I make myself a cup of tea (almost always a cream of earl grey) most mornings before I start work. Sometimes a tea latte (also earl grey), if I’m feeling fancy. Then I clear a space on my desk, sit down, and get out my tarot deck.

I’ve done this for almost a decade. And, yes, I’m aware of how that sounds coming from someone who talks about frameworks and evidence and was two-thirds of the way through a PhD in Public Health before life redirected me.

I’m not going to explain it away or make it palatable. I’m just going to tell you what happened one particular morning, ages ago now, that I still haven’t forgotten.

I had been circling a decision for the entire weekend. The kind of decision where the right answer is obvious in retrospect and completely invisible when you’re inside it. I knew what I was being asked to do by people with more power than me. I knew what saying yes would cost me. And I couldn’t make myself move.

I’d shed tears while everyone else was asleep. I was carrying something so heavy I couldn’t quite take a full breath. There was a dread in the pit of my stomach, a constriction in my throat about everything I felt I couldn’t say out loud yet, and my shoulders were somewhere near my ears as I tried to make myself as small and invisible as possible.

I wasn’t looking for magic. I was looking for a way to hear myself think.

Sitting Down with the Deck

So I picked up the deck, held the question, and started shuffling. Two piles fell out. One held the 10 of Wands, the 7 of Wands, and Judgment. The other held the 2 of Swords, the Page of Pentacles, and the 5 of Cups. At the bottom of the deck sat the 9 of Pentacles, quiet and singular.

I sat with those two piles for a long time. Not because I was waiting for a prediction. Because something was clicking into place.

The first pile was showing me what I already knew but hadn’t let myself say: what I was carrying was unsustainable, and the cost of continuing to carry it was too high. The second pile named something I’d been avoiding: that the act of not deciding was its own decision, one that was costing me more than the crossing itself would. And the 9 of Pentacles sitting at the bottom, quiet and self-possessed, was showing me something I’d almost missed entirely. That I was already growing outside the situation. That something in me had already moved on, even while the rest of me was still frozen in the driveway.

I didn’t make any announcements that morning. I didn’t send any emails or make any calls. I just started my work day knowing the decision had already been made, even if I was the only one who knew it yet.

And something shifted. My shoulders settled, just a little. The weight lifted, slightly. The constriction in my throat eased by a fraction.

That’s it. That’s the whole moment.

It wasn’t a revelation. It wasn’t clarity arriving like lightning. It was the quiet, physical recognition that I had already decided, somewhere underneath all the circling, and the cards had just given me a structure in which to hear it.

What the tarot does, for me, has nothing to do with prediction. It’s a focal point. A way of externalizing what’s already in the room so I can look at it directly instead of around it. The insight is always mine. The cards just give it somewhere to land.

I’m a rigorous thinker. I spent years in academia, in policy, in evidence-based research. And I still pull cards most mornings, because the analytical part of me and the intuitive part of me are not in opposition. They’re the same instrument. What the intellectual excavation does from one direction, the reflective practice reaches from another. They meet in the middle at something more complete than either could get to alone.

I’m not asking you to use tarot. I’m not making a case for anything except this: the part of you that already knows, the whole you, not just the thinking part or the nervous system, but the full person underneath both of those things, that part deserves a way to be heard.

What Happened After Making the Hard Decision

The decision I made that morning, to stay true to myself when asked to do something that was antithetical to my core beliefs, was the hardest one I’ve made. It cost real things. The path forward was genuinely uncertain.

But I made it with my full being behind it. And that’s the only way I know how to move. Not with a loud bang. With conscious, intentional steps, one at a time, on a path that was mine to make.

That’s what the tea and the cards are for.

If something in this landed for you, the What’s Your Way Through? quiz is a good place to start. It takes about five minutes, and it might name something you’ve been circling.

And if you’re sitting with a decision that feels like the one I described, the kind where you already know, somewhere underneath all the circling, but haven’t quite let yourself hear it yet, the Threshold Clarity Session is where we do that work together.