One of my favorite books as a baby witch was Energy Essentials for Witches and Spellcasters by Mya Om.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve read it, so I think I got the following exercise from that book? Anyway, I clearly remember sitting in my dining room with a rock, an orange, and a plastic toy lined up on the table.

I was determined not to leave my chair until I could feel the energy emitted by each item—and bonus, until I could sense the difference between them with my eyes closed.

I remember racing into the other room, scaring the crap out of my partner with “Oh holy shit you are not going to freakin’ believe what just happened the energy of an orange feels totally different than the energy of a rock and you can like actually feel it with your actual hands oh my god.” 😲

Turns out, that simple exercise flipped a deeply buried switch in my brain. Within days, I was seeing energy whenever people talked. Not with my literal eyeballs—that came later—but in my mind. Colors and densities and textures flowed along precise channels, slamming into roadblocks and finding workarounds (or not).

And with those pictures came insights:

“Their creative energy keeps trying to flow into Project A, but they reroute it into that other ‘acceptable’ thing where it completely fizzles out.”

“They’re trying to force an entire ocean’s worth of energy through a garden hose, and that thing’s about to burst.”

“Until they talk to their partner about That Thing, their energy bubbles up whenever they’re together, and they instigate a fight about something else to release the pressure.”

My First Year of Witch School

A couple years later when I enrolled in a four-year witch school, one of our “undergrad” exercises was learning to see auras. A friend and I went to an empty pavilion overlooking a wetland, unrolled a picnic blanket, and took turns staring at each other very, very hard.

And eventually…it worked! I was shocked!

We both saw blotches and smears and ribbons of color within and around each other’s auras.

Unlike with my mind pictures, these colors felt more external, like I was maybe actually seeing them with my eyeballs. 👀 But it took so much concentration—like, headache-inducing effort—that it didn’t feel worth it, especially when my mind pictures were readily available. The aura juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Just Add Tarot?

Around this time, I met a Roma woman at a friend’s party who eventually became a close friend—and my first tarot teacher.

What I hadn’t expected was how tarot would interact with my mind pictures. The shift wasn’t noticeable right away; I was too bogged down in homemade tarot flashcards and trying to learn the “correct” meanings.

But the more I did readings for friends, and as I expanded to do readings for strangers, my mind pictures kicked into overdrive, specifically when the querent was describing the situation they wanted a reading on. As they spoke, the energy flow would appear, but in a very specific form: a tarot card spread.

For instance, “They’re trying to force an entire ocean’s worth of energy through a garden hose, and that thing’s about to burst,” would appear as a hose-like column of cards, followed by a row of cards blocking that energy from going where the querent wanted it to go.

Each card within the spread was a portal of understanding, revealing why it was so tempting to fall into the garden-hose pattern and how to unkink it.

When I was viewing tarot cards as glorified flashcards, as mnemonic devices to trigger remembrance of the “correct” meanings, this dynamic layer was hidden from me. But all along, the cards were capable of mapping those energy flows in my mind, allowing me to literally spread them out on the table and explore the flows from every possible angle.

(Btw, I show you how to do this—how to translate reading questions into energy-mapping spreads—in ​The Art of Intuitive Tarot​.)

My Spidey Sense Deepens

Creating a spread based on a question’s energy was just the teaser, apparently, because the cards had another surprise in store for me.

Once I was using tailor-made spreads, I began to notice how the energy flowed within a single card and how it flowed between cards within a spread. This unlocked an entire secret garden of insights! Not only were these super handy for my clients, they made readings so freakin’ fun for me. I felt like Indiana Jones, discovering lost energy temples! Minus the snakes!

If you’re new to seeing energy, tarot cards are a fantastic way to practice reading these flows, because they don’t move around like humans do, and they’re not offended if you stare at them for lengthy periods of time with a constipated look of concentration.

(And yep, I also show you how to read the energy within and between cards in ​The Art of Intuitive Tarot​.)

A Stinky Energetic Swamp

There’s actually a reason I’m telling you this now, and it’s not just that I love to talk about tarot and energy.

A few weeks ago, I hit a concrete wall with my romance revisions. I am sooooo damn close to the finish line on The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, but I found my energy pooling and stagnating in a scene right before the climax sequence. 😩

I tried revising it four different ways, but none of them had that special spark that tells me the scene is working. I tried skipping it, intending to revisit it in the next and final draft, but the scene was too load bearing.

Until I figured out how I was going to fix it, too many things downstream would have to change, and saving all of that for my last draft felt like a tangled-up mess.

Cue: My Spirit Guides

It became clear that my energy wanted—needed—to flow into something else, just for a short while, and one night after work, I dropped into meditation and put out an SOS to my spirit guides. We gathered in the cozy study of my astral sanctuary, and my guides laid it all out on the table.

Ninety percent of their advice made total sense. I could roughly sum it up as follows: STOP TRYING TO DO ALL THE GODDAMN THINGS.

Which, fair. So I took a weed whacker to my to-do list.

But their last idea seemed completely counterintuitive, literally the last thing I would ever do if I wanted to trim down my tasks. They told me to create a podcast.

Granted, not a forever podcast that would wreak havoc on my short-burst Human Design Projector energy stores. Just a limited series with a very specific focus, one that I could, if I wanted to, repeat each time I neared the sloggy home stretch of a book.

They even tempted me with a title: Will I Ever Finish This F@#king Book?

What did I do?

As is often the case when my guides give me a good idea, I proceeded to ignore it for a week. A podcast? Me?! Now?!?

But the idea had me by the collar and wouldn’t set me down.

I was wary—oh my god, so wary—that my perfectionism would kick in and I’d turn it into A Massive Thing, one that would have me finishing my book in the summer of 2035.

I dug my heels in harder.

Me vs. My Guides

My guides are nothing if not persistent (guess they’d have to be after working with me for 10+ years 😅).

So did I do it? Did I create a limited run, super focused podcast without rousing my Perfectionism Beastie?

The answer will land in your inbox next Tuesday! (At least, it will if you’re on my mailing list.)

See you then.