I used to do this by newsletter, but I accidentally deleted my regular newsletter mailing list in Mailchimp and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back. Oops.

To write up this year in review, I took out my 2018 Metaphysician’s Day Planner and went through the pages, the months at a glance, weeks at a glance, the divinatory forecasts, reflection notes, and everything I documented this past year. I’m gearing up to write in all my goals, resolutions, and plans for 2019 soon.

If you’d like to order a Metaphysician’s Day Planner for 2019, you can read more about it here before you buy.

Order Your 2019 Metaphysician’s Day Planner

Comes with a free 2019 Metaphysician’s Guidebook

If you’re into that whole tarot year thing (where you add up the digits for your month of birth, day of birth, and then this current year, 2018, then reduce it down to a number 1 through 22), then 2018 was a Strength/Justice year for me (depending on how you ascribe Key 8 in the Majors). I’m gonna guess my life path has programmed itself to the RWS system because it was definitely more of a Strength-y year than Justice-y.

First let’s cover the light stuff. Here are all the Bell Chimes In episodes I uploaded in 2018:

List of 2018 Bell Chimes In Episodes

This year I made 18 BCI videos. Come on! That’s pretty awesome! In my mind, that’s a lot of videos I’ve made, given the time constraints I was under throughout 2018. The “So You Wanna Create a Tarot Deck [Tarot Going Mainstream],” “Starseeds and Multiverses,” and “On Reiki: An Opinion [Is Reiki Bullshit?]” pieces got me into the most trouble.

By far my favorite YouTube comments are the ones that tell me it’s okay for me to think what I think at the moment since I’m not yet evolved, my soul is still mired in shadows I have to work through, and I still have much to learn on my spiritual path. One of the recurring habits I’ve been observing in our society today is we immediately dismiss anyone who disagrees with us as uneducated, uninformed, stupid, or in the case of New Age spirituality, our souls are un-evolved. I know sometimes my own immediate impulse is to go to that conclusion about another person, too, so now I’m hyper-aware of the impulse and try not to mentally dismiss as “uneducated” or stupid anyone who disagrees with me (especially when we’re talking politics).

List of Free Downloads from 2018

Want a bullet point list of all the free downloads I provided in 2018? Here you go:

• Kuan Yin’s Great Compassion Mantra (Free Book Download)
• Your Saturn Returns (Free Saturn Return Survival Kit)
• Guidebook of 19th Century Etiquette (Free Handbook)
• The Mother Wound Tarot Spread (Image Files)
• Excerpts to “Sole Proprietorship in the Sacred Arts”
• SKT Free Major Arcana Card Images and Coloring Guidebook Downloads
• SKT Video Course Series (On Kundalini Awakening, Accessing the Akashic Records with Tarot, Ritual Magic and Tarot, Guided Remote Energy Healing, and more)

The Tinkering Bell metaphysical tutorials series also comes with lots of free PDF downloads and supplemental handouts. Here are the Tinkering Bell videos released in 2018:

• Holy Anointing Oil (or the Oil of Abramelin) plus a bonus post: On Spell Oils (compared to Anointing Oils)
• Seal of Changes (crafting Chinese sigils based on the I Ching hexagrams)
• Bloodstone for Shielding
• Thunder Rites (Lei Fa, 雷法)

There was a three-part Quick Tutorial series over the summer for YouTubers:

• PowerPoint for YouTubers
• MovieMaker for YouTubers
• YouTube Video Making Tips I Learned

Online Course Offerings

That’s the free stuff. Here are the online course offerings that were released in 2018:

• Copyright Law and Tarot – $17
• Tarot, Occultism, and Modern Witchcraft – $20

If you missed any of the other online courses I’ve offered in the past, please go here: Online Courses and check out the complete listing.

For 2019, I am planning the release of a couple key courses:

Sole Proprietorship in the Sacred Arts. This one has taken me a long time because I want it to be as comprehensive as possible, throwing in there all the know-how I’ve got. I also like to be specific. So rather than just say “you need to do accounting,” I’m going to give you templates for profit and loss sheets, show you step by step exactly how I do my own business accounting, give you lots of templates for legal forms and other boilerplate forms you might need, info on what I do week to week, day to day, etc. You can read an excerpt from the operation handbook that will be part of the course curriculum, here (direct PDF download).

Cultivating Energy for Craft. I really want to do a comprehensive course on Eastern esoteric practices for cultivating Qi energy in the personal body and astral body. This includes diet, meditation techniques, herbalism, invocations and evocations in Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese often used, charging stone talismans, how to work with candles, incense, astrology, and more. I’ve got tons of notes on scrap pieces of paper, outlines, and video ideas, but I just need to get to the execution.

Prosperity Magic. I think it’s in the course name. But yeah. Like what I said about the other courses I’m working on, I’ve got lots of notes, outlines, and ideas, but I just need to execute and organize everything into something coherent. Included within the scope of prosperity magic, I also plan on covering techniques in glamour magic. I mean, come on, the two are related. No?

Now let’s talk about me. =) My vision statement for 2018 (for those who have my Metaphysician’s Day Planner, will see that this is the box on the first page) was “To speak, to hear… and to be heard.” Later in time, though now I cannot remember when exactly, I returned to that box and added: “To elevate discourse on metaphysical faith-based topics.”

Dammit. “Be careful what you wish for” comes to mind. Why did I have to go and be such an overachiever (in the worst possible way)?

This past year, I feel I’ve succeeded very much at speaking, hearing, and being heard. And I don’t just mean on this platform I’ve created for myself, but in other areas of my professional life as well, areas far removed from what you see here.

It’s just not what I thought I asked for. Accomplishment only appears wonderful when you haven’t accomplished it yet. Wealth, success, glory all feel like the solution to your every problem when you haven’t yet solved the equation.

As 2018 winds to a close, I’ve been struggling internally with a big question. I’m a woman of color and as irrational as it may sound to anyone not in the same position, I feel a very heavy burden of responsibility to speak up whenever I have the opportunity to and use my platform for social change, in advocacy of disenfranchised or marginalized groups.

But by doing so, I get vilified not just by people who disagree with my positions (that I have no issue with taking, and comes with the territory), but worst of all, most tragic of all, by people who I’m trying to stand by. We now live in a world where if someone doesn’t agree with you 100%, on all counts, point by point, to every degree, then you treat them as the enemy, as standing against you. I am not allowed to advocate on behalf of the inclusion of two groups, and I am so over the hyperbolic portrayals of anyone even in minor disagreement with you. One group is not the pure, innocent “good guy” and the other group is by ideological necessity the “bad guy.”

It’s maddening to me when these spiritualists, occultists, and self-identified witches can lecture on and on about how there is no such thing as good magic or evil magic, yada yada, everything is yin and yang, mixed bag, and then without a glimmer of irony or awareness of their own hypocrisy, typecast people in our community as absolute good or absolute evil with no redeeming qualities worth mentioning. Maybe they don’t use the word “evil” but they certainly imply it when they use other coded words, like racist, or bigot.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Big Thing I did in 2018, and that would be coming up with the idea for a tarot deck, actually getting to work on it, finishing all hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations for the deck, finding a manufacturer, and then self-publishing, printing, and selling out the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot first edition, beginning to end spanning six months. Don’t ask how it happened. I really don’t know.

But I took notes and documented every step of the way, so if you’re interested in following along a deck creator’s journey from conception design, card by card completion, to finding a manufacturer, trying to market and sell a tarot deck, and all the in between, check out my Progress Diary.

In 2018 I visited Portland, both New York City and upstate New York, the Sierra Nevada, Colorado Rockies, England, the Czech Republic, Austria, Greece, and Turkey. Of all the places–would you believe it–the most memorable is the Colorado Rockies.

I presented an introductory course on Buddhist-Taoist esotericism at PantheaCon; tarot, occultism, and modern witchcraft at NWTS; accessing ancestral memory and past lives through the tarot at Readers Studio; and three presentations at the UK Tarot Conference: Tarot and the I Ching, Tarot and the Four Pillars, and Tarot and Katabasis: Keys to the Underworld. Over the summer, I was also part of the teacher lineup for Tarot Summer School at Ethony’s Tarot Readers Academy.

At the day job, there were a handful of cases that tried my soul. It has been a long while since that happened to me. Having practiced law for a decade, I’ve learned how to grow a shell and become more desensitized to the emotional implications of the work. I understand that non-lawyers might find that horrifying and not spiritual, but it serves the greater good because it allows me to do my job competently. You do want a competent lawyer, right? Well, a couple of cases I worked on this year reminded me of how cruel, how ugly, how debase humans can be to one another. In one case this year, I had to excuse myself and in the bathroom, suppress the tears coming to the rims of my eyes, not at all because of how the case itself was going, but because of how immediately unjust the world can be to those who are genuinely naive, good, innocent, and trusting of others. Knowing someone is truly innocent, and the reason why this person was now going to suffer is because of an overly trusting nature and a personal philosophy presuming goodness in others just shot through my decade of training as a lawyer and yes, I had to excuse myself for just a hot minute.

I don’t talk about my cases, not even to J. The only time J even knows anything out of the ordinary is going on at work is when he comes home, asks me how my day was, and I snap at him for no reason, or clearly I am stomping around the kitchen glowering as I prepare dinner. In my observations, unlike spiritual entrepreneurs who talk incessantly about self-care and mental health (hey, I’m guilty, I do this, too– just read all the crap I write), lawyers suck it up. They hold it in, and hold it in, and there’s no one to release to. They swallow everybody’s misery, transgressions, guilt, unjust punishments, all of it, and then pretend they’re unaffected because the professional thing to do as a lawyer is to be unaffected. No lawyer I know ever admits openly that their cases get to them.

The consequence of my actions this year is now I just want to crawl into a deep, dark cave and hibernate for a very long, undisclosed amount of time.

Except I can’t.

I am already at work on redesigning Spirit Keeper’s Tarot for a release in 2019. I’m very thoughtful about preserving the market value of the first edition deck. As an art and rare books collector, I have some sense of the factors that go in to determining market value of limited edition items and how to ensure SKT Original‘s worth for posterity. To me, it almost feels like a duty owed to those who supported me through the first edition run.

Likewise, 2019’s redesigned edition will also be a limited run and as I’ve said before, I’m not doing a third print run, not for a very, very long time (if even). It isn’t going to go to a mass market publisher in any foreseeable near future. Maybe a decade from now, but even then, I won’t reprint as-is any of the previous editions and SKT designs.

There’s this novel project I also really need to get back to work on. I came so, so close to finishing it this year, in 2018, but the project got derailed by, like, all the talks I had to prepare for and of course, Spirit Keeper’s Tarot and writing The Book of Maps. Oh! That’s another thing I think is pretty big this year– I completed a book, The Book of Maps, a companion to the tarot deck that’s 447 pages long and over 100,000 words in word count.

I did fail in many areas, however. My current queue for natal chart monographs (you can click on that link to find out what a natal chart monograph is) is just shy of 100 folks waiting in line. Omigosh, if you’re one of them, holy crap I AM SO, SO, SO SORRY, which I hope you already know because I have been e-mailing you throughout the year apologizing. Yeah, I am SO sorry. This has been my biggest failing this year. There are people who have waited over one year for their monograph at this point. Yeah, man, I am so sorry.

So that’s what I really have to get on in 2019– finish all those monographs, and also why I’m shut down until further notice for all divinatory bookings. I gotta get through these monographs first, guys. =)

And that’s my 2018 year in review. How’s yours?

For those who worked with the 2018 Metaphysician’s Day Planner, right about this time in the season is when I do the following:

I review the Ten Parami page spread and see what I had aspired for the year and then write down what I actualized for the year. I look through the resolutions and key actions listed in my Annual Plan and see how many I can check off. In 2018, I managed to check off everything except one. Only one thing has been left incomplete, that will have to spill over into 2019.

Now is also the time to fill in that page “Year-End Reflection.” I like to review my 2018 cartomancy card-a-month forecasts and reflect on how each month actually went down. My forecasts were eerily accurate, like, the level of accurate that makes you not want to do 2019 forecasts, you know what I mean?

I also like to review the pages I filled in for my 2018, 2019, and 2020 visions, my five year plan as I had written it down in the beginning of 2018, and just enjoy a page by page flip-through of the entire day planner to remind myself of all that transpired, all that I thought was significant enough to jot down in this day planner.

And then it’s time to put it away and crack open the 2019 one. =)