a witness to grief. I was a catalyst for renewal, helping people reclaim themselves when they believed their light had gone out for good.

Note on Renewal, Earth Knowledge, and the Spark of Healing

The Page of Wands and Ace of Wands didn’t just speak to emotional renewal — they pointed to the tangible, grounded ways I helped people rediscover their strength. In times when illness, grief, or fear emptied someone out, they came to me because they didn’t know what else to do. And this is where the earth-work began.

The Page of Wands showed the small spark I offered — a tincture, an herb poultice, a tea brewed from plants gathered at dawn, a simple remedy meant to soothe the body enough that the spirit could rise again.

The Ace of Wands was the moment that spark took hold, the renewal that came when the body was supported and the soul could reorient itself.

Healing, in that lifetime, wasn’t mystical or grand. It was grounded in the earth — roots, leaves, flowers, oils, knowledge passed through women’s hands long before there were books or doctors.

It was practical magic: strengthening weakened systems, easing fevers, calming nerves, restoring vitality. I wasn’t just tending grief. I was tending bodies back into balance, reminding them that the earth has always known how to help us find our way home.

A Little Hippie-Hearted Truth (Sidenote)

Maybe that’s why the earth knowledge feels so natural to me in this lifetime — the herbs, the teas, the roots, the plants. I’ve always been a bit of a hippie mama at heart, the kind of woman who reaches instinctively for what grows from the ground because some part of me remembers exactly how to use it.

There’s something mystical about why certain people become healers across lifetimes. Not everyone carries this path, and not everyone is asked to.

In many traditions, healer souls are recognized long before they enter the world — chosen because they remember the language of the unseen, the rhythm of the earth, the wisdom of the heart.

The universe entrusts them with this work because they have walked these roads before. Their compassion is old, their intuition ancient, their hands familiar with both suffering and renewal.

These are the souls who don’t learn healing so much as remember it — the ones who instinctively know how to comfort, how to guide, how to steady the energy in a room. The gift isn’t an achievement. It’s a memory awakened.

The Conflict — Five of Swords

I asked what challenges I faced in that life.
The Five of Swords appeared.

Clarifiers:

Queen of Pentacles, Ten of Cups, Seven of Pentacles, Page of Wands, Ace of Wands, Ten of Swords, Ten of Pentacles, Three of Cups, Ace of Cups, Page of Pentacles.

She studied them slowly.

“This conflict wasn’t personal,” she said. “It was systemic. You cared more deeply than the structure allowed. Families trusted you. You worked intuitively, outside the formal hierarchy of the time. That alone created friction.”

She tapped the Ten of Swords.

“This is scapegoating. Historically, women who assisted birth, tended the dying, or practiced intuitive healing were often targeted.”

But I wanted more clarity — especially around the Queen of Pentacles (the practical healer) and the Five of Swords (the systemic conflict).
So I pulled again:

Nine of Wands, Ten of Cups, Eight of Swords, Ten of Swords, Ace of Wands.

My reader pointed out immediately that several cards were repeating:
Ten of Cups, Ten of Swords, Ace of Wands, Nine of Wands.

Repetition in tarot isn’t accidental — it’s emphasis.

The Nine of Wands repeated the theme of endurance.
The Ten of Cups repeated the community trust.
The Eight of Swords added limitation and imposed rules.
The Ten of Swords repeated the scapegoating pattern.
The Ace of Wands validated the underlying cause: I represented change, renewal, and possibility.

“The cards are showing the same story from different angles,” she said.
“This wasn’t personal. It was structural.”

A Note on the Church and Institutional Limits

And part of that structure — both then and throughout history — was the church itself. For women who worked intuitively, compassionately, or outside sanctioned doctrine, the church often became the very force that imposed limitations on their work.

Midwives, herbalists, grieving women, community healers — anyone tending to the body or spirit in ways that didn’t pass through institutional control — were often restricted, questioned, or silenced. The rules were rarely about safety. They were almost always about authority.

The church didn’t trust what it couldn’t regulate, and women who carried natural or ancestral healing roles were often the first to be pushed to the margins. My reader said this wasn’t unique to my past life; it was part of a much larger pattern. The structure itself feared what it could not contain.

A Glimpse of the Era

The more I reflected on the reading, the more it carried the unmistakable texture of early colonial life — a time when communities depended on women healers because illness was constant and formal medicine was scarce.

People died young and often: infection, childbirth complications, fever, injury, pneumonia, influenza, malnutrition, and diseases carried through contaminated water or harsh winters.

Death was not an anomaly but a rhythm of the era, and the ones tending those thresholds were the local women who knew herbs, intuition, ritual, and presence. The cards describing systemic conflict, church tension, and quiet community trust align almost exactly with that historical landscape, where healers worked outside institutional authority and were the only source of comfort for the sick, the afraid, and the dying.

My Question About Crossing Over

At one point I asked her:

“Is it possible that part of my role was helping people cross over — from this life into whatever comes next?”

She said yes.

Not dramatically.
Not mystically.
Just factually.

Based on the Two of Wands, King of Cups, Five of Cups, Five of Pentacles, and Queen of Pentacles, she said the cards describe someone who worked in liminal spaces — birth, death, transformation, grief.

Someone who reduced fear, offered steadiness, and accompanied people through transition.

A guide in the human sense, not the religious one.

What the King of Cups Revealed

When the King of Cups appeared, she paused.
“This,” she said, “is the clearest confirmation. The King of Cups is the companion at the threshold — the calm presence who reduces fear, anchors the atmosphere, and makes it emotionally safe to let go.”

This isn’t clergy.
It’s not a mystic.
It’s a healer who understands endings.

“The King of Cups,” she said,
“is the one who stays present when others cannot.
That was you.”

What the Two of Wands Revealed About Liminal Space

The Two of Wands was the threshold itself — the edge of one world and the beginning of another. In the context of crossing over, she said it shows the moment when a soul is still here, but already sensing the pull of elsewhere.

“You worked at that exact boundary,” she said.
“Not on one side or the other.
In the in-between.”

I didn’t know then how much that word — liminal — would eventually matter to me. I’ve always loved it, always gravitated toward it, long before I understood why. It wasn’t aesthetic. It wasn’t poetic.

It was memory.

I wasn’t drawn to the liminal.
I was remembering it.

Who I Sat With — Five of Pentacles

When the Five of Pentacles appeared, she said it showed who I tended:

the overlooked
the ill
the abandoned
the frightened
the people outside sanctioned systems

Not the ones in temples or institutions.

“These were the people standing outside the warmth,” she said.
“And you met them there.”

The card also reflects the emotional landscape of dying itself — fear of being alone, fear of being forgotten, fear of suffering.

My role was to sit exactly where others felt most exposed.

“You weren’t inside the temple,” she said.
“You were outside with the people who needed you.”

A Note on Lineage and Identity

I asked whether this could have been an Indigenous lifetime — Cherokee, specifically — whether I could have been a medicine woman.

The cards affirmed the archetype of healer, but not cultural specifics.
Tarot speaks in function, not ethnicity.

Skill, trust, tension, leadership, intuitive clarity — these were present.
But cultural identity cannot be assigned through the cards.

Modern Tools, Ancient Work

The more I sat with all of this, the clearer it became that this archetype didn’t stay in a past life. It lives in me now.

Today, the work expresses itself through:

plant-based cooking

Psychology degree & Certified Health Practitioner

Ayurvedic nourishment

herbal instinct

meditation

yoga

shadow work

Buddhism

bodhi consciousness

compassion-based living

energetic sensitivity

These aren’t hobbies. They are modern expressions of an ancient role.

My plant-based cooking is medicine.

My meditation practice is grounding.

My Buddhist path — as someone who seeks awakening — shapes how I approach suffering, karma, and compassion.

Ayurveda teaches: “When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need.”

Food heals.

Herbs Heal.

Presence heals.

Awareness heals.

Insight heals.

Different lifetime. Same healer.

The Moon and the Threshold

Something unexpected surfaced as I reflected on this reading: the imagery of the moon kept rising in my mind. I later learned that in many ancient traditions, healers who tended the dying sat beside them in candlelight or moonlight because:

the moon represents the passage between worlds
the moon is the guide of the soul
the moon is the feminine guardian during transition

This imagery stirred something deep, like a memory waking up rather than a concept I learned. I recognized the posture — the quiet presence beside someone who is crossing, the stillness, the compassion, the steadiness.

It felt like remembering.

A Beautiful Closing (Queen of Cups, Five of Swords, Ten of Wands, The Star, Ace of Cups, Three of Cups, Six of Cups, Ace of Pentacles & Page of Cups)

When I finally asked the cards how I died in that lifetime, I braced myself for the shadow of persecution or the violence that so many women healers endured. But the cards told a very different story. The Queen of Cups showed that I lived long enough to grow fully into my wisdom, carrying the emotional depth that marked my entire path.

The Five of Swords and Ten of Wands revealed the burdens and conflicts I faced, but not a death born of fear or condemnation. Instead, the Ace of Cups, Three of Cups, and Six of Cups painted the image of a peaceful passing — one held by community, surrounded by love, remembered with sweetness and gratitude.

A Note about The Star

The Star is a card that speaks of gentle endings, spiritual release, and the soul returning to light. The Star is the peaceful exhale after long struggle, the moment when the weight finally lifts and clarity replaces suffering.

Its presence told me that my passing was not marked by fear or violence, but by grace: a soft transition, a quiet homecoming, the kind of death reserved for those who have spent their lives easing the way for others.

In many ways, the Star felt like a blessing — a reminder that even after carrying so much, the soul is given a moment to rest, to rise, and to be held by something larger than itself.

And the Ace of Pentacles with the Page of Cups showed that my death was not an ending, but a beginning: a gentle release into the next chapter of the soul, a blessing that carried my work forward. I was not taken by violence or silenced by force. I completed my work, and I left the world as I had lived in it — quietly, compassionately, with purpose, and with love.

What I Returned to Heal in This Lifetime (Ace of Swords, Five of Cups, Seven of Pentacles, Queen of Wands, Page of Cups)

When I asked the cards what I had come back to heal from that lifetime, the message was unmistakable. The Ace of Swords showed that this lifetime is about finding my voice again — speaking the truths I once had to keep hidden, cutting through silence, and reclaiming the clarity that was denied to me before.

The Five of Cups revealed that I carried forward the sorrow of witnessing so much loss, and that part of my work now is learning to hold compassion without absorbing the grief of others as my own. The Seven of Pentacles spoke to the long arc of this healing — a karmic cycle finally maturing, a seed planted centuries ago coming into full bloom.

The Queen of Wands reminded me that unlike that past life, this one is meant to be lived in my power, openly and unapologetically, with my intuition no longer restricted or suppressed.

And the Page of Cups showed that my soul returned not only to heal others, but to rediscover my own softness — to experience emotional rebirth, creativity, wonder, and joy. This is the continuation of the work I began long ago, but finally lived in the light.

Linda’s Words About My Tired Spirit (Queen of Cups, Nine of Wands)

Linda told me all those years ago that if my spirit ever felt tired in this lifetime, this was why. She said that souls who spend lifetime after lifetime tending others — easing grief, holding vigil at thresholds, carrying burdens that aren’t theirs — eventually come into a life where the exhaustion finally catches up. My cards were the Queen of Cups and the Nine of Wands.

The Nine of Wands and Queen of Cups painted the clearest picture of who I was in that lifetime: the healer who loved deeply and carried more than her share. The Nine of Wands showed my resilience — the woman who continued to hold vigil even when she was weary, the one who stayed present through the longest nights and the hardest passages.

The Queen of Cups revealed the heart that guided it all: intuitive, compassionate, and emotionally steady in moments when others could not be. Together, they showed a healer who never turned away, even when her own spirit was heavy.

Someone who held the grief and fear of others with tenderness, even at the cost of her own rest. It was the archetype of the wounded healer — strong, soft, and exhausted from a lifetime of loving the world too much.

“It’s not your body that’s tired,” she told me gently. “It’s your spirit. You’ve been doing this work a long time.” She said that the heaviness I sometimes feel isn’t weakness; it’s memory — the residue of centuries spent being the strong one, the steady one, the one who held everyone else together.

And she told me something I didn’t understand then but do now: this is the lifetime where that weight is meant to lift, where the healer finally gets to rest, where the soul learns restoration instead of responsibility.

Someone said something to me once that settled into my bones: “The soul doesn’t remember the way the brain does.”And it’s true. The soul doesn’t keep memories as stories, timelines, or images. They come from the storehouse consciousness — alaya vijnana — the place where old memories live as emotional blueprints, not images.

It keeps them as instinct, as intuition, as resonance. This is why we don’t consciously recall our past lives—because the remembering isn’t cognitive. It’s energetic.

The soul remembers through feeling, through recognition, through the quiet sense of “I’ve done this before.” We don’t remember with our minds because the mind is new each lifetime. But the soul? The soul remembers everything it has ever touched.

The Kitchen Oracle

This is why I am renaming my blog.

Not for branding.
But because it’s accurate.

The kitchen is where I root healing into the physical world.
The oracle is where I understand the emotional, psychological, and spiritual patterns beneath it.

One hand in the practical.
One hand in the intuitive.
One foot in this lifetime.
One foot remembering the last.

The healer continues.
The medium evolves.
The mission is the same:

to reduce suffering
to nourish the body
to steady the mind
to understand the soul
and to help people move through whatever threshold comes next.

This is who I was.
This is who I am.
This is The Kitchen Oracle.

There are times in life when the world goes quiet inside you—
not peaceful quiet, but a kind of numbness.
A shutdown.
A shutting away.
A feeling that your heart has stepped into another room and closed the door from the inside.

I’ve been in that space lately.
Not broken.
Not lost.
Just… muted.

So I turned to the tarot, the way some people turn to prayer or meditation or the woods.
For me, the cards have always been a mirror—one that reflects what I can’t quite say out loud yet. One that helps me see the forest when I’m tangled in the trees.

What Tarot Really Is: A Map of the Inner Landscape

People often mistake tarot for fortune telling, but tarot is really an energetic map—a symbolic conversation between the conscious mind and the unconscious one. It doesn’t announce what is going to happen. It reveals what is already unfolding beneath the surface.

Long before tarot was shuffled on velvet tables or tucked into silk bags, its imagery grew from deeply mystical roots. Many historians trace aspects of tarot’s symbolic structure back to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, where numbers, letters, and archetypes were used as pathways to divine understanding.

In Kabbalah, each symbol is a doorway.
Each number is a vibration.
Each image is a bridge between the earthly world and the inner one.

Tarot absorbed that same symbolic architecture—an intricate system of meaning designed not to predict fate, but to illuminate the soul’s journey. Early tarot wasn’t used to foresee events; it was used as a contemplative tool, a visual guide to understanding the psyche, much like a spiritual map.

And yet, tarot’s symbolism didn’t stay confined to mystical circles. Over time, its structure evolved into something far more familiar.

How Tarot Became Modern Playing Cards

Most people don’t realize that the deck of cards sitting in a drawer in nearly every household is actually tarot’s descendant.

The suits of the modern deck mirror the four suits of tarot:

• Hearts → Cups

• Clubs → Wands

• Diamonds → Pentacles

• Spades → Swords

Even the court cards survived—Kings, Queens, and the Page who quietly became the Jack. The Knight cards were removed, however.

What didn’t survive were the Major Arcana, the 22 archetypal cards that represent the deeper psychological and spiritual journey: The Fool, The Hermit, The Star, Death, Strength, The World, and so on.

Those cards were removed intentionally.

When divination began to be frowned upon in certain regions and eras, especially in parts of Europe, people still wanted a way to work with symbolic systems, intuition, and “reading the cards” without openly using a tarot deck. So the Major Arcana — the 22 archetypal cards representing the big spiritual forces (like The Lovers, The Tower, The Star) — were removed, leaving only the 52 Minor Arcana.

Those 52 cards evolved directly into what we now call a modern playing card deck.

• The four suits remained (Wands → Clubs, Cups → Hearts, Swords → Spades, Pentacles → Diamonds)

• The numbers 1–10 stayed the same

• The court cards simplified (Page/Knight/Queen/King → Jack/Queen/King)

With the Major Arcana removed, people could still “read” using symbolic suits while appearing to just be playing a game. It was clever. It was survival. And it allowed the language of the tarot — intuition, psychology, pattern-reading — to continue quietly beneath the surface.

This is why card readers can still do surprisingly accurate readings with a simple deck of playing cards:
they’re built from the same ancient symbolic bones, just wearing a different outfit.

Jung, Archetypes, and the Power of Symbolism —

Carl Jung, a Swiss Psychiatrist, and founder of Analytical Psychology, (think shadow work) taught that certain symbols and patterns appear across all cultures — universal archetypes living in the collective unconscious. These same symbols are found in myths, dreams, art, and tarot.

To Jung, symbols weren’t superstition.
They were mirrors of the psyche.

Tarot works like a dream:
it bypasses logic and speaks directly to the emotional and intuitive self.
It doesn’t predict the future — it clarifies the present.

When you pull a card, you’re not tapping destiny.
You’re tapping the shared symbolic language that lives inside every human being.

Tarot reveals:

• the emotional climate you’re in

• the patterns shaping your responses

• the wounds influencing your choices

• the longings beneath your actions

• the direction your inner self is already moving

It shows the forest and the trees.

Tarot doesn’t dictate fate.
It illuminates the inner architecture so you can move forward with clarity, intention, and self-awareness.

The cards are the mirror.
You are the one who steps into the reflection and chooses how to grow.

How Tarot “Reads” Other People — 

Tarot does not read minds, spy on people, or reveal their private thoughts.
It reads energy — the emotional field and relational dynamics between you and another person.

1. Tarot reads your energetic relationship to them.
The cards reflect how you perceive the connection, what your intuition senses, the emotional patterns at play, and the current energetic truth between you. It shows the bridge between you, not their hidden thoughts.

2. Humans constantly signal subconsciously.
Body language, tone, memories, patterns, hopes, fears — all of it lives below awareness. Tarot pulls that intuitive information to the surface symbolically.

3. Tarot works through universal archetypes.
People express archetypes when they’re hopeful, guarded, grieving, attracted, confused, or avoiding.
The cards reveal which archetype someone is showing in this moment — not forever.

4. Relationships are energetic exchanges.
Every connection has resonance. Tarot translates that emotional current into symbols you can understand.

5. Tarot is metaphor, not surveillance.
Asking “How does he feel?” doesn’t access his mind.
It reveals the tone of the connection, the direction it’s moving, and the emotional patterns unfolding.

6. Tarot reads patterns, not destiny.
Withdrawing energy appears. Conflicted energy appears. Loving energy appears.
It’s not prophecy — it’s pattern recognition.

7. Tarot shows alignment, not thoughts.
It clarifies whether you’re in sync, mirroring wounds, repeating cycles, or calling growth forward in each other.

8. Tarot reflects what you’re attuned to.
Strong connections create strong readings.
Tarot amplifies what your intuition already knows.

In short:

Tarot doesn’t read minds. It reads energy — the shared field in the collective unconscious where all of us are connected.
It turns intuition into language and the unseen into something you can understand

The Dangers of Asking the Wrong Questions in Tarot — 

Tarot isn’t dangerous — misguided questions are.
When we ask from fear, obsession, or a need for control, the cards stop being a tool for clarity and become a mirror of our anxiety.

1. Wrong questions disconnect you from your inner wisdom.
“When will this happen?”
“What are they thinking right now?”
“How do I avoid getting hurt?”
These questions close you down. They force tarot into fortune-telling instead of insight.

2. They feed anxiety instead of healing it.
Fear-based questions create chaotic or contradictory spreads because you’re not reading the situation — you’re reading your own panic.

3. They create loops, not clarity.
Repeating the same “What do they feel?” question in different forms traps you in reassurance-seeking, not growth.

4. They try to override free will.
Tarot shows energy and patterns, not fixed futures. Asking for certainties about another person’s future actions misunderstands the entire point of the cards.

5. They weaken intuition.
Trying to make tarot tell you the unknowable makes you dependent on the cards instead of your inner voice.

6. They replace emotional processing.
Wrong questions appear when we’re avoiding feelings. Tarot can reveal truth, but it cannot do the healing for you.

7. They close the very door tarot is trying to open.
A bad question shrinks awareness (“Is she going to leave me?”).
A good one expands it (“What part of me fears being left?”).

In short:

Wrong questions distort the mirror.
Right questions open the path to insight, healing, and self-awareness.

So what is a “right” question?

A right question is:

• self-reflective

• emotionally honest

• empowering

• open-ended

• grounded in curiosity, not fear

• centered on your growth rather than someone else’s behavior

A right question awakens your inner healer.

A wrong question awakens your inner panic.

In the end…

The danger is never in tarot.
The danger is in using tarot to bypass the deeper work instead of guiding you into it.

When we ask the right questions, tarot becomes a map, a lantern, a teacher.
When we ask the wrong ones, tarot becomes a megaphone for our fears.

The cards don’t punish us for asking poorly.
They simply reflect the state we were in when we asked —
and sometimes that reflection is murky, confusing, or overwhelming.

But when the question is aligned, honest, and rooted in self-awareness?

The cards speak with breathtaking clarity.

Asking the Right Questions

Recently,  I asked the cards,
“Who am I right now?”

And the answer arrived as Kings.
Not Queens.
Not Pages.

The King of Swords.
The King of Pentacles.
Aces. Tens. The weight of responsibility. The armor of clarity. The logic that steps in when emotion steps out.

Kings hold the line.
Kings protect.
Kings manage the storm when the heart is too tired to feel.

The cards were showing me the internal structure holding everything together while my emotional world felt muted.

This wasn’t failure.
It was self-preservation.

But it was only the beginning of the story.

Why the Shutdown Happened

When I asked why my emotional body had gone quiet, the tarot unfolded the truth:

• Queen of Pentacles — my inner nurturer was depleted

• Four of Cups — emotional withdrawal

• Nine of Wands — the exhausted survivor

• Page of Pentacles — the small, hopeful beginning

I saw clearly, maybe for the first time:

I shut down not because I was indifferent,
but because I had been giving without being refilled.

My heart wasn’t gone.
It was resting.
Reorganizing.
Waiting for safety before reopening.

What I Need to Give Myself

When I asked what I needed in this season, the tarot gave me a map of healing:

• grounding

• collaboration

• joy

• creativity

• beauty

• rest

• truth

• boundaries

• emotional release

• self-compassion

All signs pointed to the same two medicines I’ve turned to my entire life:

cooking and writing.

Cooking as Healing

The Eight of Pentacles (Mastery-Skills), Three of Pentacles (Collaboration-Work), and Nine of Pentacles (Material Independence) illuminated what my body already knew:

Cooking grounds me.

It is rhythm.
It is ritual.
It is the warm smell of onions caramelizing—the same scent that lived in my grandmother’s kitchen, wrapping me in a love deeper than words.

Cooking brings me back into my senses.
Back into my lineage.
Back into a place where nurturing comes from abundance, not depletion.

My grandmother’s kitchen was the first place that ever felt safe to me.
Warm. Predictable. Grounded.
A place where love wasn’t spoken out loud, but it was everywhere — tucked into the corners like sunlight, folded into the dough, simmering in every pot.

When we cooked together, I didn’t realize what was happening.
I didn’t understand why being beside her, stirring something simple, made my whole body exhale.
I didn’t yet have the language for safety or grounding or nervous system regulation.

All I knew was that something inside me softened there.

It awakens the Queen of Pentacles—(Nurturing Abundance, Groundedness)
the version of myself who feels stable, connected, and whole.

Writing as Renewal

Long before I ever stepped into a kitchen with intention, before I studied Ayurveda, before I built a plant-based apothecary on my shelves, I had another instinctive tool for making sense of the world:

words.

The second half of my reading was the Ace of Swords, Queen of Cups, Page of Swords—
a clear message from the deepest part of me.

Together, the Ace of Swords, Queen of Cups, and Page of Swords show that writing is my truest method of healing.

The Ace of Swords gives me clarity — the clean, sharp truth that rises the moment I put words on a page.

The Queen of Cups brings emotional depth, allowing my feelings to soften, open, and find their voice through language.

And the Page of Swords reflects my lifelong curiosity, the instinct to question, explore, and understand the world through words. When these three come together, they reveal that writing is where my mind clears, my heart releases, and my spirit finds meaning — a sacred space where insight and emotion meet and become healing.

Writing is where my emotions return.
It is where truth rises gently to the surface.
It is where the heart speaks without needing permission.

Writing has always been my passion — not in a performative way, not for perfection or polish, but because it is the most natural thing my soul knows how to do.
Sometimes the words come faster than my hands can move, like they’re pouring through me from somewhere deeper, older, wiser.

My mother loves to tell the story that my first words came at nine months old, and they weren’t “mama” or “dada.”
They were:
“What’s that?”

I started life with a question on my lips.
Curiosity was my first language.

I’ve always needed context, understanding, reference points — a way to translate the world around me into something I could hold. Words became the way I soothed myself, the way I made sense of emotions, the way I reached for truth.

No wonder I ended up with a degree in psychology.
No wonder symbolism, human behavior, archetypes, and meaning have always called to me.
No wonder tarot felt like home the first time I picked it up.

Writing is my emotional compass.
It is where I process, where I alchemize, where I turn chaos into clarity.
It is a mirror — one that shows me who I am, who I’ve been, and who I am becoming.

One nourishes the body.
The other nourishes the mind and heart.
Both are rituals.
Both are grounding.
Both are love, translated.

And both have carried me through every version of myself.

Writing is clarity.
It is catharsis.
It is meaning making.

It awakens the Queen of Cups—the emotional, intuitive, receptive part of me.

Just like cooking, writing is another extension of the healer I once was — and still am. (My next post will be about a reading I had professionally done living as healer/midwife in my past life called “The Bridge Between Lifetimes.” ) Stay tuned. 🙂

What Cooking and Writing Bring Out in Me

The cards painted the most beautiful portrait:

• Queen of Pentacles — grounding

• Two of Pentacles — balance

• Eight of Wands — momentum

• Ten of Pentacles — legacy and memory

• Five of Cups — emotional release

• Ace of Wands — creative fire

• Three of Cups — joy and connection

• Three of Pentacles — purpose

• Page & Queen of Swords — insight and understanding

Cooking brings me back to earth.
Writing brings me back to truth.
Together, they bring me back to myself.

The Most Beautiful Part: My Progression From Kings → Pages → Queens

The tarot revealed a progression I didn’t expect:

I began in King energy—structured, controlled, protective.

But when I stepped into the kitchen and onto the page, those Kings softened into Pages—the small spark of beginner’s hope.

And from those Pages emerged Queens—the embodied, intuitive, emotionally connected versions of myself.

It’s as if the cards said:

“Your strength protected you.
Your creativity heals you.
Your sensitivity returns when you feel safe again.”

The Kings held the structure.
The Pages allowed me to begin again.
The Queens helped me remember how to feel.

That is the forest.
Not the anxious tree I kept staring at.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

This is what tarot does when you ask the right questions.

It doesn’t predict the future.
It reveals the present with honesty, compassion, and depth.
It illuminates the emotional season you’re standing in
and shows you the path back to yourself.

And in those cards, I finally saw:

I am not shutting down.
I am shifting.
Healing.
Rebalancing.
Coming home to myself through the work of my hands and the truth of my words.

Through cooking.
Through writing.
Through the wisdom of ancient symbols
and the quiet strength of my own intuition.

Sometimes the forest really is bigger than the trees.
And sometimes the cards help you finally see it.

✨ My Tarot Card of the Year: The Lovers

It’s funny — I’ve been using tarot for more than thirty-five years, and yet this year, of all years, The Lovers decided to sit with me. And I don’t mean in the romantic, fairy-tale sense people often assume. The Lovers is so much more than that. It’s an invitation. A reckoning. A mirror held up to your deepest truth.

A Lovers year asks you to choose from the heart, not from fear.
And that has been the theme of my entire year — learning to listen to the quiet inner voice that whispers, this is what aligns, this is what feels right, this is the path that’s yours.

✨ A Year of Crossroads

The Lovers met me at every crossroads.
Every time I felt pulled between duty and desire, between habit and growth, between what I knew and what my soul was trying to become, The Lovers appeared again and again saying:

“Choose what’s real. Choose what’s true. Choose what feels like love—not what feels like fear.”

And I did.
Sometimes clumsily, sometimes boldly, but always with my whole heart.

✨ Mirror Connections

The Lovers brings people into your life who act as mirrors — connections that stir something awake inside you. Some people ground you. Some people inspire you. Some people walk in and activate pieces of your soul you forgot were even there.

This year, Gateway became my home, my heart, my purpose, my great love.
Cooking, creating, building something real — that love is deep and unwavering.

But that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of loving anything or anyone else.
This is what The Lovers teaches: love is not a single doorway. It is a constellation.

Some connections arrive to steady you.
Others arrive to show you the parts of yourself that are still alive and burning.

Both are true.
Both can coexist.
And that doesn’t diminish either one.

✨ Integration, Not Division

For so long, I thought choices had to be either/or. (My moon and rising are both Gemini).
This or that.
Here or there.
One thing or nothing at all.

But The Lovers gently showed me that life is rarely that binary.

This card taught me how to hold two truths in the same hand without breaking anything:

I can love Gateway with my whole being…
and still feel something meaningful when another connection brushes against my soul.

Loving one thing doesn’t cancel out the capacity to love another.
That is the lesson of The Lovers.

✨ Healing Through Connection

This year didn’t heal me through solitude — it healed me through people.
Through the ones who challenged me, the ones who inspired me, the ones who confused me, and the ones whose energy lingered long after they left.

The Lovers taught me that healing can happen in the presence of others.
That connection can be sacred.
That love — in all its forms — reveals who we truly are.

✨ The End of a Lovers Year

As this year closes, I can feel the clarity settling in my bones.

Through friendships I know what real love feels like.
I know what aligns with my spirit.
I know which choices honor who I’ve become.

My Lovers year didn’t give me answers — it gave me truth.
It rearranged the way I see myself, the way I love, the way I choose.

And perhaps the biggest revelation is this:
My heart is allowed to be expansive.

I don’t have to shrink love into a single shape or a single story. Living in the truth of The Lovers energy doesn’t just attract romantic partners — it attracts every kind of love that is meant for me. When I’m aligned with myself, when I’m grounded in who I am, I naturally draw in friends, jobs, soul-connections, and partners who reflect that same integrity back to me.

The Lovers teaches that “like calls to like.” So whether it’s a friend who feels like home or an actual lover who wants to meet me soul-to-soul, the relationships that show up in my life will begin to match the frequency of the truth I’m living.

When I honor myself, I attract people who honor me.

When I live in clarity, I attract people who communicate clearly.

When I stay rooted in love — real love, the kind that feels like safety and expansion — I call in relationships of every kind that feel nourishing, reciprocal, and aligned with who I’m becoming.

Gateway is my great love.
But that doesn’t mean my heart can’t recognize something sacred in a person as well.

This is the legacy of my Lovers year:
I follow my truth now.
I choose from the heart.
And I trust that love — real love — is on its way, and something my soul will always recognize.