I learned to read Tarot cards before I could read books. Thanks, Mom. While other five-year-olds were learning to share crayons, I was learning that the Tower card means someone’s about to have a very interesting week.
In our house, this wasn’t weird. What was weird was that the neighbors didn’t have an occult library in their living room. The neighbor called our apartment “the witches’ den.” Maybe as a joke. Maybe not entirely. Mom had ordered that first deck from Germany via Belgrade and waited six weeks to receive it. 1982. Yugoslavia. Customs probably had questions.
The cards stayed. Through classical gymnasium (translating Homer and Sophocles while secretly wondering if the Greeks had a spread for that). Through journalism school. Through a decade of media work where my official job was “reporter” and my unofficial job was “person everyone tells their secrets to for some reason.”
The questions beneath the questions.
Here’s what nobody warned me about mixing Tarot with press credentials: actors would walk in for standard PR interviews and walk out having told me about their divorces, their addictions, that thing they swore they’d never say on record.
A pop star asking me about death fifteen minutes into what was supposed to be an album promo.
(The album was fine. She just needed to talk about her grandmother. We all have priorities.)
I was good at journalism. The fluorescent lights were killing me slowly. The PowerPoint presentations were killing me faster. And somewhere around year eight, I started wondering if maybe I should just… do the thing I’d been doing since I was five. Officially. With a website and everything.
Cards on the table.
Eventually, I made it official. Cards on the table, literally. People on the other side of them, finally allowed to ask what they actually wanted to know instead of what looked good on a press release.
Turns out what people actually want to know is: why does my life feel like this and what do I do now and am I crazy or is something actually shifting. Same questions whether you’re a cleaner or a CEO. The only difference is the vocabulary.
Three years of Shiatsu school cracked something open along the way. I needed to understand why things shift. Why breath, movement and attention can change the way an experience feels. Why understanding a pattern and finding a different response can seem like two entirely separate departments.
And then came the books.
So I started researching. Neuroscience. Polyvagal theory. Quantum physics. Field theory. Why some things work even when the story around them is obviously made up. And then I started writing it all down.
My books grew around those questions: how we repeat patterns, how we experience desire and relationships, what sensitivity feels like from the inside, and how Tarot can become a language for reflection and embodied choice. The writing moves between research, lived observation, symbolic imagination and a persistent refusal to let a beautiful explanation end the inquiry.
Twenty-six books later, the questions still have my attention. So do the small, ordinary moments in which a reader recognizes something familiar and finds another way to respond.
The credentials paragraph.
A classical education with too much Greek tragedy. A journalism degree from the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb. A decade in Croatian media. Three years of Shiatsu. Decades of Tarot, including years of professional readings. A lifetime of being the person strangers tell their secrets to in grocery store lines.
Your brain needed this paragraph, so here it is, filing its taxes and wearing sensible shoes.
Fair warning.
Reading my work may result in: the uncomfortable realization that some of your assumptions aren’t actually yours. A dramatically reduced tolerance for spiritual bypassing (including your own). Spontaneous laughter at patterns that used to make you cry. The weird sensation of your body relaxing because someone finally said the thing out loud.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
Dea