Divination 101
Divination is a very old folk magic practice that helps us to receive useful information from the unseen, whether it's the divine, our wise and well ancestors, or our own intuition. Autumn is a natural time to use divination, and in today's episode I'm covering more about what it is and isn't, best practices, and how it can change your life.
Click here to listen to this episode on Spotify
Click here to listen to this episode on Apple
You can also play the episode via SoundCloud below, or by searching for “A Wild New Work” wherever you stream!
A written transcript can be found below the embedded player.
If you enjoyed this episode, please help get it to others by subscribing, rating the show, or sharing it with a friend! This podcast is nourished and made possible by the support of Eagle Creek members.
Resources mentioned:
*Needing More: a 4-week Pilgrimage into Darkness: https://mailchi.mp/awildnewwork/gd63pkceqy
*All my classes, events, and writing can be found at: awildnewwork.com
*Become a monthly supporter in Eagle Creek to access tarot readings, Needing More extras, and more: awildnewwork.com/eagle-creek
*Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100, by Max Dashu
Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to compost capitalism and the norms of dominant culture and answer the soulful callings of these times we live in, which includes the call to deepen our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother, writer, teacher and guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. Welcome back to the show if you're a regular listener or welcome for the first time, if you haven't been here before. We are coming upon the halfway point of Autumn. Samhain is the marker October 31st each year between here in the northern hemisphere, between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, and this is the new year in some pagan traditions, and I think that celebrating it like the new year is a good reminder that every end is also the beginning and that this is a time to go deeper now and not miss our chance to compost what needs to fall away so that we really can begin anew in some area of our lives.
You know, in capitalist culture, we really, really resist this dark time of the year.
There's only about six more weeks of growing darkness until the light will begin to return again with the winter solstice. So this is a really important. Rich special time in the wheel of the year. And sure enough, just as we're doing that, the culture gets really loud with the holidays and busyness and buying things and parties and you know, don't get quiet.
Don't turn off your lights. Let's go louder and louder and louder, and that's no accident. So I encourage you to flex your agency here and choose how you want to spend these next. Six weeks, the darkest time in the wheel of the year, so that you don't miss opportunities to really nourish yourself in a way that is a little bit harder to get at.
At other points in the cycle of the seasons. This is a time when a lot of people talk about the thinning veil, the veil between us and the other world, and people kind of say it, it gets thin, but I've been thinking about this and. Veils are always thin. A veil by its nature is not a thick wall, so I am not sure that the veil itself ever changes.
I think the Otherworld is always right next door, always right here, very close, and that that doesn't change. But I think our attention changes, that our attention at this time in the cycle of the year can turn to that other worldly place or way of knowing. And whether you believe that or not, now is always an excellent time to be in conversation with the mystery of which we are apart.
And one way to have that conversation is through divination. Meaning practices that help you to pull in information that is useful to you, that is meant for you. It is about pulling on threads in the ether, in your material life, in your spiritual life, and stitching something new out of that. And there are all kinds of ways to do a divination.
Tarot is a common one. You could use a pendulum. You could read bird behavior, you could read the ruins or throw bones. I've even heard of someone using old recipe cards as tools for divination. So it doesn't really matter what the modality is as much as the recognition that we can be a part of this very.
Beautiful, intricate, supportive conversation with the great mystery. I've used divination formally since about 2014 when I got my first tarot deck. And after a couple of years I trained with someone named Lindsey Mack, who has been on the show before. And that was in 2019. And since then, I've done readings for other people on and off.
Throughout the years, and I use it personally all the time, and before you think that divination isn't for you, this is a very normal, very ancient human innate practice. It's not anything fancy. It is down low to the ground, and it's a skill that you are born with the capacity for, but that may need some nurturing.
And so today I'm gonna talk about what it is. How to do it and some of the risks and principles and helpful things to remember that apply no matter what medium you're using, whether it's tarot, oracle cards, divining signs from the land, et cetera. And I was planning on doing an all day outdoor retreat on divination 1 0 1, but life had different plans for me this fall, but I still felt the call to talk about it this autumn because this is such a time in the cycle of the seasons when again, our attention can turn to the other world more easily and.
When the leaves are falling away, whether it's literally the leaves on the trees or the leaves of our lives, or leaves of busyness falling away, we can see the shape of things more clearly when the leaves fall and the greenery dies. Especially when we come to like that winter when everything is gray and bare.
More is visible, things further out are visible. We can see the real shape of the trees and the landscape, and that can be true within us as well. The autumn and winter seasons can offer a chance to have clear sight and to see things differently and in a bigger way. So this is an excellent time. To practice divination and to increase your comfort and skill with it.
Before I get into our topic for today, I wanna share a couple of announcements. The first is that needing more a four week pilgrimage into darkness begins November 30th. This is an annual community event. It's free. It is. Four Sundays in a row of turning off your electric lighting, and it is simple, but it's profound.
Uh, I look forward to it every year. It's an essential part of me taking advantage of the darkness at this time and not missing. The medicine of this time, even as the culture gets really loud, so you can learn more about that at the link in the show notes. It's available to everyone. This year, I am offering a couple of things for those who want to go deeper.
I'm offering a best practices guide, A Guide for an Outdoor Darkness practice. Some winter solstice ritual ideas and more, and those will be available to Eagle Creek members who sign up for the four week Darkness practice. So you can check that out at a wild new work.com/eagle-creek and needing more. If you just wanna sign up for that is at the link in the show notes.
I'm also teaching a class on November 11th on discerning what needs to die. You know, this is the point in the cycle. When we are invited to let go of a lot to let go of whatever is not in alignment for us as we move into the winter season, and it can be really hard to know if something is really dead.
Is it just hibernating? Is it gonna fall away on its own? Do I need to cut it away? And in some folk traditions, November is known as blood month when animals were being slaughtered and their meat prepared for the winter season. So there is this. Time when we are invited to look at what needs to die and how we wanna relate to that.
So if you would like to join us for that, that's also at a wild new work.com/events. If you listen to this episode and you want to learn more about divination or see it in practice, or if you have worked with something on your own in your own practice and you're still. Lacking clarity or you want another perspective.
I wanna let you know that I am making a handful of tarot readings available to Eagle Creek members right now in this darkening time. So again, you can learn more about that at a wild new work.com/eagle-creek. Thank you to current Eagle Creek members who are making the this work available to all. If you are.
Liking the show or appreciate the show, and you're not in a position to become an Eagle Creek member and contribute every month. I still welcome your sweet dollars whenever you send them a little tip or a little message of encouragement, and you can do that at buy me a coffee.com/megan leatherman.
Alright, with that, let's shift into our opening invocation. So just taking a moment to notice your body. You might wanna stretch or get some water or take a deep breath. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with.
I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the molten Noma Cowlitz spans of Chinook and Clackamas nations who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. May this episode be one small stitch in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into.
Okay, well, let's start with what divination is, just so we know if we're talking about the same things. My definition of divination is a folk magic practice that helps us receive information from the unseen places and helpers. That are useful to us to receive the information that is helpful, that is meant for us to recognize the threads of meaning that are present and stitch them into our lives.
Divination is absolutely something that you can do for yourself. It's also something that some people are called to. Give to others or do for others. And you can also always receive divination from someone that you trust. And there are different types of divination, different tools that people can use.
I've mentioned tarot and the pendulum. There is a practice called scrying where you fill a bowl of water or look into a body of water and you ask for messages to come through that, through the movement of the water. You can divine on the land by asking for signs. You can read the ruins. There are all sorts of methods of divin divination around the world in different cultures.
There is absolutely some kind of form of divination in your own heritage. I can't really imagine my life without a practice of divination because it's an essential way that I check in to see what is a fit for me. It's an essential way that I navigate and make decisions. A way that I notice synchronicities and patterns.
It's a way that I communicate with my ancestors and with the land. So it's a really, really useful skill to have because it's like you're trying to track something on the land and you know what you're looking for, and you have ways to find out. You know, which path is the right one to take? It has helped me immensely, both personally and professionally.
I use divination to plan for the year ahead to know what dynamics are at play for me and my work life, or for my little family. I use it to help me focus in work, how to know what to focus on, how to bring something new to life. There are so many areas. Where this is helpful and it has a lot of baggage around it at the same time, the official quote unquote definition of divination from Merriam Webster is the art or practice that seeks to foresee or fore tell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the inter interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers.
Now I don't use divination and I'm not gonna talk about it today for the use of telling the future. I don't believe that is what we most of us are invited to do. I will talk a little bit about where that might be possible. I do believe it is possible for some people in some situations in very limited context.
To get a glimpse into possible options for the future, but that's not what I'm talking about today. I also don't believe that divination requires supernatural powers to me, divination, even though it is connecting to the supernatural or to the other world, divination is practical. Embodied everyday work.
It's just a regular conversation with the divine, with the ancestors, with your own soul. It doesn't have to be some big production, and it's not something that is off limits to you. Divination is very, very old because all it is is a larger conversation with the world and the seen and unseen beings who inhabit it.
And that might sound kind of weird nowadays inside of capitalist culture, but for a long, long time, this was regular human stuff. Women casting the ruins at a birth, someone going out to the land to look for signs before moving camp. Someone sitting out in the dark all night praying and asking for the, the divine to show the way.
So this is really regular, practical stuff that has helped people, real humans, just like you navigate through their lives for a long, long time. And divination was intentionally attacked very early on in the process of Christianization in Europe especially. I can't really speak to other dominant religions 'cause I'm not really familiar, but in general.
In monotheistic religions, there is this phenomenon where only certain people have the right to divine to be in conversation with their God. And it's usually men doing that. But for millennia and still today, all people have an innate connection to the divine. And divination has been an area where women especially have held a lot of.
Power. And I wanna share a couple of examples of how divination was attacked in the early Christianization project. And these are quotes from a book I've really been loving called Witches and Pagans by Max Dashu. It's kind of a treasure trove of information about pagan and heathen practices in Europe between 700 and 1100 ce.
And many of these practices were done in passed. Down by women. And in the book she shares a lot of writings and quotes by Christian clergy. And we see the way that divination or forms of magic were feared and seen as powerful, but also degraded at the same time, undermined constantly. So I wanna share a couple of excerpts from that.
The first quote I wanna share is from Abbott Afri of Einstein e and Anglo-Saxon clergyman. And I don't, she doesn't quote the dates exactly, but I think this is like, uh, the seventh century or so. So he wrote now some soothe sayers. Say that witches often speak the truth of how things go. Now we say in truth that the invisible devil that flies yonder around this world sees many things and reveals to the witch what she may say to men so that those who seek out this sorcery may be destroyed.
So this is an example of how the clergy promoted this idea that it's true that women were seeing things or able to divine certain things that they wouldn't have known otherwise, but that that information came directly from the devil and was demonized. The second quote I wanna share are is something written by ald Helm of Malmsbury around the year 700.
And he, she writes, he invade against the quote, empty gibberish of falsity from talkative, prophetess and soothsayers. End quote. So this is just one tiny example of how what people brought in their divinations or what magical women were doing or saying at the time was undermined and wr written off as foolishness, or if not evil, just silly and stupid.
The last one I wanna share is from around the year 10 15 by the Bishop Burchard of Worms, bishops and all the men who are their ministers should labor with all their might to eradicate from their parishes, the pernicious, sorcery, and maleic arts, so that if they find any man or woman of this wicked sect, they should eject them in disgrace and dishonor from their parishes.
So divination, while it may not have been a crime, was in certain contexts punishable by being banished from the church or having to say penance for a year. And again, it was all different forms of being in conversation with the divine. The problem was that it was done outside the church and in ways that were deemed evil because it was a tremendous source of power.
So I just wanna highlight that because. Nowadays, so many of us still carry this, maybe not fear around divination, although I know that lived in me as someone who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, I had a lot of fear that it was evil, that tarot was gonna lead me to the devil or to become possessed.
But a lot of what I hear now. Is this other thread of it being silly or foolish or meaningless, and the most common block I hear is, you know, how do I know this is real? How do I know I'm not making it up? And it's really good to retain your critical mind. I would never want to undermine that, but just know that four centuries, your innate direct connection to the divine and your ability to be in conversation with the great forces of life and your own ancestors has been attacked and undermined as something dangerous.
Evil and also frivolous and stupid, and it may have been your ancestors if they were from Western Europe, but this approach has been globalized where colonizers and missionaries arrived in quote unquote Latin America and did the same thing to. Indigenous people practicing their own forms of divination there, calling it evil diabolical, also so silly.
And how could you not, you know, listen to your rational mind or whatever it was. So this has been part of a long, long standing propaganda campaign, and you have to decide. How you want to relate to this practice or to the belief that you could be in conversation with the divine? What do you believe about it?
What practices feel helpful to you that don't feel harmful, that feel safe and useful? So if you would like to keep going with me on this journey today, I'll just add that divination is a natural companion to the autumn season. Again, it can help you to know what needs to fall away and some of what needs to fall away may be these ideas that it.
Bad or that it's silly, and I encourage you to notice that and to give yourself a chance to slough those off so that you can come anew to this practice in your agency and in your own power. And in that way, you will be well served in the winter season and new pathways, new tools for guidance can lead you into the coming spring.
So I wanna talk now about some principles of divination, about things to work out or to abide by as you come up with your own way of practicing. The first thing I wanna talk about is the decision around who you are talking to through divination. For me, divination works best as a conversation tool with my wise and well ancestors with my soulful self.
With the land, which is kind of like the ancestors. The ancestors were buried on the land and they can speak through the land, so those can't really be separated in my view. Sometimes when I'm doing a divination, it feels like messages from source as well, or just the sort of great shining light of the divine, and you get to decide who you want to be in conversation with.
Are you doing divination with your own intuition, your wise and well ancestors, spirit guides you work with, uh, divining around a certain place or a certain being that you work with different methods work. Better for different kinds of conversations. Like, you know, you might have some friends who wanna meet you for a walk and be moving the whole time, and that's the conversation context that's gonna work for them.
Other friends might wanna meet you at a quiet coffee shop and have a really deep, slow conversation, so it's really helpful to know. Who you are talking to and how they like to communicate. Is it walks on the land and divining with the land. Is it a pendulum? Is it some other kind of divination? And what method is gonna work for you based on who you are trying to be in conversation with?
The second thing I wanna talk about is divination and prophecy. 'cause you might remember from that Merriam Webster definition, there is this, uh, theme around, or this thread around divination, that it's about prophecy or telling the future. And I believe that only the fates know the future, the three spinners at the base of the tree of life.
And I do believe that. Some people can see into different possibilities, but that no one truly knows long term how things are going to shake out. Even the gods and folk divination, the everyday kind of stuff that I'm talking about doesn't really cover. Seeing into the future, seeing into possibilities for the future.
That is a bigger practice that I do believe is possible in certain contexts and certain traditions. What I'm talking about today is getting help with what is here in front of you today, and that can help you to create momentum. For the futures that you desire. So it's not, the divination can't have any impact on the future or can't help us into the future, but it's not really a prophetic tool, not the way I'm talking about it today.
The third principle I wanna talk about is that we receive through our own channels. So each of you has your own unique connection to the wider web of the unseen. How you hear from the divine, what you hear, when you hear et cetera is shaped by your channel, your radio frequency, and that includes your own perception and bias.
We could all be sitting in the same room looking at the same tarot card and receive different messages about that card or notice different things. That is wonderful and not a problem. When you're starting out with divination, like if you're trying to learn tarot or learn the ru, the ruins, it can be helpful to know the traditional interpretations of the cards.
But the more you practice, the more the cards will take on their own meanings and have different meanings in different contexts. Because we're talking about symbols here and what they mean and they can change, and we have to just be attuned to that. So your. Channel is really important and unique, and it takes work to discern what is truly a message or what is this divination practice truly trying to show me and what is just noise.
And it is really helpful to develop your own personal symbology to recognize which. Symbols or patterns are meaningful to you so that you can recognize a sign when you get one. You know, if you have seen the same number over and over again the last couple of days, and then you pull a card with that number on it, that could be meaningful to you.
But if you're not paying attention, it's hard to catch that. It's easy to miss. Also, your channel is not different from your own body. So taking care of your body is nurturing Your channel is nurturing your ability to hear and see what's meant for you. Sleeping long enough to have dreams and remember them going slow enough to recognize patterns.
Breathing deeply enough that you can notice how your body feels when the pendulum do does that thing, for example. Even if we are reading for others, which takes a little more practice to hold an open channel and interpret things for someone else, even if we're reading for others and our channel feels open and we feel like we can recognize signs and we can receive messages through the divination, it is always super duper important to acknowledge that you are seeing something from your perspective.
The person that you're reading for is always the final authority. What matters is what resonates for them. I know I have been harmed by diviners who said things that was about, that were about their own bias. Who overrode what I felt about a thing. It is really easy to cause harm by claiming that you are divining, but it's essentially your own bias and prejudice or shadow that you can't see.
So. It's important to remember and just bring a lot of integrity to this practice, to divination for yourself, but also divination for others. It is not hard to channel information to be a diviner. It is not hard to open up to messages from the unseen world. What matters is. The way it comes through and its effects, does what I'm sharing, empower others, bring healing to all to the more than human world as well.
Is it humble or is this about my own ego, divination, just like. All spiritual traditions is an area that can get really weird and harmful fast, and it takes a lot, a lot, a lot of integrity when you're gonna do it for others. So if that is something that you do or engage with, I just wanna encourage you to continue being careful and really thoughtful and open and transparent around.
The fact that you are reading something from your own perspective and to always empower the queer, the person that you're reading for, to see what they see and that that really matters. At the end of the day, we are the only ones who decide how we want to relate to something that comes up in a divination.
We always have agency just because you do a reading for yourself or you get a reading and it says one thing. Doesn't mean that you have to do that. It is okay to double check something, to triple check something. It is okay to choose differently. Maybe that is the medicine to make your own choice about something.
So that's super duper important to remember. The fifth thing I wanna talk about in terms of principles is that the signs are always available. It just takes some attunement on our end to see them. You as a human being alive, you have the right and capacity to be in a much larger conversation than just the human world and just.
Dominant culture world. Divination takes some experimentation and practice and a lot of discernment, but it's absolutely something that you should engage with if you want to. It is there as a tool for you. I wanna talk now about a couple of risks around divination or, or like challenging points that I see.
The first one is giving up your agency and not trusting your own channel. It's true that some people do have a more pronounced gift around divination who maybe are gifted psychically or, uh, who offer readings that feel really powerful, but their voice should never usurp your own. It's okay to get a reading with someone, but only when you have worked with something yourself first, and you're going there to get a second opinion or another set of eyes.
Again, it's not hard to divine. It's not hard to open up to the ancestors or to spirit guides or whatever someone is opening up to, and this is why it's really important for you to have your own practice established, your own relationship with your wise and well ancestors, your own personal symbology, because there will be people who, let's say, are quoting the ancestors.
Something may not sit right with you or be confusing, and you're gonna need your own relationship with your ancestors first, and they will show you what is right, what is meant for you, diviners, whether it's tarot readers or. Astrologers or people using pendulums, they're all still just people. You have the final authority around what is gonna fit for you and what meaning you wanna make from it.
That doesn't mean that part of you won't try to not hear something that maybe your ego doesn't want to hear, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about this very common pitfall of people giving up their own agency in these divination practices. The second one I hear about a lot that makes divination hard for a lot of people is doubting everything that you notice or immediately dismissing things that you feel or see or sense in a divination.
Divination does require some openness. It does require the willingness to see things differently than you have before, or to play around with the idea that maybe you really are getting messages or maybe, you know, even though something looks really good on paper, when I do this practice, I'm getting a no and sitting with that and playing around with trusting it.
Maybe if you have been wanting to be. More skilled at divination, but you notice that you're constantly fighting against what you see or questioning it, or trying to look at it from an intellectual, logical perspective. See what happens if you just try believing in it for a week. What if you just give yourself a reading and instead of questioning it, you just embrace it?
Like, wow, what if this card really is a message from the divine? What do I notice about it if that flock of birds flying overhead really was a response to the question I just asked? What do I feel that it means? The third thing I wanna talk about is the risk of. Divining constantly, but never actually doing the thing.
It's not hard to wanna pull cards for every situation or bring your pendulum along for every decision you have to make, but at some point. We do have to take the step ourselves. Sometimes we just need to make the choice. There are no bad options. Our minds like to make things very black and white, and it's either this or that, or it's good or bad.
But in divination we can see that things are a lot more nuanced, and sometimes there's just not a clear answer or there's no wrong answer. And sometimes if we have a divination practice, there are periods when the channels just go kind of quiet or they stop making sense and we're pulling cards and nothing is really landing.
And that can just mean that it's time for us to pull back and just make the best decision that we can with what we have. And oftentimes just taking that step will kick off new energy or affirmations or a door will close and we'll. See that it's time to go this way, but divination shouldn't become a crutch.
You don't have to divine every decision. It's there for you to use day to day in your everyday life. It's a longstanding folk magic practice, but you also always can just be a person who decides and then notices to see what happens. Okay, well, with all of those warnings and upfront material, I wanna talk about how to do divination.
And again, you may need some inner healing or letting go around your right to use this practice. You may need to let go of your fear around doing it wrong and just keep trying. So I'm gonna lay out how I do it and you can see what feels useful to you and leave anything that doesn't feel useful. So the first part of this is always nurturing your own channel, your body.
If you are trying to call in more information through your dreams, but you're only sleeping six hours a night, you're gonna be really frustrated. Or if you're sitting down to do a divination and you're feeling super stressed and anxious, it would. Behoove you to take a moment to nurture your body and your nervous system and get a little more grounded.
And again, your channel for divination is not any different than your body. So as you nurture your body, you also nurture your capacity to receive messages from the other world, which is really beautiful. The second step is to clarify who you're in conversation with and how you would like to be in that conversation.
And of course, this can change day to day, but what are you calling on? Is it your own soul or your own intuition? Is it your wise and well ancestors? Is it a certain spirit guide? Is it. Source or the divine, see what terms really fit for you and decide who you are calling in information from. And. Of course, like choosing the methods and tools that fit for you.
Again, it doesn't have to be just one. There are all kinds of divination practices and you can even just look up practices in your own heritage or you know, other folk, folk traditions that are included in your lineage. But once you decide on who you're in conversation with and how you wanna do so. You wanna welcome and nurture the tools that you will be using.
This is like if you were waiting on an important email, you're waiting for a certain message, you would probably make sure that your computer was working, that it was charged, that you had the internet on the computer, right? So like you wanna treat your divination tools with respect so that you can receive the messages that are meant for you.
Some tarot decks, for example, work better for different kinds of readings. So I have a deck that I use personally, and then I have a different deck that I use when I'm giving readings to others. And those each have their own unique principles. So some tools work better in different contexts or for different kinds of conversations, and I encourage you to just be kind of open and playful about that.
The next one is to get clear about what you are inquiring about. Some questions work better for divination than others do, and some questions work better with some tools but not others. So I find that a pendulum is helpful for yes or no questions, or if I am. You know, choosing between a couple of options, I could write down the options on a piece of paper and let the pendulum go to the ones that are a good fit with the tarot.
I think open-ended questions work best questions like, how can I relate to this situation in a way that honors my best and highest good, or, you know, what would my wise and well ancestors like me to know about this situation? Being precise with your language and your intention is always really helpful, and I encourage you to find the language and the questions that work for you in the context that you're in.
If you're out on the land and you wanna divine and you're just looking for some kind of and engagement, it's okay to just ask for signs or for assurance or for some encouragement. It can be open-ended like that. So we tend to our bodies, we clarify who we're in conversation with. We get our tools ready, we get clear about our questions, and then we divine.
We do the thing, we shuffle and pull cards. We peer over the bowl of water, we throw the bones, whatever it is, we do the thing. And then we notice. We notice with all of our senses. We use our dream time logic. We notice symbols and patterns. We stay flexible and open to what we need to notice in this moment.
Oftentimes, the first hit we get is the right one. The first sensation we have the first idea that comes to mind about what that might mean. It's always okay, of course, to ask for confirmation, to ask for help, seeing what you need to see to pull more cards or ask again, or ask for another symbol, throw another room.
That's okay. But this, it's a practice in which you will wanna build. Trust in your own intuition and what you see and feel at that initial moment when a card drops or when the pendulum does the thing, and then we make meaning from what we're given. We work it into our lives, we weave it in. What will change as a result of this help I received today, this guidance?
Again, that takes discernment, but it's very simple. Does the information feel helpful? Does it feel affirming, encouraging? It doesn't always mean that we get news that feels good or easy, but does it feel true? And does stitching in the guidance I received cause harm to me or to others, or does it feel useful?
And remember, you don't have to tell anyone where your guidance is coming from or why you're choosing to do a certain thing. You don't have to prove to anyone that that card or that sign means such and such. What matters is that it feels meaningful and true to you, that it's not causing harm and it's helpful.
That's all. And then when we have decided how we're gonna work it into our lives, and we build that conversation by respecting what we've heard and using it, we say Thank you. We bring it into the rest of our lives, we bring that card with us and put it on an altar. Or if we saw a certain image or an animal in a dream, we might have a picture of that on our desktop or on our phone.
We make choices based on what we receive. We work it in. That's how this conversation builds and gets easier to have over time. If we are divining constantly, if we're trying to get. Signs about what to do, and we've had 30 different readings and we're still not taking action as a result. That does not mean the divinations aren't working.
It means that we just need to take a step and do the thing and then we'll get the next. Step the next sign and it will build over time. So I hope this episode today inspires you to tap into basic divination folk magic that it's there for you. You don't have to take it from anyone else's culture. You have a heritage rich with divination practices.
They may take some time to uncover, but every. Culture has their own methods of divination, and it may have been demonized or undermined through Christianization or other oppressive regimes, but it's still there. You absolutely have the right and the capacity to be in a larger conversation and receive guidance that is helpful to you and we need more of that.
Collectively, these are really challenging times. There is a lot that we're navigating. There's a lot of like fast, big, high stakes decisions that are having to be made right now, and it can be really, really helpful. Essential, like, I don't know how people get through life without it, to have a divination practice so that you're not just in your mental mind trying to make the decisions, but you're receiving other kinds of knowing other.
Suggestions, other ways of looking at it. And even if it's not real, it's incredibly helpful to see things from different perspectives and with enough practice. And then over enough time, I hope you will begin to see. The resonance of this practice and see that it is indeed real, that there really is something on the other side of that veil, and it's close and it's helpful, and we wanna be discerning about what we're calling in or who we're calling in.
But we are not alone in this at all. We are part of a vast web of land and beings on the land and ancestors and helping spirits who want us to get through this in a good way, that want to bring healing, that want to see peace in Gaza, that want to protect children, that want to see us come into some other kind of way of living.
So why not? Be in conversation with those helpers. Why not? I hope you loved this episode. I wish you a very blessed Samhain and time of darkness. Again, if you would like a reading from someone else. If you have worked with something already and you're feeling stuck or just one another perspective, I am offering to tarot readings to Eagle Creek members, and the link to that is in the show notes.
In two weeks, I'm gonna be sharing a conversation with Jacqueline Suskin, author of many books and books of poetry, particularly a year in practice, seasonal rituals and prompts to awaken cycles of creative expression. It was a really lovely conversation and I'm excited to share it with you. If you want to go deeper into this dark autumn time, the Living The Seasons Journal is there for you, and I'm also teaching a live class on November 11th on how to discern what needs to die.
All of that can be found at a wild new work.com. Of course. Thank you again to Eagle Creek members who are supporting the show, and to all of you who support the show through sharing and ratings and just bringing the medicine of it into your lives. I'm so humbled by that. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.