I have always felt drawn to all matters esoteric and spiritual and especially to the world of tarot. Not long after graduating high school, I applied for admission in a tarot card reader's study. Luckily the Jungian institute that offered this two-year vocational tarot training was located in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the city where I was born and raised and still lived at that time. The training was not only focused on learning to read different decks, card spreads, etc., but also on using tarot as an empowering tool to help people with their problems; so not only as a divination means.

For some years I worked off and on as a card reader, ran tarot courses, and even worked in an anti-authoritarian high school for exceptional students as a volunteer tarot teacher for a few years, but actually still yearned to learn more.

Because my school grades didn't meet the requirements that were needed to study at university, I took an entrance examination, passed and went to Nijmegen University for four years to study comparative religion. I received my BA in religious studies and my MA in interreligious spirituality, both with honours. 

After moving to Germany with the love of my life, and creating our furry and feathered family of rescue animals, I worked there as a university lecturer and researcher and received my Ph.D in ritual studies with honours from TU Dortmund University.

Afterwards I continued to work at several universities in Germany - Cologne, Bonn, Bochum - as a researcher and lecturer, deepening my knowledge and fascination for religion and spirituality. 

However, tarot played a less significant part in my life while I focused on my work in academia and the two worlds seemed more and more incompatible.

After experiencing a dark night of the soul - which lasted longer than just a night 😉 and was a complete breakdown on all levels: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually - I knew I had to find my way back to my true self. Somehow throughout the years I had lost the connection to what was most dear to me.

One day, during recovery of an emergency surgery I had to undergo, I experienced a spiritual or kundalini awakening, although at that time I had no idea what happened: one moment I was walking with our dog in our garden and the next moment - so my husband told me afterwards - I lay on the ground, having spasms, foaming at the mouth and finally stopped breathing. An ambulance ran me to hospital and on the way I seized once again. Besides hyperreflexia they couldn't find anything wrong with me or a cause for what had happened. All that I experienced was that, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at peace, no fear or anxiety and my husband marveled at my change. For him it was a traumatic experience, he had difficulty telling me what had happened and still finds it difficult to talk about it. For me it was a void, I could only remember walking and the next thing I remember was my neighbor looking at me and telling me that an ambulance was on its way. 

In the following years I recovered while reconnecting with my soul. Online I read about people who had similar experiences and learned that this had been a spiritual awakening, a rebirth. Since then, most of the time, I experience a feeling of bliss. There is no other word to describe it. Awakening is not like enlightenment - that's a whole different ball game, so to say - I still experience sadness, grief, anger, but at the same time, when my bliss is very present, I feel exceptional. In order to help people who experience a dark night of the soul I wrote a reading-, feeling-, and doing guide: Time to Wake Up! 30 questions to your soul The guide that I myself wished to have had at the time. In this new state of being I also realized that I wanted tarot back into my life. I started building up my collection of new and vintage decks, started showcasing and unboxing them on YouTube, began rescuing incomplete tarot decks 😉 and created The Tarot Tiles 

I am going where my soul leads me and don't know what the next step will be on my journey but I will follow through on my path of sharing my love for tarot with you!