Awakening Alice, Where my oracles began.

My oracles did not begin as a business idea.

They began as a question.

A question that followed me quietly for years until I finally had the courage to face it:

Who am I?

In 2021, when I enrolled in my Master’s in Fine Art, that was the only real question I carried with me. Not how to make a career. Not how to impress. Just who am I beneath the roles, the expectations, the survival patterns?

It was my own “caterpillar moment.”

The voice asking, Who are you?

That period of study became a psychological and spiritual excavation. I began to look at identity not as a fixed thing, but as a layered construct shaped by family, culture, trauma, and collective systems. I realised how early we are taught to suppress our intuition, our sensitivity, our inner knowing. We are trained to fit, to behave, to perform, to survive.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to distrust our own consciousness.

Yet consciousness is our superpower.

Our awareness.

Our perception.

Our ability to feel truth in our bodies before our minds can name it.

My work became a self-led discovery into this human psyche. Not just my own, but the collective one. I saw how we inherit stories, fears, and masks. How we perform versions of ourselves to be accepted. How easy it is to forget who we were before the world told us who to be.

From that space, Awakening Alice was born.

The original artwork for the Awakening Alice card back was never meant as a product. It was a personal symbol, a mirror for my own journey. A way to tell my story visually when words were not enough. Alice wandering through illusion, questioning reality, meeting strange guides and shadowy characters, it mirrored the inner landscape I was navigating.

My book began forming from this time. It is still unfolding, because some truths take longer to accept. Healing is not linear. Understanding yourself is not a straight path. It loops, spirals, collapses, rebuilds.

And yes, sometimes the sprites and gremlins appear, the inner critics, the mockers, the parts of the psyche that laugh at our attempts to build a life while seeing through the illusions of the world. I’ve learned not to silence them, but to listen to what they reveal.

Over time, the deck I created for myself became worn, tatty, imperfect. But it became a tool, a mirror. Through it, I found I could read for others at a deep level. Not because I had special powers, but because symbols open doors. They bypass the noise and speak to the subconscious.

The cards became a language.

A way for people to see themselves.

A way for stories to surface.

A way for truth to peek through gently.

Now, I am weaving Alice and her wonderland into a full tarot system of my own. Not to copy tradition, but to translate it through my lived experience. Through metaphor. Through story. Through soul.

When this deck is complete, it will be available for others, alongside a tarot course that grows with the learner. Not me as the authority, but as a guide walking beside them. Learning, exploring, questioning together.

The Awakening Alice card back remains on all my oracles for one reason:

It reminds me, and anyone who holds them, that we are not separate.

We are threads in the same tapestry of consciousness.

Individual stories, shared human experience.

We are each Alice in our own way.

Curious. Lost. Brave. Becoming.

And perhaps the real awakening is remembering who we were before the world told us who to be.