#24: Tarot 101: A Simple Way to Reconnect With Your Intuition in Midlife

If you’ve ever been curious about tarot… but also a little skeptical… this episode is for you.

Today, I’m joined by tarot reader and teacher Rosetta Magdalene for a grounded, beginner-friendly conversation on what tarot actually is — and how you can use it as a tool for clarity, intuition, and even nervous system regulation.

We’re not here to prove whether tarot is “real.”
We’re here to explore what happens when you open yourself up to something a little more magical in your everyday life.

In this episode, we cover:

• What tarot cards actually are (and where they came from)
• How to choose your first tarot deck
• Simple ways to use tarot in your daily or weekly routine
• How tarot can help with anxiety, overwhelm, and decision-making
• Why midlife can open the door to deeper intuition

🔮 Where to Find Rosetta

Website:
https://tarotrosetta.com

Free Guide:
Read Tarot for Yourself the Easy Way (11-page beginner guide)
https://bit.ly/tarotgo

Free Manifestation Newsletter:
Dispatch from the Magnetic Field
https://bit.ly/sparkle365

Work With Rosetta:
Book a tarot reading or tutorial session directly on her website

🛒 Want to Start Your Own Tarot Practice?

Search this phrase to find beginner-friendly decks Rosetta recommends:
 “Rider Waite Smith tarot deck all 78 cards”

✨ Ready to Reconnect With Your Own Rhythm?

Download my free Cycle Syncing Guide — a simple way to support your energy, mood, and metabolism through each phase of your cycle:

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend or leave a quick review — it helps more women find the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you were a straight A, high honor kind of kid who followed all the rules, you probably spent most of your life trusting systems more than you trusted yourself. But what actually happens in your late 30s and 40s when you start wondering if you might actually have the answers? Today we're talking about tarot or tarot, however you choose to say it. Not as fortune telling, but as a way to reconnect with your own intuition. And before we go any further, let me just say this is not the episode where I'm going to prove to you why tarot works. I am just asking you to set your logical brain down for a few minutes and be open to the possibility of doing something a little magical in your day. Today I am joined by Rosetta Magdalene, a professional tarot reader and teacher who has spent more than 20 years helping women use tarot, manifestation, and rituals. Rosetta's path into this work is fascinating. She left home at 17 with no money, found her way through college with scholarships, studied English literature, and later attended graduate summer studies at Oxford University before building a career as a writer and publicist in Chicago. Over time, her lifelong fascination with Tarot evolved into the work she does today, helping women blend practical manifestation techniques with everyday magic through tools like Tarot, ritual, and intuition. In this episode, we're getting into Tarot 101. What the cards actually are, where they came from, how to choose a deck, and how you might use them in your real life. Whether that's once a week during your morning ritual or just when you're feeling a little anxious and want a moment to reconnect with yourself. If you have ever been curious about Tarot, but also a little skeptical, you are going to get something from this conversation. Alright, let's do it. Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Next Phase podcast. I have Rosetta Magdalene with me today, and I'm so excited to step a little bit more into the spiritual realm with somebody who really can speak to it. So, Rosetta, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you for having me.

unknown 2:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

All right, let's get to know you a little bit because I am so intrigued by tarot and crystals and manifestation, but I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface. And there's people like you who have gone a lot deeper who can explain it better than I can. So, what exactly do you do? And how did you get there on your journey?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Okay, well, I think I got my first tarot deck around 11 years old, and I bought it at the mall in secret because I come from a hyper conservative Catholic family. This would not have been okay. My love and fascination with tarot goes back all that time, and I have been now a professional tarot reader and tarot teacher for a little bit over 20 years. And then I also have my signature manifestation plus magic method, where I use traditional manifestation techniques as they have been taught over the past hundred years or so, and include magic with them because I feel like combining the two makes change happen faster and it makes it more fun. So it's just fun to have magical allies, things we can touch, smell, see as part of our manifestation. So it's not just in our minds.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Absolutely. Yeah, one of the top performing episodes on this podcast was how to clear energy with smudging. And I really talked about bringing your senses into it and not having to follow an exact formula, but there's something about that magic of lighting the smudge stick and setting the intention and the smell, and this all feels very magical. Let's do a little 101 for the audience. Let's educate them a little bit, including myself. Tell us what exactly is tarot? What are tarot cards? What is the intention? What's the point?

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Okay. So as with many magical tools, they start out in a very mundane way. Like herbs and spices and food are magical. You can enchant anything. The things that our ancestors had available to them were the things they used to try to shift the reality. And so Tarot originated a few hundred years ago as a playing card game. It was not used to divine the future or gain insight. So about a hundred years ago, a spiritist called Arthur Waite commissioned a new Tarot deck. We call it now the Ryder Waite Smith deck. The most important thing about this deck is Pamela Coleman Smith's illustrations because this is the first time Tarot Deck had full illustrations on all 78 cards. So what does this mean? It became popular because people could look at the card and figure out what it meant. So 78 tarot cards, first 22 cards are called the major arcana. They will deal with life path issues. When you get a major arcana card in a reading, it's probably not just what happens tomorrow. It's giving you insight into something deep within your life path. And then the rest of the cards, the minor arcana, are more about answering how do I deal with this? Why is this happening? What should I do about this? So it's more mundane daily life kind of questions. So it's a very deep form of divination that can give you a lot of detail. So that's what tarot is and can be used by anyone who's speaking through the tarot. A lot of times people want to know. So my belief and my experience is each person gets to say who is going to speak to them through the tarot cards. So you could just say, I want it to be my inner being, but don't we know what our inner beings think? Not always, because everybody else has input into our lives. Well, my husband said this. Oh, my kids are mad at me. And so a lot of things get in the way of our own listening to our inner being. You could ask if uncle, so-and-so, or your grandma will speak to you through the cards, and you can get your questions answered through that. So you get to decide who's coming through.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

I like that because it doesn't feel restricted. What I want for myself and hopefully for the people listening is for tarot to feel more accessible and something that we don't have to follow directions necessarily to do, although I'm sure there are some, right? I have a deck that I keep downstairs where I do my morning workout and my morning ritual, which includes journaling and meditation. And when I'm finished with my workout, I pull out my tarot deck and I ask it a question and I pull a card and it just sets the tone for my day. And I think, like you said, it makes me feel more in touch with my inner voice.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

I think women know if they feel drawn to the tarot, they just have a feeling that it's for you. You get to choose who speaks through the tarot cards. It's not just one spirit, it's not like the spirit of the tarot. But like anything else in life, you need to form a relationship with it for it really to speak to you. So a nice thing to do is get a journal. If some of your listeners are going to be buying a tarot deck for the first time, when you open that box, keep the cards in the order they were in the box, and then every day take the next card and look at it and just think, what is this saying to me? I don't care what the book says, what is it saying to me? Especially if you're just going to be reading for yourself and then just jot down a few words. You know, I pulled a fool today. This card makes me a little nervous because he might be falling off a cliff. Or I think if he falls off the cliff, he's going to be caught. People have different reactions to every card in the deck. So if you did two cards a day in a month and a half or so, you would have had little notes of what it means to you for every card. And then when you go to read, you don't look it up in the book. You've got your own book. And then, oh, I pulled this card today. What did I say? Last time I looked at this card, do I still feel that way? Or do I now have a new interpretation? You've now developed a relationship with that particular tarot deck. So you feel more confidence in it, and then it feels more confidence in you if that's not too woo-woo.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

How do you choose a tarot deck? Because if you go to a metaphysical store, often there's like a whole shelf, right? And do some have more value than others, or some more authentic than others? I've seen Alice in Wonderland decks and cat decks and an animal deck.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yes. Okay. So yes, I have strong feelings about this. So we talked a little bit about the Rider Wait Smith Tarot deck, the mother of contemporary decks. And it has illustrations, full illustrations on every card. So there's two things that I recommend. First of all, go Google Rider Waitsmith Tarot, all 78 cards. And you'll get a JPEG that will show you all the cards. Take a look at them and say, do I like this deck? So if there's something about it that you really do not want to buy that deck, then I have another recommendation. It's called the Lightseer's Tarot. And that is more diverse. It's got a wider range of people, ages. Some people will say it's a little more optimistic. I would say it's a little more balanced, less heavy view. So those are the two decks that I would recommend. And then you can Google them, look at all the cards and see if that resonates. But I suggest not getting Alice in Wonderland or Cat decks, because you can get them later. And then later you can buy as many decks as you want, but you want to have this traditional imagery that is known and understood by all, just to start out with. So you just want to find a deck that feels like it represents you. Something that I Googled right before our interview, because I thought, what can people do? Google most popular riderweight smith based tarot decks. And it'll give you a list of about 20 of them. And that gives you something you can check out. And I pretty much guarantee if you look at 20 of them, every person will find something that she feels, yes, I connect with that one.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

So that wasn't the answer I thought you were going to give. I thought you were going to tell me go to the shelf and go towards what it calls to you. Right. And what I hear you saying is that these original decks maybe have more authenticity to them and you trust them more. Is that true? Well, let's see.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

There's two answers, I think. If you only want to read for yourself and you will never want to read for other people, or at least as you feel at this moment, that's true. You could pick any deck, but you want decks that have a range of illustrations and not very basic and the same. So it's really personal.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Let's talk a little bit about manifestation because you connect the two. Is that correct? You use manifestation together. So what is manifestation and how can you use them together?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

All right. So manifestation is the knowledge that what we say and we think and we do has an enormous influence over how our life unfolds. And so this doesn't mean that we have to be positive and ignore our shadow self, but it means that we know that words have power and that we know that words are spells. So we can either be blessing ourselves or cursing ourselves through what we say and do in our daily lives. This doesn't mean we have total control, but we have a lot of control. And what's great about manifestation, every person gets to choose what works for them. And now part of what I do is helping people to personalize it for themselves. So yeah, some people visualize, some people say affirmations, some people will follow the example of a hero or someone they respect. But all of this has to do with going toward the outcome you want. And then also through the magic part of what I do is to deal with the shadow, the things that come up in all of us. Well, I'd love to do that, but that's not for me. My whole family said that's not for me. You're like this. And so a lot of it is being able to dissolve the layers of who everyone said you were and realize that who you think you are is valid. And then tarot is part of that communication. You can use it to communicate with your inner being and do reality checks sometimes. You had mentioned to me about women who are intrigued but skeptical. So, what would you say, Stacy? What would be some of the skepticism that you think some people would have about playing around with tarot, for example?

SPEAKER_00 15:04

I think that first the religious piece. I think a lot of people were taught that that is devil, evil, bad. And that just feels really scary to them. But I am not one of those people, but I know I hear that a lot. I was a skeptic for a very long time. So I told you before this call, my aunt and my mom were very new agey in the 90s, which I found embarrassing. I was raised in a very Catholic community, even though I wasn't Catholic. My friends were, and I didn't want them to know that they were doing tarot cards on my kitchen table. And I just wanted to fit in and be like everybody else. And so as I got older, I was on a search, right, to find greater purpose in life. And so I became interested. But what I like about learning about the woo is that so much of it isn't as airy and up here as you think it is. I think there's actually a lot of science in manifestation. And the more I learn about that part, the more I believe in it, the more I'm open to it. And I think, especially the people who are skeptical, if you can understand that if you change your thoughts and you focus on where you want to go, just scientifically speaking, that is proven to work. And that's not magic. That's just the way the brain works. And so I think you can approach it from two different ways. And I do like the magical part of it, but I'm a little more drawn to the scientific part of it. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah. So psychologist Carl Jung use tarot as life archetypes.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Let's talk about the person who's open to it, maybe a little skeptical, haven't tried tarot on their own, or maybe they've had an experience here and there, but they want to try it. Talk to me about using it maybe once a week. How do you do it?

SPEAKER_01 17:14

First of all, you're going to get a tarot deck that resonates with you. Second of all, you're going to decide who you want to speak to you in that deck. Doesn't mean only one, but for I'm asking a question about work. Name the best boss you ever had or mentor, professional mentor. What would that person advise? And draw a card. Or you don't know why you have been feeling the way you've been feeling, but you don't like the way you've been feeling, then inner being would be a good one to go to. So you just decide and just take a minute to settle down. And you don't have to light candles, you don't have to do anything ritualistic. Shuffle your cards really, really well while you're thinking about your question. And then you will know when to stop. If you're doing this just once a week, as you suggested, Stacey, maybe you want to make sure you have 10 minutes uninterrupted, because this can also be a time of stress relief and resetting.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

How do you know which one to choose? Which card to choose?

SPEAKER_01 18:23

I think everybody ends up with their own way. A nice way to do it if you have the space is just fan out the deck on a surface and then take your left hand, which is supposed to be the more receptive hand, and then here's your deck, and you just go, and then you'll feel a place of warmth or a place you want to stop. If you don't have that kind of space, then you could cut. So if I pick up this deck, it's going to cut in a certain place. And that's my card. Sometimes you have a pressing question, you're going into a meeting, and you really want to ask, should I go with my original presentation? Or I just this morning thought of something else. Yes. And then who's speaking through the cards? In that case, it would be your audience, the people you're presenting to. Which presentation would they prefer? Should I go with the original one or that inspiration that when I got up this morning?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Yes, that's exactly how I do it. I spread it out and I wave my hand over it, and it almost feels like a pull. It's like my hand, it's not jerks, but it's pulled towards a certain card, and then I lower it and take it out. And I love I love the results.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

If listeners try that and they're not feeling anything, a nice thing that you can do is rub your hands together before you do it, like warm up your hands. Or some people like to go. So I oh guys, I'm shaking my hands in the air, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Thank you. And you said that you don't have to light a candle and all of that, but you can.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

I feel like when you I feel rituals are for us. Right. No one in the spirit world requires us to burn herbs, light candles, make herbal essential oils or any of this. This is for us because it brings us to a place where we feel connected. So anything, if you have particular stones that you like to have, okay, I'm really big on, I'm holding up a piece of rose quartz. You can just ask, lead me to the next thing I'm supposed to do when you get really stuck. You can make up your own rituals, ladies, because whatever we're doing is not by a rule book. You make up the magic. I believe everyone in your home, you have things that you think are magical. We can go to your grandmother's necklace or stones that you picked up at the beach or shells. And why do you keep them? There's just something about them. And it could be anything, but we make the magic.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

And what I like about that is that I think me and a lot of my audience, we come from this high achiever mindset, straight A's, gifted and talented, on a roll. And the way we were successful is to follow the rules, to follow the curriculum, to do it in the order. Oh, I need to know more about it. I'm going to read a book, I'm going to follow the steps. And so it's not natural for somebody to say, here is a tarot card deck. Do what feels right because we're so out of touch with what feels right. So, what I love about what you said and creating a ritual without a rule book is to practice what is it that we love? What is it that we're drawn to, what feels good, like almost strengthening that muscle. And I feel like with Tarot, the more you do it, it really is a lesson in throwing the lesson out, throwing the rule out.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

So after people do what I have suggested, and maybe six months go by, and you're reading for yourself and you've got your own little tarot rule book that you made yourself by based on how each card makes you feel, then is a good time to get a rule book. So any tarot book that appeals to you is going to have definitions for all of the cards.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Why do you think that women in midlife are started to become more drawn to things like tarot and the woo? What changes, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 22:44

I think so the older you get, the more years you have, you start making connections between things that happen that you might not have made before just because you're sifting through and you don't consciously shift through. So I think it's greater depth. And then maybe women are interested in exploring different ways of exploring that depth.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Why do you think I think that we spend the first half of our lives so focused, like with blinders on almost like this is the way I'm supposed to do it, and this is the way I was taught to do it, and I'm again following the rules, I'm doing the things I was intended to do or what was expected of me. And then I think something shifts too when our hormones change. I remember listening to an interview with I believe it was Holly Barry and Drew Barrymore, and Hallie Berry is really big in the paramenopause-menopause space. She's very passionate about educating women on what's going on with your body. And she was saying that a lot of marriages struggle when you hit paramenopause because your need to please men or anybody really, it just disappears. And there's actually a biological reason for that. And I'm gonna botch it, but it's something about your hormones changing, you're not trying to reproduce anymore. And so biologically, for survival, you don't need to people please as much. You don't need to live for others, and you start living for yourself. And so that made so much sense to me because women especially, we tend to just try to make everybody else happy for so much of our lives. And then I think we hit a point, whether it's hormonal or other or otherwise, we're just like, oh wait, I want to figure myself out and I want to make myself happy.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

And it's so great that we keep living longer and longer because we have more time to do that. So most people need some kind of medium that they can access that by. And I think that's maybe another reason.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Offline before this, we talked a little bit about ADHD. That was a regular topic in my previous podcast. And I would love to hear how you can use tarot for anxiety, for stress, for nervous system regulation. Does it work in that way?

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Yes. First of all, just in because of its tactile nature, I can't speak to all forms of neurodivergence. I can only speak to my own. But um tarot, by the fact of shuffling it, by the fact of settling down to formulate one very specific question. Because the more specific you are in the question, the more of a chance you're going to get a clear answer from the tarot. And it gives you a moment to breathe if you think to do so. So while you're asking the question, it helps if you can get into a calm-ish place to ask the question. And then you're just breathing, inhaling and exhaling and sending your energy down into the cards. And sometimes we feel like I'm all alone in this. How do I know I'm going to make the right choice? I really wish I had some help. And tarot can be the help. So I'm going to go and talk with my friend, the tarot.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Because there are some questions you want to ask that you wouldn't necessarily take to a girlfriend, or you don't have someone in your life who's really going to understand or be able to give you the appropriate advice. So there's that too. So how do you find it? Do you feel it assists you in some different ways that I didn't mention?

SPEAKER_00 26:56

The word that is coming up is safety for some reason. Um when I think of nervous system dysregulation, it feels like your body is floating all around the room and you can't find your footing. And I think with the ritual of pulling a tarot deck, whether candles or not, but just literally the act of holding the cards, like you said, tactile, it brings you back to earth and it brings you back to yourself. And I think one of the big reasons so many of us struggle so much with anxiety right now is because we live in a digital world where we're not connected to ourselves, to the ground, and there's so much information that we're just overwhelmed by all of it. And so it's I can picture almost like coming out of that digital world, sitting down on the ground with your tarot cards, just that act alone, even before you pull a card, is just is an act to be with yourself again. And then the actual card pulling feels like you're connected to somebody and it to something bigger and it signals safety, like you're okay, you're not alone.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

Here's something else that you're probably gonna end up with some favorite cards in the deck. As people get familiar with the cards in the deck, even the first time people go through all the cards in the deck, they're probably gonna say, Oh, I love that one card, right? So if you have a situation that's more of a masculine energy situation, and you know that you're gonna have to step outside of maybe your normal ways of being, and you have to be a little tougher on a situation. Maybe you want to pull out the emperor. I'm gonna pull out a rulership card that is very comfortable making executive decisions. So you can find some cards in the deck that I would go to this person, the person in the card, if I needed help with X, Y, or C.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

And you're saying in this case, it's not randomly pulling a card, it's literally searching for the embryo.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Who is the person in the tarot deck? If people are going through the cards and making little notes in a journal, what would I ask this, the person in this card about? How could this person help me?

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yeah. How can we make this realistic for our lives? There's a woman listening right now who's like, yep, I'm in. I want to do that, but I can barely find time to exercise. How could I possibly fit this into my day-to-day life?

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Maybe the ritual is on Saturday night at 9 p.m. or it's Saturday morning at 7 a.m. I'm going to pull a tarot card before I get out of bed. The cards are just going to sit on my bedside table.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

So there's ways to fit it in. How do you combine the practical with the magical? Do you consider yourself somebody who's much more in the like magical woo realm or the other or somewhere in between?

SPEAKER_01 30:10

No, I think I'm 50-50. Both manifestation and magic are concerned with practical results. Practical, measurable, time-based results. So magic would not exist if people didn't want to make practical, definable changes. What would you consider is something magical that you can create for yourself? And what that is, what will make me feel better in this situation? What will make me feel more likely to take the practical actions that I need to take? Because this is all about leading you to the correct next right answer. And sometimes a little ritual makes it more fun to pursue that next step.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

So, Rosetta, where can my audience find you? How can we work with you if we maybe want to have you pull tarot for us?

SPEAKER_01 31:14

Okay, so you can find me at tarotrosetta.com. So it's t-a-r-o-t r-o-s-e-t-ta.com. And then I have a couple of free gifts if people are interested. So the first one is my read tarot for yourself the easy way. And the second one is if you're interested in the magical aspect that we talked about. I have a free manifestation magic e-letter, which I call dispatch from the magnetic field. It's really brief and it's just got a little try me element that either involves manifestation, tarot, or magic that you can easily try in less than five minutes. And that one is at bitly b-it dot ly slash sparkle 365.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

How about if we want to actually work with you? Somebody's like, I want to do tarot, but I want a professional.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Yes, perfect. So if you go to the website, first of all, if you download the ebook, you're gonna see on the last page a link to schedule a 30-minute tarot tutorial. And when you get to the last day of the welcome sequence for that ebook, there's a discount on that same 30-minute session. So I would say wait until I offer it by email because you'll get a discount.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

This was a pleasure and I learned so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

I hope our paths will cross again and thank you again so much.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Thank you so much for joining me on another episode of this podcast. It means the world to me. If this conversation made you curious about reconnecting with yourself in deeper ways than maybe you have in the past, with your intuition, with your rhythms, and with your cycle, I have created a free guide that walks you through how to cycle sync through the month, through the different phases of your cycle, with your diet, with your exercise, and with your daily rituals. You can download it in the show notes, print it out, put it on your fridge, and refer to it as often as you need to. So TBD on whether I'm able to get my next episode out. I will try my hardest, but if not, I will definitely see you the following week. Until next time, I will see you in the next phase.