After ten years of personally and professionally reading tarot, while still in the early days of my work as a street chaplain, I decided to start bringing my deck into an unlikely place: county jail. Soon, upon request, I began keeping it in my bag as I walked the streets as well.

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I learned quickly that reading tarot with individuals experiencing deep poverty, addiction, mental illness, trauma, and marginalization was a different kind of practice—one that required a unique approach to the cards themselves. But I also discovered that tarot could have the same, if not an even more profound, impact on the people I worked with.

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 Tarot quickly became an integrated tool in my work: a powerful facilitator of deeper relationship with self, healing, understanding, transformation, meaning-making, and connection to spirituality.  Over time, it almost felt as though the cards themselves taught me how to use them differently—in a way that was trauma-informed, consent-based, respectful, sensitive to oppression and marginalization, and centered far more on the individual’s own journey than on prediction or divination.

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Today, I read tarot in a style that has become entirely my own, an approach many people have found remarkably powerful. I have also begun designing and writing my own deck, The Survivor’s Tarot (Substack below), which I hope to one day publish.

 

I now teach and advocate for tarot as a meaningful therapeutic and spiritual-care tool for chaplains, spiritual care providers, and others in the helping professions. (Email me for a Tarot Tool Kit Class!) I continue to offer readings to people from all walks of life while deepening and evolving my own relationship with the cards.