How my story has unfolded:
My name is Elizabeth, but most people call me Eliza. I live in New York City.
From a very young age, I was called to theater. I sensed something sacred in it, long before I ever observed or articulated it. In college, I studied dramatic literature and criticism, along with performance and theater making. I was a smart and deep thinker, but I was also an emotional weather system. I said I wanted to be a dramaturg. But I also wanted to be an actor – because acting felt like the way to merge with plays I love. My giant feelings were streamlined into the huge literary texts I was so moved by.
I went to graduate school and studied acting and worked as a professional actor. Later I started teaching: acting and text analysis. And then I taught directing – which engendered something new. A new way to merge feeling and thinking. A way to be intimate with the story, and to facilitate a rich and cohesive passage from text to embodiment. I worked as a professional theater director. I learned to work backward and forward. To synthesize being and doing. I developed a completely center-brained approach to work where my analytical mind danced in time with my emotional and intuitive senses.
Along the way, I was always interested in mysticism and lightly psychic. I had children and underwent an intense psychic awakening. I paused theater for most of 7 years to study and develop psychic intuition and mediumship. I began to understand that everything I had ever learned about making a rich piece of theater is immediately applicable to the perception of non-ordinary realities and communication with non-ordinary beings. I studied tarot and used it for powerful mediumistic communication.
I read for friends and family for a few years until people started referring me out and I began doing psychic tarot reads for professional clients. Over and over, I borrowed from theater practices to communicate complex ideas and sensitive insight. My younger self who said she wanted to be a dramaturg suddenly realized that she does dramaturgical work every day: reading text, subtext, and context; connecting with themes and action; perceiving the arc and the details; and supporting the author — the client whose life I’m trusted with — in their own soul’s journey of creation.
What does a reading look like?
Classes + Workshops
As a reader, I specialize in “deep dives” — one-on-one readings with me are typically between 2 and 4 hours in length. In most readings, the cards speak on several levels at once, just as any great play does.
Drawing from classical dramatic literary text analysis as an initial framework, we take a snapshot look at the elements of conflict, context, and character that are immediately present in your life. As we progress, we move deeper into the layers of insight that tarot offers. The cards speak many languages, and we will use more than one. Tarot speaks in images. It connects with folklore, fairytales, and mythology. It points toward secular psychology as well as mystical psychology. It engages a philosophical mind, but can also suggest kinetic and somatic experience. It is foundationally archetypal. It corresponds heavily with such esoteric traditions as numerology, astrology, and other magical and mystery school systems. We can take any single card and turn it over several times to see it through different languages; more importantly, by using several languages at once, we can see layers of interrelated stories mapped onto the same spread, offering insights that compliment, reiterate, and further each other. Along the way, we are guided by our own intuition as well as any helping spirits who present at the time of the reading. This process results in a layered understanding of the energies at work in your life and being. It offers a poetic and archetypal illustration of the themes of your life, but leaves you with tangible details you can hold in your day to day as you move forward afterward.
Because readings are long and the meanings complex, the deepest effects are often revealed over time. In the days after the reading, I create a written followup tailored to the specifics of the work in session, with offerings for how to continue the process independently. It is common for clients to go back to their session notes several months or even a year later and find elements that are re-emerging in new and potent ways.
For group work, I offer online classes and in-person experiential gatherings. I combine elements of theater making with traditional tarot practices, literary analysis, dream architecture, and more. All classes endeavor to wipe away received ideas and support you in working from a generative place, rooted in awareness of your soul’s totally unique blueprint.