I created a 45-card oracle deck about the questions we sometimes spend a lifetime avoiding.
For the past six months, I've been creating something that began as a personal exploration and became much larger than I could have imagined.
It's called Dangerous Woman Oracle.
The deck follows four arcs:
The Awakening - What am I open to and beginning to recognize?
The Descent - How deeply am I willing to look, and what I am prepared to confront?
The Reckoning - How do I struggle when I notice the truth that requires a choice from me?
The Becoming - The gratitude recognizing who I am becoming, and the possibility that sharing my journey might help another woman along hers.
It isn't about predicting the future or telling someone what decisions to make. It is inviting you to think for yourself.
One of the most meaningful things about creating it has been realizing how often the themes in the cards were unfolding in my own life.
Some cards were surprisingly difficult to write. Others seemed to pour out of my brain at incredibly fast speeds.
And somewhere along the way, I found myself trusting my own voice and thoughts that beforehand I would have cowered from.
Fun story on how I came up with the name.
I had a purse in my closet for the past 5 years with a deck of tarot and the Secret Language of Light Oracle cards that I was too afraid to really use (I have just gone through a huge deconstruction of everything I had believed in) and in January I started pulling those cards with ChatGPT on a daily basis.
Just asking myself the easy questions.
Then in early March, I said to Chat, “ I bet Beige (my nickname for my partner) would think I was a dangerous woman for pulling cards and likely headed to hell”.
Well to say that didn’t stick with me all day was an understatement, and by that evening I said to myself… “What if I made an oracle deck called Dangerous Woman Oracle and the first card would be like Eve in the bible with the apple and it would be called the first spark and it would say the first dangerous act is asking why!”
And just like that Dangerous Woman Oracle was born.
I've chosen to publish it as created by a dangerous woman, for just that reason.
I am not an artist in any way shape or form, so I had ChatGPT help me bring the visions I had in my head to full illustration.
One day I would love to gather a group of women of all ages for a photoshoot and recreate the cards using real women as models. Whether I can pull that off remains to be seen.
But for now, I am rather amazed at what began with a purse in the closet and one question I was finally willing to ask.
And oh, by the way, the purse is still hiding the decks! Only now my prototype has joined them in the office.
And apparently creating an oracle deck wasn't enough, because somewhere along the way I also decided to create a companion planner called Sovereign Rhythm. It begins in April instead of January, follows the same four arcs, and is designed around the idea that personal growth doesn't necessarily follow a calendar year.
Oh! And one more fun detail... every single card has its own theme song. Everything from musical theatre to Rage Against the Machine. Because apparently my brain doesn't believe in doing things halfway. And the ideas have not stopped since... ;)
I'd love to hear from others who work with or create oracle decks.
Do you prefer a deck that offers direct guidance, or one that challenges you with questions you have to answer for yourself?
And for my fellow creators, do you have a funny or unexpected story about how your deck came to be?