Finding Your Inner Compass with Oracle Cards: An Interview with Dana Whitby

Ashley Leavy: Welcome. I'm so excited today to be chatting with the amazing Dana Whitby about Finding Your Inner Compass with Oracle Cards. Dana's been on the show several times before, but she has something super new and exciting to talk about today, so Dana, thank you so much for being here.  Would you mind just introducing yourself to everyone in case they haven't caught 1 of our previous interviews?  Dana: Yeah, absolutely, so I like to call myself a divine messenger, and I do that through several different modalities, so I am the author of an upcoming Oracle deck, and we will get into that in just a minute, but I also am a Holy Fire Reiki master, and I am a past life regression therapist as well as a meditation teacher, and my background is actually in traditional mainstream mental health counseling, which I actually currently do. I'm also a grief therapist for children in the Charlotte area where I live and so I really love to marry and blend kind of that mainstream mental health with the spiritual, and to bring those spiritual ideas down into the physical, and how can we actually use them and make things more tangible, and make that healing something that we can sink our teeth into.  Ashley: I love the way you combine different modalities, and the ones that you work with kind of all gel really well together, and flow into one another, and allow you to provide a lot of support for people in such a huge variety of ways. One of the favorite things that you do of mine is your Instagram stories where you do choose a card like A or B, and it's really fun to see how much those messages resonate because I think one thing that's interesting about card reading and you mentioned you have a new Oracle deck coming out soon. It's available for pre-order. It's the inner compass oracle. It is gorgeous, like absolutely beautiful.  I've seen you use it a few times on stories, you're sharing some of the cards, but I love when you offer those pick a card stories because you really see your unique view, and insight into the cards kind of shine through when you're providing that interpretation, and that's something that I so appreciate in fact, on more than 1 occasion when I've come across one of those stories of yours, and it has really resonated. I've screenshotted what you said, and written it into my journal entry for that day because it has been so impactful, so I would love to know a little bit about how you made the transition or the leap from reading cards as part of the practice that you do overall into creating and designing your own deck.  Dana: Thank you so much for your kind words. I love to do that because even though it's a collective message, it still does somehow have a resonance for everyone who sees it, so I actually started by writing a book. I thought that I would put some of the healing work that I had done with clients in, again, both mainstream mental health, and kind of the spiritual world into a book to really help people, and I got about five thousand words in, and I hit this wall. I just had nothing else to write. Nothing was coming to me and I had to just kind of back away from it a little bit, and spend some time just not working on it, and sitting in meditation and it came to me one day that this was actually an Oracle deck.  I have loved and used Oracle and Tarot since I was a teenager in the late 90s. They have always been a love of mine. They were my first entry point into the spiritual world.