Episode Thirty-Two: The Interview - Amanda Bell

Tarot is all about magic, intuition and the divine-and Amanda is all about Tarot. Hear her discuss her miracle-and how it (and he) snuck up on her unawares. Healing can come from the most unexpected sources, from donuts to therapists.

Transcript

I felt for a really long time that he was the only person who could see that I was actually drowning,

You know,

Because I didn't know.

I was like,

No,

I'm out here swimming.

I'm fine.

You know,

I've got this.

And he was like,

Yeah,

Yeah,

I see it.

Cool.

Have you tried this other thing,

Though?

Who are you as a human being?

That one's kind of hard.

Honestly,

Like,

I don't think of myself very often.

In any,

Like,

I just do things.

I write reviews.

I edit reviews.

I parent.

I do house stuff.

I do wife stuff.

I take care of animals.

Like I don't have any idea.

I spent the last four years doing pretty heavy therapy to try to figure that out because I didn't have an identity.

I got sick.

I did chemo.

I got better and realized that if I hadn't gotten better,

Like life would have ended.

Life could have ended.

It could have been a different story and I had no idea who I was for just on my own merit.

Like I knew that I was these children's parent.

I knew that I was this guy's wife.

I knew that I was these fur babies,

Mom,

You know?

I knew that I read tarot cards at this place.

I knew about all the things that I did,

But I couldn't have told you.

I still struggle to tell people who I am.

I'm learning.

Some of the things that I've learned,

I don't know how to navigate the world and not be kind.

It makes me feel sick inside to not be kind to people.

Like I totally know how to not be kind.

I'm not perfect or saintly or anything like that.

That's ridiculous.

I know how to eat people's souls and move on,

But I don't like it.

So that question trips me up all the time.

When I was 14,

I used to spend all my time this summer of 1990.

I was 14 years old.

It was the last bit of freedom I had before my mom got really sick and we were in the hospital all the time.

So I spent,

Oh my God,

Days and weeks and hours and constant time at the Super Crown Books at the Lakewood Mall in California.

And I was there for some pretty important reasons.

I needed to read Linda Goodman's Love Signs to make sure that my boyfriend and I were meant to be very important stuff at 14.

And so I remember sitting on the floor and I'm holding this book in my lap,

Trying not to treat it like a library book because I didn't have the money to buy it.

I'm in the bookstore like,

Oh,

I'm just looking at the pages.

I'm not reading it.

You know,

Like they knew me,

They knew what was going on.

And there was this blue box on the shelf and I kept,

I would stare at it,

I would pick at it,

I would pick it up and hold it.

I just,

I wanted it.

And I didn't know what to do about it.

And I started accumulating change in a baggie and I bought it.

And it was the Tarot Classic by Stuart Kaplan or Classic Tarot,

I don't remember now,

By Stuart Kaplan.

And it was a Marsai deck.

And I didn't know that Marsai was a system.

I just thought I had a generic tarot deck.

So it was like off-brand tarot.

That's how I found it.

I just,

It was just there and it was mine.

That area of bookstores is always so intriguing because you never know what you're going to find.

Yeah,

I mean,

That's what I kind of lament the whole bookstores going out of business,

These rock and mortar bookstores.

And because you can go in and you never know what you're going to find,

It's always a surprise.

And it's maybe something really exciting.

Bookstores are part of our family's traditions and lore.

We spent years where two weekends a month,

We would pack up the car,

Go to Barnes and Noble,

Spend hours there.

Like we'd walk in the door and all four of us would go in different directions and we would read and buy books and get a snack at the cafe.

And that's what we did every couple of weeks.

That sounds amazing because my second question is,

Did you grow up in a religious household?

Because it's always very interesting,

The answers to this.

And of course I'm like,

Oh my gosh,

A bookstore is kind of a church.

At least it is me.

It is.

No,

I did not grow up in a religious household.

I took it for granted growing up,

Actually,

The house I grew up in.

At my house,

My grandmother was Baptist.

My mother,

Oh,

She'd been baptized.

Who knows how many religions?

Every time she went to church with a friend,

She got baptized there.

But we didn't ever go to church,

Never.

And I remember when my grandmother would talk about it,

It was a point of pride.

That was the legend that they passed down in her family,

That her ancestors came to America to be free from persecution for religion.

And that's why we were here.

You could believe whatever you want.

It was not our job to baptize you and choose for you.

You could go wherever you want.

You want to go to temple?

Go.

You want to go to that synagogue?

If you can get in,

I'll drive you.

If you want to check out this faith,

That faith,

You want to talk to whoever,

Go have at it.

I grew up in Southern California.

I could go to any kind of church I wanted to.

They were,

They're everywhere.

I could go to any kind of study,

Religious text studies.

So there was never any religious impediment to me studying whatever I wanted.

Thing you said about religion being a bookstore ties into 2010.

My dad was dying and I came to my husband,

Very matter of fact.

And I was like,

I need some religion now.

And he goes,

Oh,

Okay.

Why is that?

I was like,

Well,

I don't know.

I feel like it's appropriate.

I feel like I'm going to need support and religion is supposed to give you that.

I mean,

These folks at all of these churches in my town,

There was five within one mile of my house.

They all seem to have support.

I would like some of that.

My dad is dying.

Like I could use it.

And he's like,

Okay,

Well,

Where do you want to go?

I said,

Well,

We have to go to the bookstore first so that I can discover it.

So we spent more weekends at the bookstore.

The Barnes and Noble here.

There were three of them that we went to and all three of those stores,

Like they had the religion section and it was all Christian.

And then they had the religious fiction section and it was a Jewish faith and Islamic faith was put in there.

It's,

I thought was shady,

Shady.

And then I found this book called paganism and there's a diagram in this book of an umbrella with a dozen other religions.

And I was like,

Oh cool.

I've got these things to research.

But I ultimately found my faith in a bookstore like you do because they're sacred places.

The only place that is better than a bookstore is a well-run library.

I feel like magic is like food,

Right?

Like it's always there.

You can accept,

You can get to it.

You can share it.

You can pass it along.

You can gift it.

You can dress it up and make it something different than where it started from.

But if you just sit there and leave it and not interact with it,

It's going to rot,

Right?

Magic kind of works the same way,

I think.

And so in my life,

The most magical moments came when I was doing the work,

When I was interacting,

Sometimes when I was sharing,

But mostly when I was being involved in it.

And I've magicked all sorts of things.

I've magicked financial things and I've magicked silly things and I've magicked laughter when it was necessary.

And I think that the core part of interacting with magic is being honest about who you are and what you want and why you're doing it.

Magic doesn't work if you're lying and it's certainly not going to work the way you want it to.

And as far as miracles,

I don't think miracles are appreciated for what they really are and how often they really do happen.

There are moments in our lives where it's an actual miracle that we got out of bed that day.

There are moments in our lives that it's an actual miracle that our mail arrived on time or that we were able to pay a bill.

We often skip over those tiny miracles of our lives because they're not big and flashy.

You know,

They're not the celebrity miracles of our life.

And it sounds kind of cheesy,

But I just don't think you can go through the work and the therapy that you go through to not appreciate the thousands of little miracles that occur all day long.

Because a miracle is an unexpected blessing,

Right?

It's an unexpected gift that you can't always ascertain where it came from,

That you may not feel like you deserved or that you feel like you weren't worthy of.

Even when I'm in my worst mental state,

I still look at most of my life as a miracle.

Like it's a miracle I'm here today.

It's a miracle that my dogs aren't barking.

That is a literal miracle.

Like I can't get through anything without my dogs barking and everything.

I've used tarot cards for years and I always think that there's a sort of magic.

The longer you use the same deck,

It's almost like you're having or developing a long-term relationship and conversation with that deck.

And so it gets to know you and you get to know it and then the answers come.

And it's really beautiful.

I love the language that tarot speaks.

It took me a long time to figure out,

To identify like what that language really was.

I used to teach a class called Deck Discussions.

People get really caught up when they're reading tarot about,

Oh,

Well,

What does the book say?

I have to read a book.

Who is a good person to learn from?

And right,

We should read these books.

They're important,

But they are not the end all be all.

They're not.

And what's amazing about living today is that you can find the tarot deck that fits your personality,

Your way of seeing the world.

I was at the bookstore before COVID and I found a steampunk tarot deck.

I mean,

Come on.

So cool.

The deep work that you did,

I can't imagine deeper magic than discovering who you are as a human.

That goes right to the core of your soul,

Right to the core of who you are.

And it's almost like an excavation.

You're like on a dig.

Yes,

Exactly.

Like that.

And so you never know when you're going to dig down what you're going to find.

I think that I was the most unprepared for.

So I started therapy in the middle of chemotherapy with the idea that,

Oh,

Well,

I'm not doing anything.

I might as well just go do this therapy,

Which that was bad planning on my part,

But part of the lessons I needed to learn.

When I got to the end,

I just got to a place where I was done working on that for a while.

My relationship with therapists have been difficult.

When I started seeing the one that I was seeing when I was sick,

I told them in our first meeting,

Listen,

I know this is work I need to do.

I know it.

I had a shit childhood.

I don't know how I made it out of there.

I'm mostly not okay all the time.

And I know I need to do this work.

I do not want to.

I'm really fucking smart.

And I'm going to outmaneuver you every chance I get.

And he just looked at me and he clapped his hands and rubbed them together and did a little dance.

He's like,

All right,

Let's do this.

And he was very excited to work with me.

And he,

Oh,

He was so good.

He would like,

He let me get just far enough for Realizations to hit before he'd smile.

He actually got up and danced a couple times because he was so pleased.

When I was in therapy with him,

There was a day when I looked at him and I was like,

So what,

What if I just treated myself like,

I don't know,

I was a person in my own life.

And he's like,

Yeah,

What if?

I had to take a month off,

Couldn't go back.

I needed a break.

There was another point in time we'd seen each other for about a year when he was like,

Oh,

You want to talk about your mom?

And that's when I discovered therapy donuts,

Which are donuts from the donut shop about a mile away from your therapist's office immediately following your session.

Therapy donuts are pretty damn sacred.

They go well with black coffee,

Which you only drink with therapy donuts.

They're very important.

Therapy donuts were like my buddies for about three months when I was going to therapy every week.

My mom had had a really hard life.

She was an only child.

She was not a boy.

She was,

My grandmother was very dissatisfied with my mother not having a penis was pretty important to my Southern granny.

And it was a big wound my mom carried.

And so my mom made a lot of decisions based on that perceived failing.

And then she got sick like right after she divorced my dad.

I was five.

My brother was one and she was told she had terminal cancer.

And so she made pretty much whenever she was offered the opportunity to make a decision that would negative like you could have this thing that might be okay,

But it will really,

Really negatively impact your daughter.

My mom would choose the things and I was what she was willing to pay.

Her relationship with my brother was totally different.

Like he had little league and he had a mom who went to his school.

So her death was,

It was a lot of things for me.

It was a lot of things.

Talking about her was something I had successfully avoided for all of my years until that,

Until that moment.

So therapy donuts were very necessary to get me through.

And then I had been seeing him for two years,

Two and a half years actually,

When I was telling him,

I think that we're done.

I think that it's time for me to move on.

And he was like,

Oh,

You do cool.

Yeah,

That's great.

And he kind of leans forward and looks at me and goes,

So before you go and we end,

Which that's your call.

Do you think maybe you want to talk about having had cancer?

Yeah.

I mean,

Like it was fine.

I had it.

I don't.

It's over.

Right.

He goes,

Yes,

Yes,

Clearly you're fine.

And then he did another year.

He studied shamanism in Africa and used part of his religion to help me navigate my life and had no interest in healing me and no interest in fixing me and no interest in coddling me.

And every interest in saying,

Cool,

Let's reassess your toolbox and figure out if,

You know,

Are you still using that butter knife to fix things?

Cause we've got a whole supply of screwdrivers.

Like you could try something else.

Right.

He gave me so many different tools to reassess and re-navigate my own world.

And I'm not always successful.

I'm still not a hundred percent confident in how well I can use those tools,

But he changed the trajectory of where I would have ended up by a lot,

By whole life.

And I think I completely,

Every once in a while in your life,

Those people come in and they're totally unexpected.

You have not planned for them.

And those people,

Cause I've certainly had those in my life.

Those people are miracles because they completely change your reality.

They're there to do work with you and to push you so that you can become something other than what you are at that point.

Oh yeah.

And if you were satisfied with who you were and what you were,

What you are at that point,

Like they wouldn't have needed to show up.

You know,

Like if you,

If you were like,

No dude,

I'm living my best life.

They're like,

Oh cool.

I'll hang out over here.

I felt for a really long time that he was the only person who could see that I was actually drowning.

You know,

Cause I didn't know.

I was like,

No,

I'm out here swimming.

I'm fine.

You know,

I've got this.

And he was like,

Yeah,

Yeah,

I see it.

Cool.

Have you tried this other thing though?

My mom died when I was 15 and my dad died.

I was turning 35 that year.

So I was 34 when my dad died.

Yeah,

I don't have parents.

My grandparents are dead.

I have one sibling.

He lives in Arizona and we don't talk.

It's just me.

I think there's a thing that happens when you don't have family and you come out of a trauma,

Trauma filled house.

And so there's no instruction manual for how you're supposed to be living.

So you come out into the world and the world expects you to behave a certain way,

But you're like,

Dude,

I didn't,

I didn't take that class.

I don't know.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I missed,

It's like starting English class on the third day and you don't have the syllabus.

You don't have the textbook.

You're just kind of winging it.

That's how I felt in life.

There was no place to go.

Everybody expects you to be caught up.

There's not a lot of room to not have all the skills that everybody else has,

Especially when you don't know what you're missing.

Right.

He helped me figure out how to navigate.

He taught me how to be me as a human instead of playing one on TV all the time.

I'm so grateful that he came into my life the way he did.

This has been episode 32 of Bite Sized Blessings,

The podcast,

All about the magic and spirit that surrounds us.

If only we open our eyes to it.

I need to thank my gracious guest today,

Amanda Bell.

You can find her on Instagram at salt and shadow tarot or feral tarot.

Check out her Instagram when you have the time.

It's full of cool advice,

New decks,

Interesting conversations,

And beautiful art.

I also need to thank the creators of the music used in this episode.

Frank Schroeder,

Music L.

Files,

Chilled Music,

Lilo Sound,

Winnie the Moog,

And Agnese Falmagia.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

And remember that's bite spelled B-Y-T-E.

On the website,

You can find links to other episodes,

Other guests,

And cool art and change makers that are working really hard to make this world a groovier place.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Amanda and realize that human beings can be miracles too.