Stories in Motion: Oracles for the Modern Seeker

A highly sensitive child who could sense the emotions and stories of others, learns to express her true gifts and powers via oracles

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Growing up as a highly sensitive person, given to knowing things about everyone around me (without permission), I felt way too much, all the time. The world was a big blur of diaphanous stuff, brimming with information, feelings that were not mine, stories about others I shouldn’t know about and a pervading sense that I just didn’t belong, had no map, and my boat just might capsize at any minute.

The one thing I wanted was certainty. I was three when I discovered I could dream about other people’s secrets — my mom’s in particular, although it took her 22 years to tell me the truth about why she was afraid of me and my nightmares. I don’t blame her.

What do you say to a kid who sees her grandfather die in a concentration camp in her dreams when you are pretending to be someone and something else?

Oy vey says the kid at the Anglican church staring lovingly at Jesus. Never mind, knowing when someone is lying to you all the time about something huge is a tad crazy making on top of it all. No safety possible when fear was everywhere.

The stories we tell are most powerful and I indeed had a very festive time growing up intuitive adapting myself to the story of my family and learning about my own albeit stranger version (I think the term dysfunctional is highly overrated) in an upwardly mobile academically minded family. They had plans for me to be a lawyer. The universe had way more interesting ideas for me.

By the time I was five, my father was wafting philosophically about numerous things, making my sister and me sit at his feet (because he said so!) so he could school us in Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Atlantis and aliens. (My favorite part of that was watching one of my gerbils perch behind him and poop on his shoulder — c’mon I was five!) However, to this day one thing he kept repeating has become one of the most powerful concepts I have learned that has kept me sane. He said. “The only constant in life is change — remember this and you will always be on an adventure.”

Although the desire for certainty is a driving force in all of us (not just me!), knowing this is the greatest blessing.

We are all storytellers and always moving, changing, evolving, transforming and transcending. We are stories in motion, and long ago I discovered the way to track those stories about myself and other people. I found a tool that could help shape them and get clarity and guidance about the stories that make us, well, us!

For 30 years in this weird and wonderful profession as an intuitive and spiritual teacher, oracles have been my passion.

I discovered oracles in my teens and became an avid student of classical tarot, and dove into my father’s dusty antique book collections that described others from ancient cultures around the world like the Chinese I-Ching, Norse, and Celtic Runes, and other forms of divination — ways to communicate with the Otherness — the Universe that is conscious and alive. Oracles were the ultimate story tellers, mirrors of truth, navigational maps and communication devices.

I came to understand that they originated in the Goddess culture dating all the way back to the Paleolithic age, and all of their sacred use began well before the system of patriarchy and religious domination sought to silence and destroy them as viable methods of intimate divine dialog. There are legitimate reasons for the fear surrounding their use. We remember at a cellular level things like the Inquisition — the Holocaust of women. Yet, today, oracles and divination practices survive and are returning to us with great fervor!

I didn’t know back then it would be my calling, but looking back today, with my 8^th Oracle deck in print, the Mystical Shaman Oracle (co-authored with my Hay House colleague Alberto Villoldo) a bestseller that just landed on the selves recently, and 6 more under contract with my publisher Hay House, I see it with such obvious clarity.

Watch the trailer for the Mystical Shamam Oracle card deck

The numinous and the mystical have their own ways of guiding us, and now more than ever many of us are turning to alternative methods to connect to a practical spirituality that is direct and intimate. Oracle cards of many shapes and sizes are readily available these days. They are not all the same. Some are daily positive messages, affirmations, and others, like mine are true systems of divination.

What most people don’t know and I am committed to teaching about is the original use of oracles. Oracles used rightly are not meant to be predictive tools of the fortune teller, even though that’s often been the case. They are so much more.

They (Oracles) are also prescriptive tools to empower you to create your reality and track your intentions, not predict it as if your story in motion would stop at a destination one special day.

Here’s an example. My own personal experience with using oracles as a means to help me navigate my world and co-create it rather than predict it, hit home to me in my early 30s as both my parents died tragically back to back, after the demise of my father’s multi-million-dollar business. They died paupers — the thing my mom was most afraid of, happened. I had gotten clean and sober 5 years before, so I had a handle on my own experience, and was no longer self-medicating to avoid it. Watching them lose everything with such powerlessness was soul destroying for all of us. You can’t help but feel completely lost when it appears your world is disintegrating. Their friends avoided them like they had a contagious disease. So many hard lessons were learned over the course of a few painful years that seemed like they would never end.

What kept me on track was turning to my oracles to show me with clarity about where I was at and what my next action needed to be to stay grounded, sober, sane and continuing to grow.

Oracle cards specifically showed me what I couldn’t see. They helped me avoid making some serious missteps. When you are flailing around in the dark, and everything you’ve come to know as true for you is gone who has the flashlight? I got through it all not by looking to my oracles for predictions and hope for the future that had no substance as of yet. (Although that was true too, after all I made my living seeing things for others.)

It was the power of remaining in the 24 hours. The story I could weave into the world one day at a time could sustain me, and I could evolve out loud, make mistakes (human here!) but still find the truth in my world, when admittedly, in many respects I was in denial. They never lied. They told me the truth even when I didn’t like what they said. Choosing one card a day was enough to keep me centered, connected to my Higher Power and help me to radically accept where I was at. I could see I was a story in motion and not fixed in time or experience.

The issue for me after a while was the archaic language and ideas that matched the culture the oracle systems were made to serve. I wasn’t living in medieval times! So I became obsessed about making my own — hybrids of those venerated traditions that could be done in a more contemporary way for the modern seeker. Now, today my unique oracle decks are published in 27 languages and I have an online school, Oracle School, that trains students from all over the world how to use oracle cards as personal empowerment tools and a way to open their connection to the universe, to co-create their reality and so much more.

One thing is for certain. If you know how to accurately see how the story you tell yourself and others, whether consciously or not, impacts the way you create and experience your world, it opens up an entire new way of being. You are no longer at the mercy of Fate and now a conscious creator of Destiny.

where does a novice begin?

Choosing one card a day can make all the difference! We set up a way for people to come and choose a card (up to 3) on my website a few years ago — choosing from some of my oracle card decks. Over 3 million people have come, and more coming every day!

We all need guidance, and clarity and a reminder of the mystical side of life. You don’t need to be an expert to experience the astounding epiphanies oracle cards have to offer. You just need to be willing to open your mind, and automatically you will open your innate connection to a loving universe where anything becomes possible. If you are willing to try, the universe is willing to meet you, and you will find with oracle cards, it’s very chatty too! And, why not, have a divine dialog about your life? You are a story in motion and heading into a new adventure every day. In these topsy turvy times, why not get all the help we can get!

I, for one am ready to contribute to a new story — this one for us all with peace, purpose, creativity and way more laughter and love. So to help me stay on track today, I will pick a card. You?

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You may also enjoy reading Millenneagram: A Badass Twist on an Ancient Tool of Self Discovery by Hannah Paasch