Creative Coaching for Musicians

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S3 E62: My Favorite Oracle + Tarot Decks for Connecting Creativity + Self Care

Rebecca Hass

Oracle and tarot cards are great tools for connecting creativity, self care, and spirituality. They can serve as inspiration, insight into your own reactions, and journaling prompts, adding a magical layer to the creative process, whether you have a specific question about a project,  a decision, or how to work with the energy of that day.  

I share how I use pulling cards for creative and self care prompts, and highlight my favorite decks. However you connect to spirituality, there's something for everyone in this episode. 

Do you use tarot or oracle decks to aid your creativity? Tag me on Instagram @rebecca_hass or send me an email and let me know your favorites!

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 62 of Being a Whole Person. 

I'm very excited today because I am opening up the Compassionate Creativity Club community. You might have heard me talk already about Compassionate Creativity Coworking Club, which is not going anywhere, it's going to be all under the umbrella of this Compassionate Creativity Club, and you can either join us at the Curiosity and Care level, which is $7 a month. Then you get the secret podcast with weekly sneak peeks into my creative process, which is kind of like the mini episodes here on the podcast have been. Those are moving over to the community, and I will be showing you what I'm working on. I will play it, I can show you pictures of my wild scribblings on the paper, and I'll be sharing lessons that come up that I think might be helpful for others, as well. You will get access to my Discord community where you can chat with other fellow artists, and you're really encouraged to share your process because it's a safe, supportive environment to do so. 

We like to share things when we're finished, because they're finished, and, you know, we're hopefully proud of what we've done when we're finished. It can feel more vulnerable to share along the way, but if you're able to share along the way, it can be so rewarding and encouraging to have other people say, “Yeah, you did that step. Awesome, what's next?” I find myself really fueled by this, and have seen others fueled by it too. 

So if you are motivated by that, you can also join us in the Creator Lab level, where you get all of that sneak peek stuff, and the Discord Community, but you also get to join us at a monthly show and tell call. Remember how fun show and tell was in elementary school? And everyone was like, “Ooh, what's this?” We'll have that same kind of energy. It's going to be like a garden where you can grow, meets a playground where you can play and do whatever you want, meets a laboratory where you can experiment. All those things really light me up, and I hope that they do for you too. 

Also in the Creator Lab, you get access to my resource library of lots of different tools, worksheets, things that will help you develop your creativity, give you prompts to journal on, those sorts of things, and discounts on future group offerings that come up, like workshops, and something that I'm probably cooking up for next fall, not sure exactly what it will be quite yet, but all really exciting stuff. It is open to access for free for the next couple of weeks, because I want to give people a chance to just come in and try it, like an open house. 

So that first show and tell call is going to be on May 19, Thursday, May 19, and that will be free for everyone to join as well. Links for all that stuff will be in the show notes. Then if you come to the call, and you're like, “Yes, this is awesome. I want to join the community,” you'll have until May 20 to decide and check out all those offerings before I put them back behind the paywall, so to speak. So this is all super exciting to me. I hope it is to you, too. Let me know if you have any questions, you can always email me or send me a message on Instagram, send me a pigeon, whatever method you like. 

Let's get into today's episode. Today I'm going to be sharing some of my favorite oracle cards and tarot decks for connecting creativity, self care and spirituality. I know there are various opinions and parts of the spectrum when it comes to using spiritual tools like this. You don't have to be really into woo woo stuff or witchy stuff to enjoy using oracle decks. Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that cards are communicating with you or anything like that, they can be such a helpful tool. I am definitely on the practical side when it comes to all of this stuff. But a friend of mine coined this word pragmagical - pragmatic meets magical, and I think that's kind of perfect for how I think about this stuff too. 

When you draw a card, it can serve as inspiration, it could serve as insight. It can help you understand your own reactions to what is on the card. And it's a really great jumping off point for journaling about whatever it is you are asking the cards about. You could ask a specific question about a project or a decision that you need to make. You could ask for insight about what you need from today, what the energy is of that day, you can use a card as a creative prompt, you can use a card as a self care prompt, since self care and feeding your energy is what is going to feed your creativity, too. I will share some cards that are specifically for self care. 

I think, also, pulling a card adds this extra kind of magical and spiritual layer to what could just be normal journal prompts. And as we all know, there is a kind of mystical element to creativity, we can't always explain it. So however you explain, or understand, the forces that work behind creativity, or however you're connected to spirituality, I think that there's something for everyone in this episode. I also wanted to create my own tarot spread, to share with this episode and, real life, with launching the new community stuff, I didn't end up with time or energy to do that, but it's something that I definitely want to do in the future. We all know that happens, right? Sometimes we have big ideas for how large a project is going to be, and in real life, sometimes it ends up being smaller, just due to practical concerns. So I just want to share that, because if that happens to you, know that that's real life, and that's okay. 

So here we go. My favorite tarot deck is the Wild Unknown. It's become really popular over the last several years. I think I got it about six years ago, and it wasn't brand new at that point, but fairly new. I love the artwork style. It's very different than the traditional Rider Waite Smith tarot deck that often people think about when they think about tarot imagery. It features really colorful cards sometimes, and really dramatic black and white drawings other times, or sometimes it's black and white with hints of color. I really love how she uses color.

 I'm still learning about all the cards and their traditional meanings. Honestly, it's been a very gradual process, and honestly, I think that reading guidebooks is great, but kind of getting to know stuff more intuitively, is ultimately even more meaningful. I really like doing tarot spreads at the beginning of each year. I do a year ahead spread where I pull a card for each month, and then one for the whole year. I like to do them at the beginning of a season. I also like to do them on new and full moons. I don't do them on every single one, but those are kind of the times when I like to add some ritual to the moon phases or the seasons. You can find a spread for just about any issue or question or topic that you might have, if you just Google it. And you can also just make up your own, with whatever questions are on your mind. So there's just so much creative freedom you have with that. 

Alongside that, I really like the Wild Unknown Animal Spirit Deck, which has a lot of symbolism of different animals, and she groups it by the elements fire, water, air and earth. I often like to pull one of the animal cards as sort of a bonus, helper energy for whatever else was pulled, like, I'll use the regular tarot deck for the questions in the spread, and then I'll just say, “Okay, so whose energy is guiding this?” and that's kind of fun. Or if two cards jump out, maybe I have two different animals that guide it.

I also just got the Wild Unknown Archetype Deck, which is an even bigger version. It's not just animals, but symbolism of all kinds of different archetypes. There's so many cards in it, I think there are like 80 or 90 cards. She says in the guidebook that she had like 250 ideas, or some huge number, and had to pare it down because that was just too many things. So I'm still exploring this one, but it's been very fun so far. 

On the self care side of things. I mentioned these last week and my interview with Jenni Kowal but I am loving her self care adventure cards. Go back to last week's episode, Episode 61, if you want to hear more from Jenni and more about the cards, but they are so beautifully designed. They come with lovely accessories, like a cloth that you can lay your cards out on, some nicely designed bookmarks, and a little wooden stand that says, “I am enough” on it. You can put your card for that day in there and put that on your desk, or if you have an altar of some kind, or really wherever you want to.

Each card has a self care prompt on it, but then there are all these bullet points with ideas for exactly how you could carry out that self care prompt, which I love,  because there are so many different ways to interpret. Sometimes you just need a little boost if you don't know exactly what it might mean to you on that day, always good to have more ideas. Then they're also divided into different categories: revitalize, nourish, express, connect and reflect. So you can go straight to the categories if you feel like you need specifically one of those things. Very, very cool.

On that same note, I also love the Self Care Solitaire Token deck by Lauren Cummins. She is a psychotherapist at StarHaus Psychotherapy in Minneapolis. This deck, as far as I can tell, is out of print, I'm not able to find it online anymore. I got it at a maker market kind of thing, a little craft fair in St. Paul, a few years ago, a little bit before I moved to California. She describes it as a deck to assist you in absorbing and internalizing the idea that you are a sacred and mystical being eternally worthy of self care, which I absolutely love.

This deck has symbols from different cultures, as it relates back to self care. So there might be something that is like a talisman in a certain culture that's used to make you feel safe, and then she'll talk about the cultural significance of it, and then how you can use it in your life. Or it might be something like the stone turquoise, and what that means. It's very cool. I wish it was still in print. Maybe you can find it in the future someday. But I did notice on her therapy website, she comes out with a seasonal zine in blog form, and it goes into a lot of cool things about mythology and symbolism and seasonal living. I'll link to that in the show notes, so you can get a taste of what that is like. 

Another one that is unfortunately out of print is the Daily Tending deck by Mara Glatzel, who you probably know that I love. This is a set of prompts for self care and self kindness. She has a course called Daily Tending that I think came out of these cards, so check that out. I'll put the link in the show notes for that, too. That course looks like it's email-based and gives you a prompt every day. So that looks very cool. 

Another one that's newer to me is the Nature Nurture deck by Marcella Kroll, or Marcella, I'm not sure how she pronounces her name. I haven't used this one as much because it's newer to me, but I’m really enjoying the art and the symbolism. It's multicolored in sort of an abstract way, but with a lot of black accents, very cool and dramatic looking. She describes this as: “created with the highest intentions, Nature and Nurture is the idea of bringing education, healing and awareness to the subjects painted in the deck, focusing on nature, animals and archetypes that might soon be extinct if humanity continues consuming and abusing our resources, as well as forgetting where we came from.” So I love that idea of reconnecting with ancestral wisdom and remembering where we came from, so that we can work together and hopefully renew the Earth. Very cool. 

On that nature theme, the Fleurot deck by Stephanie McKenna is also really cool. It mixes the Victorian language of flowers, and all the symbolism of that, with the traditional tarot deck. It has beautiful gold line drawings that illustrate each flower or plant. She was inspired by the book, The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, which I read and really enjoyed. It's set in the Bay Area where I live, so that's always fun to kind of know where some of the places mentioned in a book are. But in the book, someone is communicating via the language of flowers, like, if you give someone a certain kind of flower, it means a certain kind of feeling.

There's a little glossary in that book about what they all mean, but in the Fleurot deck, Stephanie also includes a guidebook to let you know what all of this symbolism means. I find that really fun to learn about new plants and what they mean to different people. It was extra fun, because I actually know Stephanie in real life, she lives near me in Oakland. So I got to order this deck from her during the pandemic and go pick it up from her and talk to a human outside - that was in the summer of 2020 when we were more starved for interaction than we are now, probably. I don't want to speak for anyone, but kind of the general feeling. 

Going back to the creative side of things, I really love the Sacred Creators Oracle by Chris-Anne. Her name is @pixiecurio on Instagram, and she's been around for a long time. She also created the Muse Tarot, which I don't have, but I definitely want to get. I love the Sacred Creators Oracle, because it's very encouraging. If I'm having a day where I wake up, and I feel like, “I can't do this today, I'm too tired,” I like to pull a card from that deck. It always has some kind of thing for you to think about, like collaboration, or recognizing your own power or something like that. The guidebook with it has prompts for questions to ask yourself, so you can go deeper to work through whatever challenges coming up in your creative process or in your business. And of course, if you're creating a business, that's a creative process, too, but you know, you might be on one side or the other of that. So I really liked that one. 

Another one on the creative side of things is the Creative Whack Pack by Roger Von Oech, I don't know if I'm saying his last name right at all. This deck looks like it's about 30 years old, and it was actually created here in the Bay Area. I got these from a departed friend of mine, she was also a coach, and she was giving away some of her things when she was sick and knew that she wouldn't be returning to coaching again. So this deck feels really special to me, because that was the last time I saw her, when she came to give me those cards. I just started using them as creative prompts for composing recently. They feature insightful ideas from great thinkers, great doers throughout history, and he divides them into four different suits: the Explorer, the artist, the judge, and the warrior, which is very cool. I'm saying “very cool'' for all of these, but I do think they're all very cool. 

That's the one I maybe feel the least connected with so far, because it has fewer spiritual elements, but I'm gonna give it time and see what unfolds. I always like having as many tools and resources as possible, because maybe you feel more like one on one day and like a different one on a different day. It's good to have a library full of stuff. A

Lastly, this is actually not an oracle deck at all, but I use it in that way. It's the book Grapefruit by Yoko Ono: A Book of Instruction and Drawings. She describes it, or the publisher describes it, as a whimsical, delightful, subversive and startling book of instructions for art and for life. So if you know anything about Yoko Ono, she's a very conceptual artist. Some stuff is more out there and hard to understand, which I'm not saying is a bad thing at all, but you know, it's not for everyone, maybe. I really like it, and I've really liked it since I was in high school when my mom got me a copy of this book. At that time, I was getting really into photography, and I think I had enjoyed a show, maybe, of Fluxus artists and similar stuff that featured some of Yoko Ono's work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. 

I've had this book for over 20 years at this point. I forgot about it for a long time, and I just pulled it out again. I opened to a page and used that as a prompt for composing. It was really fun lately when I opened one page that was about the moon, and it was right after I had gotten my new cat Tsuki and his name means moon in Japanese. So I was like, “Oh, I have to write a Brazilian choro about Tsuki and it's called Patas de Problemas or Troublepaws. 

If you want to hear me talk more about my creative process, and specifically that piece, I'm sharing a sneak peek along with playing some of it and explaining how it came about in the Compassionate Creativity Club community, which if you're listening to this when it comes out on May 6, is still free to look at. So, check that out if you want to go deeper into my Tsuki the cat piece. It's been really fun to use that book, because sometimes something that's difficult to understand is actually a better creative prompt because it makes you think more deeply. Like, okay, this is about the moon, that one was more literal, but some of them are more conceptual and you're like, “Alright, how would this relate to something I want to create right now?” 

So if you're intrigued by using tarot decks or oracle decks in your creative process, I hope this has given you a bunch of new ones to check out. I know once I got into this medium, I just keep finding out about new ones, and I have a really long list of new ones that I want to get. I'll try to collect them slowly so as to not go broke, but let me know if you have any of these decks and you really like using them. Or if you pick one up, inspired by the episode, and you start using it, I would love to hear what you're doing with it, and about what you're making.

I hope you consider joining us in the Compassionate Creativity Club, and joining us for the show and tell call on May 19. You can look in the show notes for all of that. So thank you so much for listening as usual, and I will see you next time.