Humans are wired for connection and to have some sense of spirituality, whether it’s directed at a particular deity, to nature, the moon phases, or to community. And when we lean into the parts of ourselves that believe in the magic of all we don’t know, we are stepping into our own intuitive magic.

I first learned about the term process-focused or process-oriented Tarot reading from Jessica Dore, a Tarot reader and teacher whose first book, Tarot for Change, just hit the shelves. Her approach is so much more intuitive than I had often seen when I was trying to leaf through guidebooks and memorize the meaning of each card. She offers Tarot the way I had already been reading it: by observing the images of each card and noticing what comes up.

Part of the reason there are so many different religious holidays in December is because of the magic of the winter solstice. All over the world, people light candles and bonfires at this time of year, gathering, feasting, and staying up late. The winter solstice is a powerful time of darkness, and darkness is often the place where magic happens.

Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell.