Tag: oracle

Weekend Oracle: Yin, Yang and Harmony

Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee

Think of any question that is on your mind, or think of the weekend ahead. This “Weekend Oracle” is the premier of my newest layout, TaoCraft Taijitu.

Inspired by the famous yin yang symbol, this three card layout shows yin (energies you are pulling in) yang (energies you are pushing away) and harmony (a way to be at peace and flow with all of these energies)

As usual, I read the cards right to left. This disrupts the deeply ingrained, logic-driven pattern of reading English left to right. That small cognitive shift helps to improve intuition and keep thought-habits at bay.

Of course, if your native language is Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or other language that reads right to left, then reading Tarot left to right would make more sense.

With today’s cards we get:

Yin, The World. The World from the major arcana is a very positive, hopeful energy. It points to the big picture, the Gestalt, the everything. This is the energy you are drawing in.

Yang, Seven of Swords. This is energy that is moving away from you, or better still, energy you have been empowered to release and push away. The Seven of Swords card is associated with mischief by others and self-serving deception. In the picture a man is stealing away with swords. I intuitively ‘hear’ the old song “Steal Away” – I forget the artist, it is so old.

But in any case, there is a validating energy. You have been taken, deceived or a general victim of our collective chaotic circumstances just as much as you thought.

Harmony, The Fool. Traditionally the very first card of a RWS Tarot deck, this symbolizes fresh starts and new beginnings.

Taken as a whole, the message seems to be very hopeful: Things have been as bad as you thought, but are getting better holistically even if the changes in any one area of life seem very small. To be at peace and to help this transition along, look for any opportunity to start new .

Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip!

Weekend Oracle (6 Feb 25)

Choose your card, get the Oracle card reading below.

Thanks for watching!

Sage Sips blog is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee Please support this non-monetized channel & blog at https://ko-fi.com/taocrafttarot

Think of a question, a topic or the weekend ahead. Choose your card. Pause the video if you need time to think, then restart to see the reveal.

PAY ATTENTION (reversed): something important has flown under your radar. Pay attention now and you can figure out the situation. It is just more urgent now than it was before.

THE GAMBLER: Wayne Gretsky said that we “miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” If you don’t try, you have 0% chance of success. Trying, failing, re-thinking, trying again might be a more valuable experience in the long run than an easy success could ever be.

Deck: Alleyway Oracle of Secrets by Seven Dane Asmund. Used with permission from  @publishinggoblin1072 

Odinsday Oracle

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Odinsday? Odin (Woden) is the source of our name for Wednesday. Plus I have an irrational like for alliteration. On Wednesday (generally speaking, barring last minute squirrel rave changes) I’ll post a reading from an oracle card, or in this case, one of the unconventional or expansion pack cards from the Alleyman’s Tarot. I plan to combine the Alleyway Oracle cards when they arrive with this portion of the Alleyman’s deck. That will give me one huge Alley based RWS -ish Tarot deck and one huge oracle-ish deck. You’ll probably see both a lot because the Alley aesthetic that Publishing Goblin has created with all of the “alley” cards to day remain my favorite to date.

“Learn With Me” posts will take the place of oracle posts on Wednesdays if one of those series are in progress.

Next Wednesday, September 20th, we’ll start a new series featuring the Healing Light Lenormand by Christopher Butler copyright 2021 © year Lo Scarabeo srl, via Cigna 110, 10155 Torino, Italy. All rights reserved, used by permission.

See you at the next sip!

Odinsday Oracle: Traitor

Etteilla Tarot (public domain) via Alleyman’s Tarot (used with permission)

Yep – back to the the Odinsday Oracle title because Odin was the god of wisdom among many other things in Norse mythology and because I have an irrational enjoyment of alliteration. Wednesday will be oracle card day unless there is a “Learn With Me” series running. The next one of those starts September 20 when we look at the 36 cards of the Lenormand Tarot. I’ll be using the Healing Light deck specifically (Healing Light Lenormand by Christopher Butler © 2020 Lo Scarabeo srl, via Cigna 110, 10155 Torino, Italy. All rights reserved, used by permission)

Today – back to the Alley. One of the many things I love about The Alleyman’s Tarot is the way Seven Dane Asmund not only gives broad permission for the deck to be customized by the purchaser, but it was intended for that, which perfectly fits the herd of cats that is Tarot readers at large. The whole point of the deck being mis-matched and eclectic from the very start is so cards can be added and subtracted and made into something entirely unique and intensely personalized to the reader using it. A master artist’s skill is evident in any medium, but the experience is synergistically and exponentially elevated for everyone when superior tools are used. It’s like the relationship between a master painter and superior pigments, a master chef and the freshest ingredients, or a master violinist and a Stradivarius violin.

My thing has been to separate the traditional-structure Tarot cards from the “Strange Suit” and “Other Arcana” cards. When they arrive, I’ll add the Alleyway Secret Oracle cards from the more recent Publishing Goblin LLC deck and use the sum total for our Odinsday Oracle posts. As always I’m grateful for permission to use the cards here and in social media posts.

This particular card is the “Traitor” from the mid-1800s Grand Etteilla deck in the French National Library.

The weird thing is that I’m in a little bit of an “I got nothin'” place with the card even though it speaks volumes to me on a personal extended family thing that I’m not going to talk about here because privacy (btw – I go just as hard protecting YOUR privacy, even with the ASK ME ANYTHING questions that are answered in the blog)

It doesn’t help that this is such a succinct, straightforward card. It reminds me of Corban Dallas’ one word answers in the Ruby Rhod scene.

The card is just what it says. Someone’s trust has been betrayed. Are you the betrayed or the betrayer? Where have you made mistakes and misteps either in placing your trust or allowing trust to be placed in you?

Today’s oracle Traitor resonates with Monday’s Five of Cups

No matter which direction it flows, disappointment and betrayal are difficult emotions to process. They are hard mistakes to learn from and all the more painful is there is choice or deliberate action as any part of the situation.

Sometimes you just have to sit with those feelings, experience the whole thing, maybe even wallow for a short while in order to reach a place where you can let the emotions go and things can start to change for the better.

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Thanks again. See you at the next sip!

Wednesday Oracle

Queen of Bombs: Denying the darkness has never lit a candle.

I don’t know if it was Odin’s day, but it was a day.

Enduring comfort is an illusion. Nothing is certain. It isn’t pretty or pleasant, but neither is life. Not all of the time, anyway.

To deny the realities of life is as toxic and dangerous as any other risk or challenge life brings – perhaps more so because of its disguises. The most dangerous disguise of denial is that of comfort.

Tarot is labeled occult and evil, usually by those who wish to wrap us all in the paralytic comfort of their own delusions and desperation for control. Tarot has has dark and violent imagery representing the darker sides of human nature because darkness exists and Tarot is meant to help us cope with it, perhaps even thrive in it.

Denying the darkness has never lit a candle.

The Queen of Bombs comforts us not through glassy eyed and fanatical devotion to an impossible ideal, but by reminding us of the fleeting moments and reminding us of the endless human capacity to believe it just might be OK in time after all.

The Queen of Bombs card was created by Seven Dane Asmund for the Alleyman’s Tarot Deck. Deck used with permission.

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Learn With Me: Oracle Dice 5

Learn With Me as I explore the new Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice from Seven Dane Asmund

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I’m a big synchronicity fan (The Police album AND the Jungian concept)

Even after all of these years, I’ll still have days where I pull a card for the blog and get a whole lot of nothing intuitively. Luckily, thanks to the extra boost of energy from a client’s name and question / permission for an open reading – that doesn’t seem to happen for private readings. Even if it did, the solution is the same: prompts.

Have you ever seen those antique hand pumps for water? I’m not sure of the physics of the whole thing, I think Archemedes Principle has something to do with it – he was that ancient greek dude that was into sloshing water – but for the hand pump to do its thing sometimes you had to put a little water in it before you could use it to pump more water out of your well. “Prime the pump” came to mean anything that you put into something to make it work.

It’s kind of like lubrication too – oil changes for the car, oil on squeeky hinges or stuck locks – that sort of thing.

When intuition feels stuck, it is perfectly ok to prime the pump. It’s ok to look for a little extra inspiration outside of the dice or cards or whatever you happen to be using.

Look, listen and read works for me.

Look around you – does anything in view grab your attention? That might be an extra help for your intuition.

Listen – is the intuition coming through as a sound or bit of music instead of the card or dice or in place of anything visual at all? If listening doesn’t work pay attention to any scents or physical sensations that pop to mind.

Read – if nothing else works, pick up the guide book for the oracle your using or any other guides that are relevant. I have a whole collection of Tarot books, so if I’m not getting anything intuitive right off the bat I’ll browse through several to see if any of the key words hit as the right one.

Today’s dice toss was a little bit of both

My impulse impression was “infinity” because of the sideways it landed. Had a few quick thoughts that you can see in the video. After that nothing except the nagging feeling that I was missing something. The heart shape is obvious and shows Seven Dane Asmunds genius in designing these things.

Here is the Jungian kind of synchronicity here. I haven’t read the dice guidebook yet. 138 dice faces is a bit much to take on all in one go, so I’m learning the oracle dice little by little right along with you in these posts.

Just by pure but meaningful coincidence, the die lands with the image sideway, prompting the association with “infinity.” Combine that with the obvious heart shape, gives us “infinite heart.”

Go to the guidebook an the die itself is “elements” and this face means -SOUL!

(Doh! Why didn’t I think of that right off?)

Beautifully designed and communicative image – yeat again.

To quote the book “Soul, as an element, speaks to the human element of the world, and its positive and negative affects.”

Although “effects” would work there too.

The image has a light side and a dark side which also perfectly reflects human nature and warms the cockles of my Taoist philosophy loving heart.

This is the dice-face of humanity and the infinity of the human heart.

Thank you for reading!

The Publishing Goblin’s Oracle Dice is used with permission from Seven Dane Asmund (author of the Alleyman’s Tarot) and Publishing Goblin LLC

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See you at the next sip!

The Oracle’s Toolkit: Introduction

Introducing a new blog post series about ways to help improve intuition

I was talking with a really interesting, insightful, lovely person last evening (you know who you are … and I still think your intuitive light shines more than you realize.)

One of the things that came up in conversation is learning to read Tarot cards.

I can teach you how to do that, and have offered small group workshops on how to do one card meditation Tarot readings for a long time – until covid came along, anyway. My ebook PeaceTarot is the basis for the workshop. The book is a basic how-to guide for DIY daily Tarot. My hope is to bring the book and workshop to live, online, private one to one sessions this year. If you’d be interested in that kind of private zoom-meeting lesson, drop a comment below. Knowing that there is an iota of interest in private Tarot reading lessons will bump them up on the ever growing list of sh*t I want to do to make TaoCraft Tarot better for you.

BUT, as was also part of the conversation, Tarot isn’t for everyone. It does have layers and lots of moving parts and can get very confusing and overwhelming. That’s why we pros are here. You don’t have to juggle all of that if you don’t want to. We are, you know, professionals at sorting the cards out for you.

That is what makes Tarot so useful. It has the depth and complexity to encompass all that life can throw at us and still reflect each person’s unique energy message.

Even with all of that, get right down to it, Tarot is a tool. It is just one of dozens and bunches in an oracle’s toolkit. When you get down to the root essence of it all, the only oracle that exists is human intuition. All the rest of it is just bells and whistles, hammers and wrenches of the heart and mind.

Tarot cards, oracle cards, playing cards; you could do an intuitive reading with uno or old maid cards if you wanted to.

Tarot cards, rune stones, pendulums, black mirrors, crystal balls, palm lines, star patterns, head bumps, chicken guts, random songs on the radio or what-have-you; all of them are just tools. I call them oracle tools, and they are simply just that. All of these things and more are simply things that help us access and communicate our innate intuition. They are like microphones that amplify the quiet whispers of spirit and energy. For the deep and sometimes hidden well of human wisdom, your intuition is the pump that brings the wisdom to the surface and these oracle tools are the cup of water that primes the pump.

The best thing is that you don’t need a single tool to unlock your intuition. With a little time and mindful attention, intuition is right at your fingertips quick as a thought. Think of TV psychics who just say way they see (or hear or feel or know) with no tools, props or drama required. That isn’t to say that they are better psychics than those of us that use these oracle tools, they use a different microphone. We all have something good to say. Not everyone is a good direct speech communicator. Oracle tools give us a way to put the non-verbal intuitive message into useful verbal form.

We may not need oracle tools, but they do make the whole process easier and a bit more fun. In that sense they are oracle toys as much as oracle tools.

Back on my old ModernOracleTarot.com Tarotbytes blog, I started a post series called “The Oracle’s Toolkit” It didn’t get very far before the whole re-branding to TaoCraft Tarot process kicked in. Inspired by the conversation last night, I’m bring that back too. We’ll start with the original first for parts about pendulums and pens, then move on to other oracle tools like scrying objects, rune stones and more.

I won’t make any promises how long the posts will be or how often they will happen. I hope you’ll follow the blog so you can see them whenever they do happen.

Short Sip Tarot returns in the morning. See you at the next sip!

Just looked at the latest new case count and deaths for our county for January 9-15. Yikes! Guess that sticks a fork in in-person readings for a while. Party Tarot is closed until further notice.

Please stay tuned to reputable news sources for up to date information. Avoid whackadoodle conspiracies and make good choices to stay as healthy and well as you can.

Being healthy and alive are the best oracle tools of all.

Dearly Beloved

For my own sanity, I really, really, REALLY try to avoid politics and that other powderkeg word that starts with R.

But, in full disclosure, the idea for today’s card dropped into my head while I was watching coverage of President Biden’s remarks in Tulsa about the Greenwood “Black Wall Street” massacre of 1921.

Most of the time when you work with an oracle tool to access your intuition (like Tarot, runes, scrying, I Ching or what have you) a random item sparks the meaningful idea. Sometimes, it’s happened the other way around. A meaningful idea drops into my head inspired by some other source; muses, spirit guides, something I’ve seen, something on TV, a song from the radio, a scroll through social media…anything. Those ideas are usually the ones that niggle at you for a while. I turn them into a post for “The Niggles” category here in the blog, or sometimes I’ll reverse engineer the idea into a Tarot card.

It’s an interesting exercise, really. It doesn’t even have to be a spontaneous, inspired niggly thought. Take any concept that seems important to you and browse a Tarot deck (or decks) to see which card best resonates or exemplifies the idea. It is a great way to build your relationship with your deck(s) and expand your intuitive understanding of the cards when you do a reading. In this case, the Two of Cups seemed best.

Today’s – or really last evening’s – niggly concept is “beloved.”

President Bidens remarks in commemoration of the Tulsa Massecre were so filled with compassion, insight, inspiration. Especially in contrast to the last administration, the kindness and humanity so evident in his words and voice were inspiring, heart wrenching and breath taking. I encourage you to listen to his speech. If you consider yourself one drop intuitive, listen with your heart and with your third eye. Bring your full intuitive attention to what he said as well as what historically happened.

Perhaps you will wonder, as I did, why isn’t he the most beloved President in American history. Perhaps he will be. If there is one bit of justice, if the species survives long enough to do it, I hope that those who look back at the early 21st century see Presidents Biden and Obama for the compassion and intellect they embody. Again…look with your third eye, listen with your heart, not with your usual political leanings.

Out of that moment, that fleeting thought, the word BELOVED grabbed my attention.

It takes a lot of people to make a President “one of the most beloved.” It takes a solid plurality (and enough popular vote to overtake gerrymandering and electoral college bias) to make a person a President at all, but what does it take to make a historical figure beloved?

One person.

Perhaps you.

All it takes for anyone to be beloved is for one person to love them, for any measure of time. That measure of time exists. Always. If you love or are loved for any moment, then you are loved for an eternity because that moment always exists in the larger eternity, no matter where else in time you view that moment from.

Every moment you give love to the universe, to any person, to any idea – to yourself – that moment counterbalances and functionally erases a moment of hate given elsewhere.

Even for a moment, if you love someone – or yourself – then that person is beloved.

As for President Biden, I suspect Dr. Jill has it covered.

As for the rest of us, love someone for a moment. They are then beloved. Think of the whole earth and everything living being on it just for one tiny little fleeting moment and send your love to that entirety. Now you too, are forever beloved.

All it takes for anyone to be beloved is one person.

Perhaps you.