(Re)Introduction: Intuitive Strategies Network
🗣️ Psst…the waitlist is OPEN for Intuitive Strategies Network, my community for leftists to deepen their intuition and merge it with their work in the world. Learn more and sign up here
image: two Black folks laughing together. the person on the left has mid-back length wavy hair, a purple button up crop top, a bejeweled statement necklace, and purple plaid bottoms on. their arm is around the waist of someone with bantu knots, a yellow shirt, and yellow and pink earrings. they are in front of a pink and purple grainy background.
The Purpose: Why Build Intuition Now?
I don't have to tell you that the world is on fire. You know that, and I know that you know.
There's genocides in every corner of the globe. Most of them are funded by the money that could be feeding our children.
Trans people, like myself, are endangered from every side. People can't decide whether to renew their passports or build a bunker under their basement.
The wise and resourced opt for both.
It's understandable to wonder how intuition can help any of this. That's because it's spoken about and taught as though it can't.
The spiritual renaissance of the post-Lemonade moment is dying down. Not because people are less interested in connecting with spirit. Because they're jaded, burnt out, unemployed, and tired of getting scammed.
Much of what passes for spirituality is microwaved lifestyle content, capitalist approaches to manifestation, and ableist bullshit. So how can intuition help anyone now?
What can intuition do about any of this?
I hear this often, both explicitly and implicitly. Mostly from cis men, but not just them.
The way that many activists believe everyone else in the movement is here to serve them is telling. We're here to serve each other. To lift each other up. To be, as Gwendolyn Brooks called us to be, each other's business.
Intuition strengthens and empowers our movements through new ways of knowing. Intuition fuels innovation. Intuition can help us move through burnout, and see it coming.
Intuition can help us identify threats to community. Intuition can help us protect ourselves from bad actors at actions. Intuition can help us root out predatory mindsets and abuses of power before they take root.
Intuition can make us more present to the needs of the people who make our movements, and to the goals of movements themselves.
Intuitive tactics can be part of larger intuitive strategies that meet perfectly real and tangible goals.
They can be part of our arsenal of tactics overall. It's not either/or, it's not a binary or a hierarchy. It's one more thing that helps us fight.
It could even be our secret advantage.
After all, it has been so many times before.
image: a Black person's hand reaching around on a fuzzy pink rug for playing cards.
The Shift: Why I'm Realigning Tarot In Community → Intuitive Strategies Network
In 2023, I changed the name of this service from Temperance Queer Tarot to Collective Cartomancy.
That name change wasn't a "rebrand." It was an attempt to bring greater honesty and purpose to my work.
I've been reading playing cards, of which Lenormand cards are related, for years. I was offering them in readings. Yet I was still calling myself a tarot reader.
There's tension in claiming correctly. I didn’t want to exaggerate, and I couldn’t afford to minimize myself any longer. The new name is and was the right size for the work I do, and my particular why.
Moving my service name from "tarot" to "cartomancy" did some of that. But like every big shift, it created others.
I was called to continue being honest about what I offer, and what we do together as readers, clients, students, and community members.
My work as a two-headed womanman has always sat alongside my work in movements for justice. I've had the privilege to share what I know in spaces from the Allied Media Conference to BYP100 study groups, to queer therapy conferences.
I've worked with my clients to create these shifts in their own lives, and worked with students to apply this perspective to their work in the world.
So why was I still positioning Tarot in Community, one of my most beloved offerings, as the sum of its parts?
To answer that question, I had to face some fundamental fears. The fear that doing my work will mean punishment. The fear that if I'm honest about the impact I want most I'll be rejected.
But who does that serve? Not my communities. Not the movements that nurture me, and that are my responsibility to nurture. Not my students. And not me.
So today, it's with humility and hope that I (re)introduce the Intuitive Strategies Network.
The quality of the services is as high as ever. Yet the perspective I invite you to about the offering has shifted. Let me show you what I mean:
image: three Black people dressed in black shirts.
The Community: Goals + Strategy + Tactics + Collectivity
We collectively have the answers to what ails us. So where do we go to learn these tactics and tools? With whom do we develop these strategies? Where can we practice?
Intuition and other spiritual gifts are often marginalized in patriarchal movements. Sidelined at best. Scoffed off at worst.
Certain sects of organizers are so anti-religion they lump other kinds of spirituality in with Christianity. Some just think it's bunk.
Yet as a Black person, applied intuition is my history. It's also my mission and my purpose.
I've worked with Black women leaders to interrupt cycles of burnout that are inherent to the non-profit industrial complex. I've worked with activists to investigate power through tarot's imperialist archetypes.
And, as you know because you're reading this, I've publicly taught these things through the internet.
It's the core of what we do in Intuitive Strategies Network, formerly Tarot in Community.
It's a space where folks committed to these strategies come to think through how intuition influences our work in the world.
That's not changing. That's getting deeper and more serious.
After a year of doing this work together, this is me telling you where it's heading. This is us turning an eye towards implementation when it seems like we need it the most.
That implementation looks like a quarterly theme broken down into three, interactive workshops and one comprehensive course.
It looks like a monthly reading swap where you can hone your skills and get some answers and learn precise spreads.
It looks like weekly questions in the feed, and posts about intuitive solutions to practical problems.
It looks like a monthly study group where we devour full books and blog posts with equal rigor and curiosity.
It's spirituality for nerds. It's serious and jokey in turns. It's a purposeful group of people.
image: a Black person in a yellow blazer and a blue tee shirt with a honey blonde afro talking on a cell phone.
The Costs Under Capitalism
I've been practicing intuitive social insertion in movement spaces for years. I've paid to be trained by Black women and fem/me teachers I trust. I've spent my whole life learning and honing these skills in my communities.
I would love to find a way to offer it freely, and also keep the lights on in the house I rent. If you know of a way, let me know. Even as we work to end capitalism, we must survive it. I don't know of a way to get around that yet.
In the meantime, one of the best parts of Intuitive Strategies Network is that this work is sustainable when it happens in community.
The costs can be low because it's split among many people.
The volume makes it accessible to more people. At least more accessible than a training that comes out of an organizational budget.
(Though I am available for organizational trainings and workshops. You can get in touch with me about those here.)
I look forward to a world where capitalism is gone and I can give freely to those around me.
Until then, let's hang out in Intuitive Strategies Network for the price of making coffee at home twice a week instead of going to whatever weirdly bespoke latte shop popped up overnight on the next block over.
That's probably a New York price, so TL;DR: it $55.00 per month or $560.00 per year.
image: a Black person's tattooed arm by a tea cup, a bowl of petals, and a candle over an indigo dyed cloth. They're wearing a variety of bangles and their nails are gold.
The Vision: Toward More Intuitive Movements
Do you know how to make non-profits obsolete? Do you know how to make a community garden not the weirdest and most authoritarian piece of land the world has ever known?
Do you know how to sort out an unending conflict with a dear comrade, or a close friend? Do you know how to leave the work you loved, but cannot continue, with grace instead of resentment?
Me neither, at least not all of them, but I think intuition is the key to figuring it out.
It's easy to run to self-help for these answers only to be disappointed again. It's easy to confuse a spiritual issue for one of another type. That confusion can lead us into crisis.
Intuition gives us knowing beyond our logical minds. It doesn't have all the answers, but neither does a book, or a teacher, or a professional, or any living person.
And unlike those options, the answer you find is bound to be authentic because it comes from you. You can wait in your own time to share it.
The more you understand it, the less urgency you'll feel around it.
Imagine movements for justice where you and everyone around you was making intuitive, authentic choices.
I won't claim to know exactly how we build such a movement. Thankfully, the building of it isn't all up to me. And it's certainly not all about me.
I grateful that our movements are about you, and me, and everyone we know.
If it sounds like I'm being vague it's because to name all our movements would be a disservice. I believe intuition is a fundamental part of EVERY movement. Yes, every movement.
I'm also rooted in the disability justice movement, which is a movement of many movements. And I came to disability justice through the Philadelphia chapter of Black Lives Matter.
I came to BLM Philly through sex worker activism, and I came to that through queer fem/me organizing. I came to queer fem/me organizing through student activism.
I came to student activism through my mother's work organizing Black lesbians in the 90s.
She came to her work through my grandmother working the polls to make sure everything was alright, and her grandmother deciding there should be and AME church in our town.
If you're reading this, I bet it would take you just as long to tell me how you came to the work you do. I assure you, folks are down to hear it in Intuitive Strategies Network.
And if you don't wanna get into all that, we're down to hear how your work involves, grows with, or would benefit from intuition. That's what the space is all about.
There's an app and you can get it on a browser too. There's four full classes and 11 monthly workshops. There's a year of timely spreads and thoughtful questions in there.
I'm proud of the work we've done together so far. I'm also excited to expand it with you, if you choose to jump in.
You read this long ass blog post, so you're probably in the right place lol. If you wanna learn more, read the details by clicking this link.
I genuinely hope to see you in Intuitive Strategies Network!
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.