Tag: peace

Weekend Oracle: Keep Clearing

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This is a direct continuation of the energy we saw in the Action Eases Anxiety: Clear Away post from Wednesday

“Keep cutting away the unnecessary to find (and protect) the blessings beneath” Precision and minimalism are your allies. It is a time for scalpels, not sledgehammers.” Intuitively comes through here.

The key point of this card, as I understand it, is that personal growth is a double edged sword. The reversal of the card feels significant here, pointing toward shadow work in particular. It is painful to face the darker side of ourselves, but leads to peace and emotional health in the long run.

Shadow work is the emotional equivalent of a blade that cuts through our defenses causing painful feelings – but opening the way to calmer, more peaceful, more fulfilling emotions as well.

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

Alan Watts

This is the same energy seen in the Heart and the Crane Lenormand cards from our previous reading. Cut away the excess. Clear away the unneeded. Love exists, whole and complete but obscured, just like the beauty within Michelangeo’s sculpture:

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Michelangelo

In this orientation, the sword on the Blessings oracle card resembles the Ace of Swords, which is associated with clarity and truth among other things. The Lenormand reading, the Oracle reading and the hinted-at RWS tarot card all point toward the same basic idea: simplify, clarify, do the hard personal growth work to uncover the obscured now and it will reveal great benefit in the end.

You can be yourself with me. Happy pride month!

Deck: Alleyway Oracle of Secrets by Seven Dane Asmund used with permission from Publishing Goblin LLC

Weekend Oracle: Vibe Check

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It will probably be majorly cringe in a few years. Saying cringe will be cringe. Still, vibe check is my current favorite way to describe what these collective energy Tarot readings really do.

It’s a vibe check for your next few days. If you are reading this, those next few days are a weekend. If you are reading this in the timelessness of cyberspace who-knows-when, then it applies even more. If this post and this card caught your attention, no doubt it is for some reason or another.

These “one card daily meditation” readings, be it with tarot or with Oracle cards, aren’t a prediction. They just let you know the energy environment around you. It’s a check of the vibes you’ll be dealing with and maybe give you some idea about how to best navigate those vibes over the next day or so.

Meanwhile, the NO! card reminds us that no is a complete sentence.

Help when you can…be kind always…but kindness extends to yourself too. Don’t Don’t put your responsibilities on others or expect the universe to hand you the good life on a silver platter, but at the same time, don’t take on responsibilities that aren’t really yours to carry.

In Tarot card terms, think ten of wands energy. This is a good weekend – or a good few days at any time – to think about the times you need to say no. Or as Scisavage says on instagram, “protect your peace”

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See you at the next sip!

Deck: Oracle of Secrets by Seven Dane Asmund, used with permission Publishing Goblin LLC

Daily Meditation Tarot

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

Available for purchase in the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi shop

May is both National Meditation Month and National Mental Health Awareness Month.

Tarot has a part to play in both, especially in the form of one card daily meditation style Tarot readings.

I explain how to start your own daily meditation Tarot practice, which is kind of a misnomer since you don’t have to do it every single day. As I see it, the “daily” part comes from the way the Tarot reading takes a “just for Today” approach, much the same as the Reiki precepts.

By not focusing on personal development, past events, predicting the future or any other thing, drawing a card just for today is very akin to mindfulness meditation.

Tarot in general can be very stress reducing, and have helpful mental and emotional benefits in that way. I’ve seen it dozens upon dozens of times when I was doing in-person readings. The body language was clear as a bell; people’s shoulders would drop, their face would relax, they’d sit back in their chair a little more. Tarot readings offer a degree of healthy mental and emotional relief.

Life is less stressful when we understand the situation a little better or can formulate a plan for moving forward, hopefully both.

Tarot can help with that understanding. Like a meditation practice, when you add up those small, incremental bits of relief it can amount to something larger.

Meditation and mental health advocates have been saying these things for years. Reiki’s “Just for today” precepts is an example. Taoism and Buddhism give us the idea of change and impermanence. Everything is always in motion and change is a part of life. Death, Temperance, The Moon, The Wheel, the Two of Pentacles and other cards carry many of the same ideas.

PeaceTarot can teach you to find this Tarot comfort for yourself, even if you don’t own a Tarot deck. This simple method teaches you how to draw and read a daily Tarot card, gives a peace-themed meaning for every card in a RWS style Tarot deck PLUS three different techniques for choosing a Tarot card meaning if you don’t have a Tarot deck at hand.

PeaceTarot is available as a .pdf download and is available for purchase now from the Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi shop

Happy New Year 2025

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

I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee and a slice of leftover pizza (the breakfast of champions) wishing I had some earth shaking Tarot insight, brilliant read or the year ahead, or at least some good advice to offer.

After the traditional playing of U2’s “New Years Day” I have to admit Bono is right in the lyrics “nothing changes on New Year’s Day”.

You know what is same-est thing about New Years Day? It is the way everything changes on New Years Day – and every other day too.

Shift your inner perception, and the whole universe can look just a tiny bit different.

That being said, I still don’t have any particular wisdom to offer about 2025. I don’t have anything to say about today, except to let it be what it is, whatever it is. If it is exactly like yesterday, that’s OK. If it is a profound new beginning, wonderful! If it sucks in uncountable ways, I’m sorry. I feel you. We just have to hold on to the notion that it will suck a little less eventually. It’s New Years Day, and like any other day, it is whatever it is: joyous, tragic, or kinda average.

One of the things I like about Taoist philosophy is the way it embraces seemingly opposite things as part of a bigger wholeness. Today may be a brand new beginning. Today might be the pit of despair. Today might be a massive hangover. Whatever it is, it is part of the biggest big picture. Whatever it is you are not alone. Whatever today may be, old days are still with us and tomorrow brings another new day. Yet still, today is all we have. Might as well be at peace with it.

Whatever this new year may actually turn out to be, my hope and my wish for all of us is for a time of health, happiness, safety and ease.

Happy New Year, everyone!

If a Tarot reading would help you find your way through New Years Day and all of the other days, I’m here. Distance readings are my specialty, so they are open and available to order all of the time.

Most orders are delivered to your email within 24 hours. I’m not a big business, a scam or a media maven, so I don’t have ‘a team’ It’s just me, my laptop, my cards and my intuition. Sometimes there might be delays depending on the day job, holidays with family, needing to sleep and whatnot.

Thanks so much for reading! Please support this Tarot work: Any virtual coffees or private reading orders support this blog, the free readings on social media and the non-monetized YouTube channel.

Caution and Contemplation: Sage Sip 12-20-24

Private readings are open for the holidays, no appointment needed.

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Three of Swords: Guard yourself against the thoughtlessness of others, even if it seems unintentional. The holidays can be a time of both love and pain existing in the same person at the same moment. Be kind, but be cautious. Your peace and happiness has the same right to exists as everyone else’s.

Six of Swords: A journey or transition not of your own making may be at hand. If you aren’t satisfied with the answers at hand, keep seeking – continue contemplating until you are OK to move forward again.

Merry Solstice everyone! Thank you for reading. See you at the next sip!

Peaceful Clarity

It exists. I promise. I’ve experienced it, and it is possible.

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here.

Today’s card is the Star from the Alleyman’s Tarot deck with artwork by J Star designs.

Guidance is core to the Star card. Navigating by the stars, finding your north star.

This card and today’s energy takes my mind in a slightly different direction.

My first thought at seeing the card was a supernova. Instead of us reaching out to the eternal sky for guidance, the guidance bursts across time and space to reach us.

Oddly, it reaches out with silence, and peace.

It’s like the old critique of Star Wars. There could be no ka-boom when the death star blows up because there is no atmosphere to propagate the sound waves. We couldn’t hear an entire star explode. Supernova are silent.

I was talking with a friend about another kind of science. We were talking about the confusion and misinformation that raged through the pandemic as hotly as the virus did. Real science and solid facts have never been quite able to keep up with the rumor mill. It’s exponentially worse now that the bubble brained rumor mill runs at the speed of cyberspace. The world is a noisy place when it comes to information.

It seems to me that silence is a hint that you are on the right track.

As we’ve all lived and worked through this thing we’ve all experienced, we’ve all developed our coping strategies. One of mine was to find one or two solid, trustworthy experts and listen to them and tune the rest of the B.S. right on out. There is an element of peace in that.

In her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards talks about a certain mindset, a certain mental place found in the act of drawing (or I would add writing or making knitting or creating almost anything) where the world around you falls silent. That peaceful silence is the place where those activities are most meditative. I tried the exercises in the book. It’s true. I’ve been in that silence of creativity that can also be the doorway for clarity.

Intuitively, I keep getting the phrase “silent lucidity” It took a bit of brain racking and few minutes on google to figure out that it is the title of a Queensryche song from the nineties. Never was a fan, an all I remember of the song is those two words, so I’m chalking this one up to intuition and taking it as a validation of today’s card and message.

When a supernova flashes brighter than all of the other stars, when something cuts through the noise of everyday life and brings you a feeling, if not a literal moment of silent lucidity or peaceful clarity, that….

That is something you pay attention to. That is something that can guide you. That is something worth trusting yourself to find.

Thank you all for reading and listening. TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. It puts your message first, not advertiser’s so your kind support on the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi page is very much appreciated.

The blog and podcast will be taking a little coffee break on Thursday, July 28. Email readings are open, still no appointment needed, order anytime. The blog & pod will return Friday. See you at the next sip!

YouChoose Interactive Tarot

https://youtu.be/p4tVrya3m54

Happy Holidays everyone!

This is the last YouChoose reading of 2021, and if everything works the way it should, it will be the first video in the podcast stream before the name changes in January 2022. I’m changing Clairvoyant Confessional to TaoCraft Tarot Podcast, and it will be, at least partially, an audio version of the blog here. This is still going to be the only place with ALL of the content in one place, so I hope you will sit tight and follow the blog BUT you have the option to listen if you prefer.

Speaking of listening – I’ll leave you to listen to the YouChoose video. I hope your time of winter quiet and contemplation is a wonderful one.

Holiday Hours: still have no idea exactly what time things will happen this week. All I know is that E-mail Tarot is OPEN all season long. The holidays can be as weird as they are wonderful, as disconcerting as delightful…all alliteration aside, if a Tarot reading would be of some comfort, I got you. Order anytime, 24/7 no appointment needed.

In-person and Party Tarot are currently closed and will re-open based on covid-19 community transmission rates as reported by the CDC for Allegheny County PA. As of today, 12-14-21 the transmission rate is HIGH.

YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Look

Time and space isn’t such a big deal in Tarot. Viruses be damned, we can read Tarot together any time, anywhere. You may be reading this years after it was posted – thank you! If I just smashed the old publish button and you are reading this – Wow! Thank you! You may be watching this for the fourth time…it still has some message for you, even if it isn’t the week in the video or the interpretation that is stepping forward right now. Follow your intuition.

Choose a card at random, left, middle or right. Choose on impulse, or if you want to think about it, pause the video and then restart it to see the reveal.

The video get things started, then here in the blog we take all three cards together for a theme too. For this week’s theme, I get a sense of “look.”

Left: Seven of Swords. Look around. Watch your back. Mischief is afoot. It is NOT a prediction. This isn’t to say anything bad will happen. The energy feels like a minor heads up, think critically, question things. It could be as innocent as a prank by kid, or it could be more adult office politics. Use your head, don’t be taken in by social media hysteria or a deep fake. This is a good week to question everything. But then, aren’t they all?

Center: Knight of Wands. Look inward, then DO something about it. Whatever your spiritual tradition, spiritual leaning or life philosophy might be, this is a good week to DO it. LIVE it a little bit. For me, that is in the realm of lighting a stick of incense or meditating with a mala. Or it may be to do nothing at all. Celebrate your nonbelief by celebrating SOMEthing you love. I mean, they are going to fly a drone on Mars soon – go Percy & Ingenuity!

Right: Ten of Wands. Look inward, and persist. The Ten of Wands is about slowed or blocked energy, a strong sign of obstacles, more than simply a reversed card would be. It is a spiritual time and energy, but chances are you just aren’t feeling it….which is perfectly OK. If all the peace, love and positivety is more annoying than not, it is fine to find your vibe. Don’t force yourself to listen to new age harp music when you really want to crank up the thrash metal. Acknowledge your true mood, and keep one eye on the spiritual stuff. Time will work it’s magick and your moment of peace and Zen will come in its own time.

PeaceTarot: Introduction to the 1st ed.

PeaceTarot is available as a downloadable ebook in the Taocraft Tarot Shop

Copyright Ronda Snow 2020 All rights reserved

I almost didn’t write .

It was an idea born out of tragedy, and there is a certain discomfort in writing a book inspired by stories of loss and violence. It feels a little like taking advantage of a disaster, even though the core idea is to help and comfort. Even so, every time I would chicken out, the Muses would take a deep breath, then start whacking me over the head with the idea all over again.

The notion of first came around after the September 2012 attack on the American Embassy in Bengazi, Libya.  As bad as that was, it was even more discouraging to hear politicians and presidential candidates try to turn those events to suit their own self-serving ends. Their rhetoric was verbal violence heaped on top of violent tragedy.  What could one unknown blogger do to speak for peace when some of the country’s most powerful people seemed intent on the opposite? I reached for the one thing literally at my fingertips: the Internet. I posted tarot meditations on Twitter with the hashtag and asked other tarot readers to do the same. Some friends picked up the challenge, but after a few days hashtag idea faded along with the headlines. It didn’t trend one bit, so I just chalked the whole thing up as a nice try.

After the mass shooting of school children in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, came to mind again. Several friends of mine were genuinely upset by the news.  It was a loss that touched every parent in the nation. Maybe this time needed to be something more than a few ephemeral tweets. Maybe Tarot could be a source of comfort for anyone moved to emotion after a tragic event, no matter the circumstances. After all, that is what Tarot and psychic readings are really all about. Readings help us understand our situation, ease emotions, and find a way forward – plus maybe find a little inner peace along the way.

Day after day, violence continues; Shootings, bombings, chemical weapons being used and hostages being taken. demanded to be written, and for better or worse here it is.

If one person can find one moment of serenity in these few pages, then this book has served its purpose. That one person and that one moment contributes to the sum total of peacefulness that exists in the world.  Peaceful thinking and calm emotions change the choices that we make. When we choose differently, then we can literally change our future. Thought by thought, moment by moment, we all can contribute to a more peaceful world for everyone.

Sugar Devil

public domain

You can’t sugar coat this.

It’s just one of those gnarly sh*tshow kind of years. All politics aside for the moment, there has been a lot of funky mojo energy out there. We’ve talked about it through the past several months and made friends with the word “zeitgeist” along the way. It started with multiple, multiple clients who never thought of themselves as intuition sensitive or empaths. Time and again readings were saying that the anxieties they were feeling were actually a resonant response to the outer energy environment. The advice was to to reinforce their boundaries, to do something protective. The 2020 funk started ringing those assorted psychic and empathic bells as early as January and February. Then came the avalanche of pentacle cards telling us to hunker down, get our proverbial ducks in a row, and pay attention to the physical realm nuts and bolts of things. For those of us lucky enough to be able to work from home, paying attention to the physical realm while staying home day after day after day wasn’t exactly helpful advice – at least not on the surface. Dig a little deeper, and we were being called to wring enjoyment out of the simple things, to recapture the things that delight us, and remember that little things really do mean a lot. That, in turn, inspired the “Kitten Whiskers” off topic series of “my favorite things” posts this summer (more of those to come, btw)

The energies have shifted recently. The boundary challenging, empathic bell ringing quality has abated. The focus-on-the-physical, avoid life altering decisions if possible, enjoy-the-little-things-while-you-can energy has become the spiritual retreat many of us expected at the beginning. Ready or not, we were thrown into a cocoon by worldwide crisis. Now, we are facing a new crisis. This time it is internal. NOW is the time for that spiritual introspection and evolution. NOW is the time to decide our path forward. We were chucked involuntarily into a cocoon. Now we are being forced to decide how, and in what form we will emerge.

No matter what the external lockdown orders may or may not be, the time has come for that spiritual retreat. Just because you are permitted to go out doesn’t mean have to do it. When we do emerge, are we going to bring the same hate and prejudices out with us that we took in with us from the before time? Are we going to face what we’ve avoided both out there in the world and within ourselves?

That is where the Devil card comes in. It isn’t a prediction of doom. I still get that mental image of a storm front on the horizon. Actually, that distant hurricane image is honestly starting to look like a tornado of sand and glass at our doorstep ready to grind everything flat if certain people and forces prevail. But that isn’t today’s Devil card.

In this case, the Devil card is reminding us that some people have come out of the cocoon a good deal worse for the wear. This is our reminder that the sh*t is still storming and there are dark forces out there. It really isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. We are leaving the cocoon and entering the crucible.

One of the greatest things about the Devil card is the reminder that it serves. Yeah, things may suck, they may continue to suck for a time to come, but we can nevertheless do SOME thing to make the world a better place in spite of the general suckishness. Volunteer. Protest (with a mask, outdoors, standing apart) donate, vote a straight blue ticket come November. Be at peace for a moment. Even just one little moment. Even at that, you have added a moment of peaceful energy to a world that really needs it right now.