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BTP49: The Divine Magic of Tarot and Oracle Cards with Alana Fairchild

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Alana Fairchild is one of Australia’s most respected and innovative metaphysical teachers. She is an oracle goddess, having created some of the best and most Divine oracle decks available, including my personal favourites, the Sacred Rebels, Rumi and Kuan Yin Oracle.

Alana has a unique approach to her work, combining music, dance, voice, channelling, sacred ritual and energy work to create a powerful experience of the divine. Join me as I welcome one of my personal heroes to the Podcast, and we delve into her mission to bring light and healing to the world.

In this episode, you’ll learn….

  • My personal epiphany about my soul mission and how it re-connected me to Biddy Tarot (all thanks to attending a workshop with Alana Fairchild in 2015)
  • How Alana channels the divine to create her beautiful oracle decks
  • Why the oracle cards opens up a path for healing and transformation
  • How Tarot readers can use the oracle cards in their spiritual practice

Additional Resources:

Podcast Transcript

Brigit:  You’re listening to the Biddy Tarot Podcast, and this is Episode 49: The Divine Magic of Tarot and Oracle Cards with Alana Fairchild.

Voice-Over

Welcome to the Biddy Tarot podcast, where you will learn how to connect more deeply with your intuition and live an empowered and enlightened life with the Tarot cards as your guide.

Listen as Brigit and her guests share their very best tips and strategies to help you read Tarot with confidence. And now, here is your host Brigit Esselmont.

Introduction

Brigit:  Hello and welcome back to the Biddy Tarot podcast. As always, it's my absolute pleasure to have you here and to be talking Tarot with you today.

I have one of my favorite spiritual teachers as a guest today. Her name is Alana Fairchild and is one of Australia’s most respected and innovative metaphysical teachers.

She is an Oracle goddess, having created some of what I believe are the best and most divine Oracle decks available, including my personal favourites, the Sacred Rebels, Rumi and the Kuan Yin Oracle.

Alana has a unique approach to her work and she combines music, dance, voice, channeling, sacred ritual and energy work to create a really powerful experience of the divine.

I've played with her Oracle decks, in fact, I've got them powered up here right in front of me. I've also attended her in-person workshops. I can tell you I've had some of the most profound experiences in those workshops. It's really been what has also fuelled my passion for Biddy Tarot.

One of the workshops that Alana ran was with Isis, the goddess Isis. In this, we went into a very deep meditation. Actually at a time with Biddy Tarot, I was kind of questioning whether would I be doing this for a long time or would I be moving on to something else.

Anyway, I went into this meditation and I was taken back hundreds of years ago, back to the time when women were persecuted for being witches and I was this woman who was being persecuted.

What I experienced was this feeling of my power and my control taken away from me. I felt incredibly sad and just de-energized. I can't really explain that feeling that I felt.

But then we started to move through this process of where I harnessed the anger that was also associated with having my power taken away. The anger grew and grew but in this beautiful way that actually prompted me to take back that power.

What I felt by the end of this meditation process was in the here and now with Biddy Tarot, it's all about helping people reconnect with their power if it's been taken away from them. I felt so strongly motivated that I wanted to get rid of any fear around Tarot and of connecting with the divine in the ways that we do.

I can't explain to you how strong my feeling was that this was my sole mission now, to make Tarot truly accessible and make it normal and make it okay and to help people who read Tarot feel awesome about reading Tarot because I never want anyone to feel the way that I felt in this meditation where my power had been taken away and where I had almost been stripped bare.

I guess that's kind of a long way of giving you an introduction to Alana but this is why her work is so powerful because she holds the space for these kinds of experiences to happen. I would certainly say that also with her Oracle cards are incredibly healing and beautiful and delicious.

I was absolutely thrilled when Alana said yes to my invitation to come on to the Biddy Tarot podcast and let me welcome Alana to the Biddy Tarot podcast. Welcome.

Brigit: Welcome Alana. I am thrilled to bits to have you on the Biddy Tarot podcast.

Alana: Hi Brigit. It's lovely to be here.

Brigit: Wonderful. For those who may not know you, which is a terrible thing. I'm sure they're going to get to know you after this. What's kind of been your spiritual journey and how is that journey manifested through your work?

Alana: It's been a meandering path with many moments where I felt like I had no clue what I was doing, I have to say. But I suppose I'd describe it as something of a revelation.

It's been very much about communicating with higher guidance and the great beloved divine and then finding ways of sharing the messages that I received in a way that allows other people to develop their own connection, of course. But also to be able to kind of rest in the notion that my connection has provided me. I really just wanted to share it with others.

Brigit: Yeah. Every time I'm working with your Oracle cards and I'm reading the little book, I'm like, “Oh my goodness, I just read these words and it feels like I'm getting a healing light there and then.” I can just see how in alignment you are with that.

Alana: Thank you. That's really beautiful.

I remember actually when I was writing the Kuan Yin Oracle, which is the first deck that I wrote, it was all very new territory and I thought I'm just going to write exactly as spirit speaks to me. I thought I have no idea if it's a really small soul group that's going to connect with this or if anyone's going to really relate to it. I didn't know. I just thought I'm going to put that into the words.

I think when I hear people speaking the truth of the divine connection, you know as a reader, when that energy is there and when you feel it coming through. People are definitely healed by those words, by the energy and the truth and the quality of love that's within them.

Brigit: Yeah, absolutely. Alana, you also share a similar story to me where we've started our careers in the corporate space and then have shifted into much more of a spiritual space. Can you tell me a little bit about that journey for you?

Alana: Yeah, it was a little bit of a no-brainer to be perfectly honest.

I remember – because my corporate experience was basically completing a law degree and moonlighting very briefly in a corporate litigation department. It never felt right to me. I just remembered in law school getting busted in the middle of the litigations exam for reading a book on chakras. I thought well, the writing was on the wall a long time earlier.

To me, it never felt quite right for me to be in corporate. I'm a very free-spirited creative kind of personality, so working in something that was so structured. And a sense of structure that was imposed on me rather than something that I developed to support my own creativity, that was very difficult.

It was playing havoc with my health and my well-being and it just wasn't right for me. I understand for some people it is, but for me, every fiber of my being rebelled.

Brigit: Yeah. I can certainly relate with that as well. I always believe too that everything serves a purpose, so do you see now that you've fully devoted to spiritual work, do you see that corporate phase of you life, is that helping and supporting you now in sort of mysterious and magical ways?

Alana: Absolutely. I have found everything that happens in our life whether it appears to be right for us at the time or not, everything is divinely orchestrated by love. I just see the purpose and the usefulness of it.

Actually, when it really started to come through was when I was creating the online training program that I'm running, Soul Guidance and Sacred Mentoring. That just drew on every element of my experience in law and writing and corporate and the spiritual aspect to kind of bring it together and birth it. It is a massive project. I was very grateful, unexpectedly in the moments of pulling that together, the elements of law training, actually.

Brigit: Yeah. It's interesting how it just comes around and at the time you think, “I'm shutting out all of this part of my life and I'm saying goodbye to that,” but then it suddenly comes back to you and like, “Oh, okay. That's why I did that. Now it's helping me here.”

Alana: I think the universe has a loving sense of humor and really equips us so perfectly for everything that we need to take our journey even if our minds recoils at different elements of it. It's not always easy, but I do believe there's always a kindness underneath it all at these moments.

Brigit: Absolutely. These days I think you're quite well known for your Oracle decks. In fact, I've got four stacked up in front of me right here and I know you've got many more than just four of these. What's been sort of the inspiration for the Oracle decks?

Alana: They're a little bit like meeting a type of spirit guide. They have a theme and a quality and a lesson that sort of comes through.

Sometimes it happens I get the idea first and then it unfolds. Sometimes I see the arch and that then triggers the idea.

I think each one is its own little world. I kind of describe them like vitamins for the soul.  Sometimes people who are working with empowerment really want Isis or someone who's breaking free from feeling constrained and needing to liberate their individuality, they're really drawn to Divine Circus or if someone really wants to tap into the heart and the beautiful Divine mother, then they might be drawn to Kuan Yin Oracle or Mother Mary. They each have their own little world.

So the inspiration can come in any way and I just think the divine – you only have to look at Mother Nature really, but the divine is so diverse and surprising in its creativity and so beautiful. I'm just really open to whatever way that spiritual being becomes the deck, wants to present itself to me.

Brigit: Yeah, I think that's something that I really admire about your work is how well you do align and then channel with that sort of universal energy and then it produces the most beautiful things like the books that go along with the Oracle.

I know you're not the artist of the Oracle, but I'm sure that that is all part of this bigger picture. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous as well.

Alana: I was really blessed to work with those different artists. There's so much amazing art on the planet at this time. It's so exciting, the creative explosion that's happening to people all over the world.

Brigit: Yeah It's kind of this beautiful expression of the whole universal energy and it's expressed in so many different ways, which is absolutely gorgeous.

I often get asked this as a Tarot reader, how does the Oracle work and then how might it be different from Tarot? What's your perspective on that?

Alana: I was writing decks for a little while before I really began to understand – I still think there's an element of mystery to it, but before I began to sort of feel the truth of what was happening.

Because I kept getting these emails from people saying all these incredible things had happened from reading a card. One woman, I remember, emailed me from the States I think, saying that she'd overcome her fear of going to the dentist, which had plagued her, this poor woman, plagued her for her whole life. Then she did – in the Isis Oracle actually, a healing process and it just went, just went.

I mean I didn't know anything about teeth in the Isis Oracle. But I just realized that spirit is so incredibly intelligent beyond the definitions we currently have intelligence.

If there is purity in the heart connection, in the words that we say or the cards that we use, spirit has – you'd be amazed at the tiny little gateway and it will move through and connect with people and bring the truth of what's needed.

Sometimes as a reader, we're saying words and we're thinking, “Oh, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just going to go with it. I don't know if this person's going to think that I'm crazy.”

I know that the reader's that are listening to this will have had moments where it's those very things that the person turns around and says to them, “That has so much meaning for me. Thank you. That's really helped me what you said there.”

I think it's that purity that allows the spirit to just do what it does and it heals. It's the most amazing, creative, unpredictable, oh my goodness, it's so unpredictable. It's that live wire quality that I think makes it so beautiful and so reassuring because there's a sense that that spirit comes through with absolutely attentiveness and responsiveness to whatever it is that each one of us needs even if it seems so unimportant or not important enough or completely overwhelming and impossible to heal. It's that spirit knows what is needed and delivers this kindness.

I think an Oracle deck in the hands of a reader who is coming from a place of pure intention of wanting to assist someone, it's a very powerful tool a spirit to manifest in the space.

Brigit: Yeah, absolutely. The thing that I notice, again, more so as a Tarot reader, when I'm using Oracle cards I find the energy is really big and very fanatic, I suppose.

For me, it's kind of I can really only draw one Oracle card and I might be able to do ten Tarot cards. But the Oracle cards kind of feel like the main meal. You can only ever have one main meal unless you're really, really hungry. Whereas, the Tarot cards feel more like the ingredients of that meal and it can have a couple of ingredients and put those together.

How do you kind of work with the Oracle in that respect?

Alana: I really love what you said there. I know for me the Oracle cards generally I feel one is enough. Occasionally, I'll see people who want to work with maybe two or three. If you watch them, they're like “Oh, there's a lot to process here.” It can be challenging to work with too many cards at once.

The thing with the Tarot that I really love is just the archetypal energy, especially in the Major Arcana, but I wouldn't probably choose a lot of the Major Arcana all at once. I think those, in themselves, are something like Oracle cards. There's so many layers in there and there's such a way of healing for the soul at a really profound level, just even giving someone a Major Arcana and just saying just be with this for a moment and really drink it in, can be incredible.

Brigit: Yeah. Yeah. It's bringing me back to the templates that you have in the Sacred Mentoring Program. I'm part of that. I find it fascinating because being a Tarot reader, I'm used to just sit down, shuffle cards, lay them out, interpret them, put them back in a pile and we're done, more or less. Then I'm working with this template and it's one card and it's a whole hour-long process.

It's a completely different experience where I'm really diving into the one card and then really exploring the healing that's going on with that. I just find that process quite fascinating compared to sort of the – I don't want to say like a quick dash Tarot reading because it's not always that way. But maybe it's opening up the space to work with Tarot in that way as well.

Alana: Oh, absolutely. I think the soul of a reader who's really working from that deep place with intention to heal and to connect with the loving intelligence in the universe that mirrors that, that also wants to heal. They have a tremendous power and capacity to bring through not just information for a person, but an experience of the healing field.

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We have this ability and some of us are perhaps more aware of it than others but anyone who's receiving a reading or guidance from someone working with the Tarot, working with Oracle cards it doesn't have to be more in terms of the card to get deeper into the soul. I think sometimes one card can just really nail it.

We usually have a person in our lives, you go to them and you tell them a story and often it's a man because they have a different way of thinking lot of times. You just go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and talk for 25 minutes and then they'll just go, oh, it's blah. In one second, they'll just kind of nail it, just that one little issue that's coming up.

In a way, it's sort of like not that we can't have the depth and the diversity and the feminine soldier and all the experience and all the information, but when it comes down to it sometimes just that simplicity and that truth can be so powerful. That single message can be what the person really walks with and it can change their lives.

Brigit: Yeah. I think that becomes possible when there's so much, I want to say, power or something more than that, depth, I suppose, behind one card. You might even just see one word or one phrase on the card, but there's so much that sits behind that and perhaps energetically that's being fed through that particular phrase and then that's maybe the thing that just heals in magical ways.

Alana: Yeah I think that's so true. I think sometimes it can speak a book's worth of information in a couple words.

Brigit: Yeah. Oh, I just get so excited about all this stuff. It's wonderful.

You've also just launched the Divine Circus Oracle: tell me a little about that, where it came from, what it's intended to do.

Alana: I absolutely love this project. I tell, you it has driven me bonkers from the moment it first started to come into inception, which is actually quite a few years ago, in 2012.

It started out as a musical project, which it still is, but I've added this Oracle deck to it because it's really about unfettered creativity that comes from the soul and is about anchoring light, spiritual light through that process.

What I found with it is first of all, it's impossible to define, which why I think it's really been driving me nuts because people say, “What is it? What's this event?” And I'm like, “Look, I don't know. But come because you're going to have a great time. It will do these amazing things for your life.”

I'll get feedback from people who have come to events or worked with the deck that's just coming out and they're loving it. It's got this kind of excited, intangible, but really irreverent, feisty, rebellious, on steroids kind of energy about it. It's really about being your own unique, divinely defiant being.

I think we have to have sass. We have to have, in a loving way, a bit of attitude to be able to say to the forces of conformity in the world, and there's plenty of them, that are based in fear and want us to kind of keep our heads down and not see too much, and not know too much and sure as hell not say too much about the truth of what we see beyond these false perceptions that are perpetuated through media and so much nonsense, so much nonsense, just to stand up for the truth and claim and be and live that truth.

The Divine Circus is kind of about all of that really. But it's fun. I know people say don't take yourself seriously and I think well, in a way that's a load of hooey because you have to have seriousness and discipline to get anywhere on the spiritual path because there are times when it's just really hard work, but if we forget the joy and if we forget the fun, we're missing out on the other half of it.

The Divine Circus is really about playing and having fun and the joy of that silliness that sometimes it's like someone raging at you, blah, blah, blah, and you just stick your tongue out at them and burst into laughter and it's like it evaporates, the negativity, and the intensity. It just kind of dials it back. So that's the power of play.

Brigit: Yeah. Absolutely. It's kind of this dance between it is work that you need to be serious about, but it's also work that you need to play with. It sounds like two opposite ends of the spectrum, but I think they actually integrate quite nicely in the middle.

It sounds also quite similar to the Sacred Rebels deck, which is one that I've got which I love consulting and just that essence of how do you be your divine self whilst not sort of falling into that trap of conformity.

Alana:  Yeah. It was insane writing that deck. I actually rewrote it three times. I'm just so fortunate that I had such an understanding publisher. He an artist. He understands the creative process.

Because I kept submitting it and then saying hold on. It's something else. He'd go, “All right. Go back and rewrite it.” It just kept – I couldn't pin it down to say what it was until the final draft, then I realized it was all of these elements but in one.

I think Sacred Rebels is very much about not being afraid to be outside of your norm and it's really focused on creativity and empowerment, in particular.

Brigit: I think that's going to resonate a lot with a lot of Tarot readers and obviously in other fields as well because when I talk with Tarot readers, a lot of the feeling is, “Oh, I feel a bit weird reading Tarot,” or, “I told my Mom and now she thinks I worship Satan and something's gone wrong.”

Alana: I know. There's so much fear around Tarot.

I remember once dating this man years and years and years ago. The first time he came to my place, he walked inside and he saw a deck of Tarot cards on my table. He just said, “Oh. That's against God.” I was thinking, when's the last time you read the Bible. He wasn't even a religious person and he was completely freaked out.

I thought wow, how much fear has been cultured over feminine power. The Tarot, to me, is a key to feminine power. I don't mean men can't have it as well. It's for men and women, but being able to see into the language and the world of the soul.

Tarot really speaks at that fundamental level of the soul. That's why it's so powerful. I think why there are a lot of forces in this world that like to veil the powerful doorways to love with fear and encourage people to think that way. It's done in this subtle way. It's so pervasive.

I think it's really important that if you are on that path and feeling a bit like a weirdo or whatever, you've got to embrace the fabulous fringe dweller. You've got to find that part of you that says I am unafraid.

And rather than cowering when someone freaks out, just standing in that strength and saying to them, “Hey, why not join me over here? It's a lot more fun. You don't have to be scared. You don't have to be scared. There's discoveries to make. It will be great.”

Brigit: I always find it funny when people say, Tarot is about Satan or that's against God because when I'm reading with Tarot, I feel so connected to the Divine. I couldn't be closer to the Divine at that point.

I think you're right in terms of this sort of sacred, feminine energy and at some point in time, a few hundred years ago, we kind of lost track of it and placed fear-based belief systems around it that I just don't are accurate of what Tarot is really about and other similar practices as well.

Alana: Yes, fear loves to stick itself to things. That's what it does. It's like dust really. Soul dust. It likes to accumulate and stick to things, but it's not necessarily a true reflection. Dust on something tends to obscure it. You can't actually see what it is. I never base things on the response. I actually check first, you need to see what the truth is underneath and trust my heart. What do I feel?

When I tune into Tarot when I work with Tarot, I'm like you. I feel connected to this loving universal intelligence that's saying whatever it is that's bothering you, whatever it is that you're seeking, whatever questions you have, let's unveil. Let me bring you the information and the knowledge and the wisdom and the journey that you need. It's so loving. It's really nothing to be afraid of actually.

Brigit: Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that there's anything that we can do to positively shift perceptions or do you think it's more of an organic process that will happen over time?

Alana: I think it's a bit of both of that. I'm a big believer in giving destiny a hand. I think the way we move when we are plugged into the truth of our soul and open to the loving presence spirit and then through how we are, how we live our life, what we choose to say, what we choose to do, I think we are the tide changes.

I'm not waiting for a great thing from the sky to descend and take over human free will and change the world for us. I'm wanting that beautiful vein to be in our hearts and that sort of stuff you do in your heart.

Brigit: Yeah, absolutely. Wonderful. What other projects are you working on because I know you've always got something simmering away. What's on your plate?

Alana: I do have a lot that I'm working on at the moment. I have another deck that's coming out The Lightworker Oracle which is really kind of moving on a little from the Crystal Mandala Oracle which is so beautiful.

I'm really very touched by that project and this one as well, both written by quite high-level guidance. In fact, when I was writing the Crystal Mandala Oracle, there was a whole story which I won't go into now because of the time factor, but the short version is I had to write it very quickly. So I actually channeled it in ten days. It was a longer deck than normal decks, so it was all really, just quite unbelievable.

Because I was channeling for ten or twelve hours at a time, my crown chakra was really over stimulated and there was times when it was like I was drunk. I could hardly stand up, sort of be stumbling away from the computer to go to bed. It was just crazy.

I remember my publisher saying to me in the editorial process, “Oh this is great. How did you write this? There's virtually no mistakes.” I said, “Look, I'm sorry. But I can't do that to my body all the time.” I can't write like that normally, but for that one, it just needed to be done quickly and the frequency was very high. The same with the Lightworker Oracles.

I guess it's just trusting it. I think our body knows which vitamins it needs and our soul knows which Oracle decks are going to work for us at a given time. I'm really happy that that's coming out at quite a high frequency.

Brigit: Yeah. It's fascinating. The way that you produce things is very inspiring.

Alana: Thank you.

Brigit: I'm lucky enough to be in Australia where you're running a lot of your workshops as well. How do you decide I've got to do a workshop on this?

Alana: Oh, that's spirit. Most of the time I never do what I'm told, but when it comes to spirit I try to always do what I'm told, so it just sort of emerges.

They are very unexpected for me too. I've started doing very loving dance rituals and things that are quite beautiful in a lot of my workshops now. It's been amazing just seeing what that does for people. And burst into tears of joy or song. Start singing when they haven't sung before. These amazing things happen.

To me, I just feel very humbled by it, to be honest, that spirit manifests in that way.

I have like a workshop set around – I am working on a specific training program for Oracle card readers. You are the first person that I've told about it.

Brigit: Who-hoo!

Alana: It's still kind of on the works, but be something else in that in due course.

Brigit: Wonderful. Excellent. Folks who are listening if you're in Australia and you can get to a workshop, I highly recommend it. I've been to two and I've just had some very, very powerful experiences.

I just love the depth that they go into without over doing it. I don't know how to explain that. You don't set up these really complicated things, but the space that's held there allows you to go very deep. They were absolutely magical.

Alana: I'll be heading over to the States at some point in the near future as well, so hopefully I'll be able to connect with people in a workshop space there as well.

Brigit: Wonderful, yes. Because I know most of our Biddy Tarot community is based in the US so that will be very good news. Absolutely.

Alana, where can people find out more about you?

Alana: Easiest place is probably the website, which is just AlanaFairchild.com.

Brigit: Wonderful. We'll make sure that's in our show notes as well. Thank you so much, Alana. I've enjoyed our conversation so very much, it feels like it was 2 minutes, not 25.

Alana: It's really lovely to talk with you. I can hear your passion that comes through. It's wonderful.

Brigit: Oh, thank you very much. All right. Be well.

Alana: You too my dear.

Brigit: Okay.

Wrap-Up

There you have it. That's Alana Fairchild talking about, not just Tarot and Oracle, but the absolute deliciousness of the Divine and how the Divine works. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. It was an absolute joy.

If you loved this podcast episode, head on over to iTunes and leave a review. You can also subscribe to get the latest podcast and never miss out on an episode.

It's been my absolute joy as always to be talking with you and talking about Tarot. I can't wait to connect again next time, so bye for now.

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