This year, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling lost.
Since my layoff, I’ve been planting seeds and imagining myself into many new life shapes, wondering which seeds will take root.
This darkness can feel fruitful but can also be disorienting.
Recently, sitting in a coffee shop, feeling overwhelmed, a friend said to me, “You already know how to grow, even when you think you don’t.”
Could that be true? Deep down, is there a part of me that knows the way? Are we like acorns, carrying a quiet map, guiding our growth, even when the path seems obscured until we become an oak tree?
Can I tap into my intuition to help me through this challenging time?
Questions like these led me to ask today’s guest on the podcast.
Charlie Claire Burgess is a trans, nonbinary artist, author, and creator of tarot decks and I wanted to ask this excellent maker about their relationship to their inner life and intuition.
Charlie works at the intersection of tarot, spirituality, and queerness and is the author of Radical Tarot and the creator of the Fifth Spirit Tarot and Gay Marseille Tarot decks. Their second book, Queer Devotion: Spirituality Beyond the Binary in Myth, Story, and Practice, is forthcoming in 2025.
Whether you're new to tarot or not, Charlie's insights will inspire you to trust your intuition and take control of your journey of growth and power.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- How Charlie started coming back to their spirituality and embracing their true self after years of self-abandonment
- How tarot is a tool for externalizing thoughts and feelings to give them new awareness and perspective
- What Charlie had to unlearn about work to honor and support their creativity
- The practices that help Charlie ground in their spirituality
- How tarot can be an opportunity to create agency rather than using Tarot as a predictive tool
- Why following your intuition also means permitting yourself to screw up
Learn more about Charlie Claire Burgess:
Learn more about Valerie Black:
What is Becoming Power?
What is power? Well, that's complicated. We've learned to associate power with money, influence, position, fame, politics, and even certain bodies. Becoming Power is a podcast about a different perspective on power. Host Valerie Black highlights how true power emerges from the practices that help us transform and evolve as humans and serve as a foundation for our work in the world. She talks with leaders, executives, athletes, and activists about how they nurture their own inner power. Valerie analyzes their insights and turns them into meditations, visualizations, and bite-sized experiments for you to integrate into your own life. Whether you're looking for a greater sense of power at work, a deeper relationship with yourself, or ideas for developing your own powerful practices, Becoming Power is for you.