125. From Tarot & Akashic Records to Jesus Christ | Deconstructing New Age Beliefs

I used to believe all religions were basically pointing to the same thing, and I built a business around New Age spirituality: oracle card readings, Akashic Records sessions, Reiki certification, tarot, astrology, and the whole “spiritual awakening” mindset. It felt like healing. It felt like light. It even looked like it “worked” at times. But when I finally started asking honest questions about truth, Scripture, and the real Jesus of the Bible, I began getting answers I could not ignore.

We walk through the messy middle of change: the moment I can pinpoint as the beginning (finding out I was pregnant in June 2023), the severe sickness that forced me to step back, and the surprising resistance I felt toward marketing, clients, and being public facing. I also share what it was like to pour myself into finishing an oracle deck postpartum while my priorities were radically shifting underneath me, and how that inner change showed up in everything I was creating.

Then the story turns toward clarity and conviction. I find a church online that feels like sanity in an insane world, start volunteering, and eventually get baptized. I also wrestle with a question many people ask when leaving the New Age: can divination be “good” if your intentions are good? The more I seek, the more direct the Bible becomes, and the more I understand why spiritual freedom is not found in self worship but in Jesus Christ.

If you are deconstructing New Age beliefs, questioning tarot culture, or just curious whether Christianity is actually true, listen through to the end and sit with the invitation. Subscribe for the next part, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with the question you are wrestling with right now.

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Transcript

When Seeking Brings Real Answers

Feeling Found Like The Lost Sheep

June 2023 Seeds Of Change

My 2020 New Age Awakening

When Healing Becomes Self Worship

Pregnancy Sickness Forces A Pause

Postpartum And Finishing The Oracle Deck

Church Online Baptism And Conviction

The Invitation To Say Yes

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Counterculture Mama podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Venables, and today I want to share a little bit about the progression of my faith. It's not going to necessarily be like a full-blown testimony that is on my list of things to record, but I want to make sure that I really do the next testimony that I record justice because the first one that I recorded while it was filled with passion and devotion and love for the Lord, it just was not. And I have recorded, I believe, at least one other podcast episode about Jesus not being Netflix and how you can't channel him. That has kind of corrected some of what I maybe believed in the beginning. So if you haven't seen or listened to that one, you can go check that one out. It's a really good episode for new agers who do believe that they can all coexist, or maybe you've seen somebody go through conversion, they've been saved, and then all of a sudden they are basically saying that everything they once believed is no longer true, or even they're saying it's demonic. That podcast episode would be a great one for you to go listen to because in it I share what exactly I learned and what I went through to come to the conclusion that okay, this actually isn't compatible in my new belief system. And it's not just some trend, it's not just something that, you know, we just throw away everything that we once did, everything we once made money on just for fun. It's really grounded in scripture, is grounded in the Holy Spirit working within us and revealing to us the truth. And I think that's like the most beautiful thing about seeking that relationship with Jesus, with the true Jesus of the Bible, is that when you ask for answers, he, in my experience, anyway, he delivers. Like when you are genuinely asking for answers with a pure heart, honestly, sometimes even without a pure heart, I have heard many stories of you know, people who are like, All right, Jesus, I'm gonna let you in for a day, do your thing. And even then, like he shows up and he delivers and he reveals truths to people. But especially when you're you're seeking with an honest heart and you're really like praying about things and you're asking, you know, why? Why isn't this okay, or why is this condemned, or why does the Bible say this? In my experience, he's always been so faithful at bringing those answers into my world, whether that is through like YouTube explanations, whether that's offering me scripture in the Bible. And I will say, like, my journey with scripture and my journey with deconstructing new age and constructing and learning and growing in my in my Christian faith has really been revealing of like, okay, like this, this is so relevant. Like, scripture is so relevant, and it's just further proof to me that God did use the what is it, 40 different authors to to communicate with us and to anticipate our pitfalls and to anticipate where we're gonna fall short and the temptations that we're gonna face. And a lot of it speaks directly to the occult and to new age and to seeking hidden knowledge. There are layers all the way through the Bible that talk about these things, and that revelation to me, as I was starting to study scripture, was really reassuring that God is who he reveals himself to be, right? Like he knows. He knows every step you're gonna take, he knows every pitfall you're gonna fall in, he knows every false belief system, he knows that angels are going to appear to people and start false religions 1400 or more years later. He he know like he knows all of these things. He he warns us about demons, he warns us about you know, Satan masquerading as an angel of light and all these things. And I'm sure you've heard a lot of this on this podcast, so I'm not gonna like beat a dead horse here, but it really is incredible when you finally just say, Okay, Jesus, show me how much can be revealed to you about what was already predicted. And it's really validating and it's really reassuring. And I'm almost getting like a little bit emotional, even like talking about it, because you know, in the parable of the lost sheep, it's like the shepherd goes and finds the one. He doesn't care about the 99. It's not that he doesn't care, but he's not concerned about the 99 that are safe under his care, but he's going off to find the lost one. He's going off to find the one that could be in danger, that could be facing imminent death. And, you know, reading passages like that that speak directly to the pitfalls that I personally fell in in the new age, and realizing that he had the answer all along and that he predicted that I was gonna walk that path, and he still came and he found me is like it's just mind-blowing that a God can be so big, so powerful, so all-knowing, and still be so deeply personal to the point where, you know, all of heaven rejoices when one lost person gets saved. And anyway, that is not where I was expecting to start this podcast episode, but I'm gonna trust that somebody needed to hear that, and that's why that needed to come through me today. But I wanted to just talk about in this episode when things started to change, how things started to change, the ways that I was probably still in denial that they were changing, and what that journey looked like. Because if I go back to this would have been June of 2023, I found out that I was pregnant with my youngest. And that's kind of where I would say if I had to like pinpoint a time, like that's probably where those seeds started to maybe take root a little bit, but I was definitely in denial about it. So flash forward to before June of 2023. In 2020, I had what I called at the time a spiritual awakening, where I had been kind of like, you know, casual, agnostic, like, yeah, I'm sure there's some higher power out there, but I don't really know what it is, and I don't, I don't really care. Like, church is not my thing. I'm sure all religions are, you know, mostly true. They're all pointing to the same creator, blah, blah, blah. Like, that was kind of my belief in where I stood. And as then I hit that that pregnancy with my son, my youngest, and I just like could not bring myself. Like, I so I was running a business where I was doing oracle readings, I was doing Akashic Record healing sessions, I was Reiki certified, I was, you know, reading cards, learning tarot, learning astrology. I was all in on the new age stuff, and I was making money doing it. And I had invested a ton of money into coaching to build that business up, to make it successful. And I was also at the time writing my own Oracle deck for printing and publication. So I was all in on the occult. I was all in it, you know, spiritually. And it was this constant like healing and fixing, and like even in the coaching space, it's like, oh, you're not making money, you must be blocked. Where's the block? And then, you know, you do the energy work or you do the Akashic Records reading and you remove the money block and all these things. And it all sounds great, and it all sounds like it works. And honestly, like, you know, I would do Akashic Records readings for people, and they would say, Oh my gosh, that resonated so much. That just spoke to me. You know, it would like parallel into their lives in these crazy ways, and then you know, they'd leave the session and the next day they'd make$600, and it was like just this crazy thing. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like it's working. This is amazing. Like, I have found the most powerful healing tool that we have access to on this planet. These are all things that came out of my mouth, these are probably things that made their way onto my sales pages, and you know, I genuinely believed that I was doing good. I I believed that I was doing light work, I believed that I was making the world a better place. And within all of that, you know, good and bad can be so subjective in a world where morality is determined by what feels good. And that's a warning that I have for those of you who are still in new age. It's like live your truth and embrace your truth, find your truth, find your purpose, and you know, find your identity. It's all like me, me, me. And what it does is it becomes self-idolatry. And all of a sudden, when you are worshiping the God of self, you are living for your own pleasure, your own comfort, even when you claim, like, oh, I'm going through all this uncomfortable healing and this, you know, metamorphosis or this death and rebirth or whatever. And again, I'm not making fun of this. These are all words that I have used, but it it's like you you you become addicted to the drama. It's like, oh, I'm healing, I'm evolving, I'm ascending, I'm whatever. And it it feels light, but what it really is is it's a trap. And you know, there's always something to be working on, there's always something to be moving towards. And part of that, I would argue, is probably the human condition of like when we have our sights set on something, when we're working towards something, you know, it keeps us occupied, it keeps us perhaps on track if we're if we're chasing after the right things, but it can also be a double-edged sword in that when that switches over from motivation to a need to prove yourself, or you know, it just it turns into something where now we're idolizing our businesses, we're idolizing money, we're idolizing success, that's where it turns dark, right? Because there is only one God that is meant to sit on the throne of your life, and that is the living God. That is Jesus. And so when we get off track and we, you know, are working on the healing, we're working on the money, we're working on the business, we're working on the new age stuff, it's like we start to get our priorities out of whack. And that is what I witnessed in myself, and I didn't realize that I was doing it when I was in it. I I truly did not. And I considered myself to be very self-aware. You know, I I loved psychology, I loved the mind, the subconscious, like you name it. I I deep dive, studied all of these things, and I did consider myself to be very self-aware. But the devil is very deceptive. And so, you know, he'll gradually push you in a direction of, oh, this feels good, or this feels like you're healing, or this feels like you're evolving. Like, look at you, you're breaking the chains of your ancestors, you're, you know, breaking these relational patterns, you're, you know, being boundaried, you're standing up for you, but really at the end of the day, all of that is is a pretty package and sanitized words put around self-worship, self-idolatry. That's really what it comes down to. And so, all of that to say, when I was pregnant with my youngest, I got so sick. I was so sick that pregnancy, it was awful. But what that did is that caused me to take a step back. And as soon as I took a step back and I took my foot off the gas a little bit, you know, I closed out a mastermind that I was running with a few other women, and that was pretty much that was pretty much it. I closed that out, I didn't launch it again. I wasn't really offering like readings or any like one-off services. I was sort of like half-assed, maybe promoting coaching a little bit, but I really didn't want clients. Like there was this deep resistance of like, uh, I don't want to do it. I don't want to market, I don't want to build the sales page, I don't want to even work with clients. Like, I was just like, everything was feeling so like heavy and resistance. And historically, what I would do with that resistance is push through it and be like, oh, you're avoiding because you're self-sabotaging or you're, you know, whatever, all the stories that we tell ourselves in like the personal development, coaching, new agey type world. But because I was pregnant, I finally just was like, you know what? It's fine, everything's fine. Just don't worry about it. Like you can pick it up after you give birth, and you know, you'll feel more like yourself and like it's all good. So I I put everything for the most part down and just kind of let my business start to taper off, minus what what I was calling sovereign wealth, which I talked about a little bit more in the last episode as well. I am a firm believer in having passive income streams, and that one was has been amazing for me through this entire transition process. But basically, what happened is after I let it all go, I couldn't really pick it back up. So my son was born in February of 2024, and I was, you know, in the postpartum phase, I had an amazing birth, had an incredible like home birth experience, and was just really soaking in everything that comes with being freshly postpartum and you know living in that bliss and just breastfeeding, and it was amazing. And the only thing I could bring myself to do was finish writing my oracle deck. I didn't want anything to do with being public-facing, I didn't want to be promoting things, I didn't want to be on social media, and so I went deep into authoring that oracle deck and finishing up that manuscript and going through all of the phases that that come with that, you know, the editing, approving cards, all of that stuff. And I will say, like in that postpartum period, I had started to write the manuscript before, and it changed dramatically because I trained changed dramatically through that birth process and through, you know, the process of just pregnancy and birth and postpartum and all of it, like my world radically changed, my priorities radically changed, and it's not like this was my first child, you know, that was number three, but it really was I I could see the ways in which I transformed, and so I was rewriting a bunch of the cards that I had written previously. We were redesigning cards that you know previously had a certain energy, and then you know, it changed. And you know, my my designer and publisher was amazing to work with through that entire process, and I'm like so grateful for her and the way that she was able to hold space for that transformation as I was going through it, and as the deck was going through it. You know, at one point she told me she was also growing, so we were all just like in this vortex of like growth and change, and what I didn't see coming was how much growth and change was gonna take place because in that season I was still very much focused on the Oracle deck. I was like, this is it, like this is my bread and butter. This is like I'm so excited about this opportunity, even though I wasn't really offering Oracle card readings, I was still just like, you know, in it, right? And then as things progressed and we got to the launch and stuff like that, I had kind of started, I had found a church online, I was starting to, you know, watch this church, and there was just something about it that I just kept coming back. I was like, this is sanity in an insane world. Like what is being spoken here makes sense, and that was something that was so rare in the world that I was just like, what what the heck, right? And so I leaned in and I, you know, started volunteering with that church, and one thing kind of led to another. And it ended up that I got baptized that summer, and again, I was still kind of trying to hold on to the oracle deck and hold on to oh, like divination can't be all bad. Like, if you do it with good intentions, it's it's probably a good thing. And you know, over time the conviction just came down of like, no, like the Bible specifically says that divination is an abomination and why. And like I explained in the beginning, as soon as I started asking the questions, I started finding the answers. And I want to share more about that in a future episode. But basically, what happened is the more I leaned in and the more I sought answers, the more I found answers that surpassed any expectations. And I basically just like my entire belief about like, oh, Christians are just stupid or they're just suppressed, or they just don't know how spiritually free you can be, or whatever. I started to realize how wrong that entire ideology was. And I started to find true freedom in Jesus Christ. And my husband just got home, so I'm gonna leave that story off there and I'll continue it in a future episode. So stay tuned for that. But what I will say is it has been the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Giving my life to Jesus and studying scripture has been the best thing I've ever done. And so, even if you're not ready to let go of that other stuff yet, my invitation to you is to just say yes and see where it goes.