Over the decades, those questions have taken me through Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Oneness teachings, Science of Mind, Goddess spirituality, Greek stories, Paganism, Mysticism, and many other religious, spiritual, philosophical, and metaphysical traditions. I’ve read sacred texts, ancient teachings, modern interpretations, academic works, psychology, and philosophy. 

I spent my entire 20's buried in books while everyone else was out partying. 

Through all of it, two values have consistently risen to the top: Truth and Freedom.

I want to know what is true - or at least get as close to it as I reasonably can. And I believe people deserve the freedom to question what they’ve been taught, explore new ideas, change their minds, reject what no longer makes sense to them, and make their own choices about their lives.

Those values run through pretty much everything I create.

Find Your Path

My work has grown in a lot of directions over the years, but all of those directions are connected by the same basic idea: you get to decide what you want to explore and where you want to go next.

I teach Tarot, from learning how to read your first card to using Tarot for deeper personal exploration. I train professional Tarot Therapy Practitioners. I create continuing education for people who want to keep learning. I teach business, particularly for Tarot readers, spiritual practitioners, and people trying to turn the things they know and love into something sustainable. And then there’s The Library, where I put useful, interesting, magical, experimental, and occasionally ridiculous things that don’t necessarily belong anywhere else.

There isn’t one correct place to begin, and there isn’t one path you’re supposed to follow.

Explore. Experiment. Learn. Have fun. Find your path.

Learning Tarot

If you’re completely new to Tarot, or you’ve been staring at 78 cards wondering how anyone is supposed to remember all the meanings, Hello, Tarot! teaches the foundation you need to begin reading confidently and leads to Tarot Reader Certification. It has everything you need to get started, including a printable Tarot deck!

The Amethyst Tarot Method approaches reading from another direction. Instead of relying entirely on memorized definitions, it teaches you how to look at the card that is actually in front of you, notice what catches your attention, explore the possibilities, and determine which meaning fits the reading you’re doing.

Because I don’t want you to become dependent on me, a book, a cheat sheet, or anyone else to tell you what your cards mean forever. I want you to understand Tarot well enough - and trust yourself enough - to read the cards yourself.

And if you decide you want to go much deeper than reading Tarot, there’s another path waiting.

Tarot Therapy Certification

Tarot Therapy grew out of a different question: What if the purpose of the cards isn’t to give someone an answer, but to help them have a better conversation?

Tarot Therapy uses Tarot as a structured tool for reflection, exploration, pattern recognition, perspective, and intentional change. Instead of positioning the practitioner as the person who knows what the cards mean and therefore knows what someone else should do, Tarot Therapy puts the client’s own experience at the center of the work.

The client brings the life. The cards bring the imagery. The practitioner holds the process.

The Tarot Therapy Certification teaches practitioners how to facilitate that process thoughtfully and intentionally. We go far beyond learning a few therapeutic spreads or adding better questions to an ordinary Tarot reading. The Certification explores the foundations and philosophy of Tarot Therapy, ethics, scope of practice, therapeutic conversations, professional practice, the Life Map, complete Tarot Therapy sessions, and practical methods that can help clients move from insight toward meaningful integration and action. Plus how to bring spirituality into the conversations. 

Throughout the program, we return again and again to client agency and autonomy. The practitioner can offer questions, observations, perspectives, practices, and resources, but the practitioner does not become the authority on someone else’s life. The client remains the person who decides what something means, what matters, what fits, and what they want to do next.

The goal is to train Tarot Therapy Practitioners who can work with Tarot ethically, skillfully, and intentionally while respecting the values, beliefs, autonomy, and lived experience of the person sitting across from them.

And because becoming a good practitioner isn’t something you finish when somebody hands you a certificate, Continuing Education offers workshops and advanced training in Tarot, Tarot Therapy, the Life Map, business, and related areas for people who want to keep learning, exploring, and helping others.

Business & Spiritual Entrepreneurship

I like business.
I also like having enough resources to pay my bills.

Not having wealth sucks. Being homeless, living out of my car, and eating every other day at age 16 while I was trying to finish high school taught me that.

You can't spend enormous amounts of time studying spirituality when you are trying to survive.

Resources can do a tremendous amount of good in the world. It can create freedom and choices. It can pay your bills, support your family, employ other people, fund projects you care about, make your work more accessible, support organizations and causes you believe in, and give you the resources to actually do something about the things that matter to you.

I'm not particular interested in ideas like "Money is bad," or "Money is the root of all evil." Wealth just amplifies who you are. If you're a jerk when you're broke, you're an even bigger jerk when you have more. 

We live in a world where, now more than ever, good people need to create more wealth and do good things with it. 

I started teaching business back when there really wasn't much of a place for people like me. Traditional business groups wanted to talk about business, but they generally didn't want spirituality anywhere near it. Spiritual groups were perfectly happy talking about purpose, calling, energy, abundance, and changing the world, but start talking about actual wealth or wanting to earn more, and suddenly everybody got weird.

Honestly, a lot of them still do.
I want a place where we can talk about both.

You can care deeply about the work you do and want to be well paid for doing it. You can have a spiritual practice and understand a profit-and-loss statement. You can want to help people and want a profitable business that will buy your children's clothes or pay for college. You can talk about purpose and pricing in the same conversation without pretending one somehow cheapens the other.

And if you want to create massive resources? Cool. Let's talk about how to build a business capable of doing that.

If you want a small business that pays you well without taking over your life? Great. I've got workshops, info, and materials that will help with that, too.

If you want to create courses, write books, see clients, build recurring income, work three days a week, hire a team, stay a one-person business, or create something you can eventually walk away from, the important question isn't whether your goal looks appropriately spiritual.

The question is whether it's the business you actually want.

My business teachings are about understanding what you're building, creating things people genuinely want and need, pricing them like you're running a business, marketing them without treating your customers like third graders, paying attention to your numbers, building useful systems, experimenting, changing what isn't working, and making enough to accomplish whatever you wanted the business for in the first place.

 Wealth is a resource.
What you choose to do with it is up to you.

Business courses and workshops can be found in the Continuing Education Center.

The Library

And then there’s The Library.

The Library is where I get to explore things that don’t necessarily need to become an entire certification, course, or grand educational undertaking. It’s a growing collection of materials, trainings, experiments, ideas, and assorted weird shit I’ve created because I thought they were interesting, useful, fun - or all three.

Some things will help you learn. Some will give you something new to experiment with. Some may send you down an unexpected rabbit hole. Some will just give you time to relax and turn your brain off. That’s kind of the point.

Explore. Experiment. Have fun.

You never know what you might find.

Emergence

This is I go deeper into the subjects I’ve spent most of my life studying: Consciousness, spirituality, religion, philosophy, mysticism, sacred texts, ancient teachings, modern beliefs, and the fluidity of enormous questions human beings have been arguing about since time began.

We explore ideas from different religious and spiritual traditions. We look at where beliefs came from, how they’ve changed, what different traditions have to say about the same questions, and what happens when you put supposedly incompatible ideas next to each other and actually examine them.

We talk about goddesses and gods, the Divine, consciousness, death, meaning, spiritual practice, religious trauma, reconstruction, mysticism, doubt, faith, bullshit, and the possibility that sometimes several apparently contradictory ideas contain pieces of something worth considering.

I’m not there to tell you what to believe. I’m there to explore it.

That means questioning things we’re supposedly not supposed to question, being willing to say I don’t know, and changing our minds without shame when we encounter better information or when something else just feels right for that time in our life.

It means allowing spirituality to contain curiosity, humor, irreverence, skepticism, wonder, anger, joy, and the occasional extremely well-placed profanity.

We laugh. We cry. We question everything.

But if you want a place where nothing is too sacred to examine - and nothing is too irreverent - you’ll probably feel right at home.

Bring your questions. Bring your curiosity. Just don't ask me if I'm going by Michelle or Amethyst or something else on any given day. 

Names are just as fluid as gender, sexuality, and your understanding of the Divine. 

Where My Ideas Come From

Because I’ve been studying religion and spirituality for most of my life, those influences inevitably run throughout my work. My studies have included Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Oneness teachings, Science of Mind, Goddess spirituality, Greek stories, Paganism, Mysticism, the fact that I've ready the Bible completely through 9 times and done a 3-version side-by-side comparison of verses, as well as many other religious, spiritual, philosophical, and metaphysical traditions.

I do my best to acknowledge the sources and traditions behind specific teachings when I know them and when attribution makes sense. I also share resources whenever I can so that if something interests you, you can go explore the original teachings for yourself.

At the same time, after a lifetime of study, it isn’t always possible for me to identify exactly where every idea first entered my thinking. I have a substantial personal library and access to extensive academic collections (a nearby Christian University just renovated their library with over 123,000 volumes, so presumably I'll be busy for a while).

I also spent the entirety of my twenties studying religious and spiritual texts while other people my age were out partying.

So when I teach something that has grown from those studies, I’m not claiming to have invented ancient wisdom.

I’m sharing my own understanding of it: the philosophy I’ve developed through decades of reading, questioning, comparing traditions, living with these ideas, discarding what didn’t hold up for me, changing my mind, and integrating what did.

Where I can point you toward an original source, I will. Where I know a tradition or teacher that influenced a particular idea, I’ll tell you. Where I can recommend something worth reading, I’ll share it so you can explore further if you want to.

And where an idea has become so thoroughly woven into my worldview that I can no longer tell you which of the hundreds of books I’ve read first put it there, I'm probably just not going to reference anything.

I'm not trying to hide it from you, but I just...don't remember where it came from exactly. 

I don’t expect you to retrace several decades of my reading before you’re allowed to benefit from what I’ve learned. Part of my job is doing the studying, sorting, questioning, and synthesizing - and then giving you somewhere useful to begin.

Question Everything. Including Me.

One of the most important things all those years of study taught me is that just because somebody said it or wrote it in a book does not mean it's the end-all be-all of everything. 

Something doesn’t become true simply because it’s old, because it’s written in a sacred text, because a teacher said it, because everyone around you believes it, or because I said it.

One of my most foundational truths is Question Everything.

This means I want you to question my work, too. Compare it with other ideas. Read people who disagree with me. Look at the original sources when you want to go deeper. Test what you’re learning against your own experience and values. Keep asking questions, and when you encounter information that changes your understanding, give yourself permission to change your mind.

I would much rather help you become more confident in your own ability to think, question, discern, and choose than convince you to adopt my worldview.

Keep what is useful. Toss the rest to the side.

Accessibility Matters Here

I’m a full-time semi-ambulatory wheelchair user right now, so accessibility isn’t an abstract consideration for me or something I think should be added after everything else is finished. I know what it’s like to want or need to participate in something and discover that nobody stopped to consider whether you’d actually be able to access it.

And with WCAG enforcement coming soon, every entrepreneur should be especially considerate of this issue. 

We’re committed to making this website and our courses as accessible as possible and to continuing to improve as we learn, grow, and discover better ways of doing things, as well as when access to newer and better technology arrives. You can learn more about that commitment, the accessibility features we provide, and how to contact us about an accessibility issue in our Disability & Accessibility Policy.

And if you encounter an accessibility problem we’ve missed, please tell us. Accessibility is something we intend to keep working on, not something we declare is finished.

And Then There’s Me

Outside all of that, I’m a wife, animal lover (currently with 3 cats taking over our home), writer, science-fiction and horror fan, I love weird music, I'm a lifelong learner, and someone who can become disproportionately interested in a question and emerge several hours later with twelve books, three competing theories, and an entirely new project I absolutely did not need.

Some days I read books on quantum physics. Other days I sit wondering how to work the toaster.

I spend ENTIRELY too much time playing video games. 

I also do NOT watch anime. I do, however, watch an extraordinary amount of carefully-curated animated shows and movies, many of which just happen to be on Crunchyroll for some reason. 

I believe curiosity matters. I believe joy matters. I believe changing your mind when you learn something new is a strength rather than something to be embarrassed about.

I believe that change is essential to growth, which could be why I've lived in 16 states. 

I believe people are capable of making their own choices.

That’s really what this entire strange collection of courses, certifications, books, workshops, articles, experiments, and assorted weirdness is about: giving you more things to explore, more questions to ask, more tools to experiment with, and more possibilities to consider as you decide what fits your own life.

Different paths. One purpose.
Insight. Growth. Transformation.

Find yours.

Or, you know. Don't.
Just dink around and see what you like on any given day of the week.
Whatever.