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I grew up being told tarot was evil. Demonic, devilish, the kind of thing a good Christian kid stayed well away from. For years, I did.
What I didn’t know then was that I’d spend the next two decades chasing the same thing through completely different systems. Prayer. Meditation. A pendulum in a valley in Valencia. And eventually, a tarot deck handed to me by a friend during a pandemic, with the words: “You’re actually really good at this.”
This is how I got here.
Where I Started
Charismatic Christianity and What It Gave Me
For the first twenty-odd years of my life, Christianity was how I understood the world. I was deep in it. Not just Sunday services. I was doing the charismatic stuff: praying for people, words of knowledge, healing. I genuinely felt like I was connecting to something when I did that work. I still think I was. The language and rituals of the church gave me a framework for the big questions, a sense of something larger, and a place within it.
When you’re young and the world is confusing, that kind of structure is genuinely comforting. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t useful, because it was. But structures that fit when you’re eighteen don’t always hold as the questions get harder.
The First Crack
I was 18 at Soul Survivor, a huge annual Christian festival for young people held in Somerset. Thousands of us, charismatic worship, the full thing. I was working on the Fringe team doing detached youth work. We ran a session called Grill a Christian. One afternoon, a girl came in with a sign that said “I’m gay and Christian. Problem?” with a question mark.
She asked whether it was wrong for her to sleep with her partner.
I gave the standard evangelical answer. Sex is for marriage, gay people can’t get married, therefore it’s wrong. That was what I’d been taught. That was the framework doing its job.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her for a year. That one question, that one person, kept coming back to me. I started researching. Found blogs and writing that challenged the usual readings on homosexuality. Started pulling at the threads of what I’d been told.
The year after, I saw her at the same festival. Someone there had given her homophobic abuse. I helped her get support, and I apologised for the answer I’d given her the year before. But what I remember most clearly is sitting with the realisation that the framework I’d been defending was the same one that had hurt her. I’d stood in that room and given the answer it required. I wasn’t separate from the harm. I was part of it.
What Finally Broke It
Years of Pulling at Threads
The deconstruction that followed wasn’t quick. From my late teens through to my mid-twenties, I kept questioning, kept finding places where the answers I’d been given didn’t fit the reality in front of me. The church had always told me it had the answers. The more I looked, the less I believed that.
What I never lost was the sense that there was something real underneath all of it. The connection I felt when I was praying for people, when something seemed to actually land, that wasn’t nothing. I just stopped trusting the system that claimed to be the only way to access it.
Walking Out of HTB Focus
The end came sharply. I was at HTB Focus. HTB is Holy Trinity Brompton, one of the most prominent Anglican churches in the UK, probably best known internationally for creating the Alpha Course. Focus was their annual summer conference for church members. That year the main speakers were Bill and Beni Johnson from Bethel Church in California.
The Johnsons had publicly backed Donald Trump during his first Presidential run. Not from the stage that day, just out in the world, clearly and publicly, the kind of backing you don’t quietly walk back. And here was Nicky fucking Gumbel handing them a platform.
A group of us walked out. I’d spent years watching the framework I’d grown up in tell a girl her love was sinful, exclude people, draw tighter and tighter lines around who was in and who was out. Seeing my church platform people who’d thrown their weight behind Donald Trump, someone who embodied everything I’d been trying to reconcile with what Jesus actually taught, was the final nail in an already ready-to-bury coffin. I didn’t want to be inside this anymore.
By my mid-twenties, I was out. Not angry, not dramatically. Just done. The framework had stopped fitting and I’d stopped pretending it did.
Finding Something Real
Valencia and Alain
I didn’t leave the church looking for something to replace it. I just needed space. For a while I wasn’t sure what I believed, and I think that was okay. I still felt like there was something bigger. I just didn’t have a framework for it anymore, and I wasn’t in a rush to build one.
In 2018, I went on a retreat with Alain Tello Robledo, the founder of AtelTrainer, in Valencia. I’d drifted toward meditation as a way of holding onto some version of the inner stillness I’d had in prayer. What I found there was more than I expected.
The Pendulum
Part of the work with Alain involved using a pendulum, both during meditation practice and as part of the ancestral healing treatments he offered alongside acupuncture. I hadn’t expected the pendulum to be the thing that clicked for me. But it forced me to stop and actually listen. To bypass the noise in my head and hear what my intuition was already trying to say. When it moved, I wasn’t consciously directing it. Something deeper was connecting to something I’d been too busy to hear.
That quality of attention, that sense of something larger, it was the same thing I’d felt doing the charismatic stuff at church. Same signal. Different frequency. Same connection, no doctrine required.
How Tarot Found Me
The Pandemic Reading
Then the pandemic hit. A friend from my bubble came over and gave everyone readings. It was interesting but it didn’t quite land. Then a different friend gave me a reading at her place, and that one actually did. She asked if I wanted to try giving her a reading back.
I did. And she said: “You’re actually really good at this.”
That was it. That was the thing that made me take it seriously.
The Fifth Spirit Tarot
The first deck I properly connected to was the Fifth Spirit Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess. I’d seen Kevin Garcia using it and it felt right somehow. Then I found out Charlie Claire Burgess is also non-binary. That mattered more than I expected. It felt less like picking up someone else’s framework and more like something I could actually inhabit.
By the time I was reading regularly, something had become clear. The thing I was connecting to through tarot was the same thing I’d connected to through prayer and meditation. It had always been there. The systems I used to access it had changed, but the signal itself hadn’t.
Why I Read Tarot
Tarot didn’t give me a new religion. It gave me a more honest way of paying attention. A way of sitting with someone, looking at what’s actually there, and helping them understand their situation more clearly. No certainty handed down from above. No framework that tells you who’s in and who’s out.
That matters to me because I’ve seen what the other thing looks like.
If you’re curious about tarot and want to explore it for yourself, Simply Tarot is where I teach it. No scripts, no dogma, just your relationship with the cards.
