00:00 Episode Preview

00:28 Opening

01:03 Introduction

02:07 Interview Begins with Justine Shu

04:08 Joining the Create Your Deck Club

05:42 Spiritual Sovereignty

06:57 The Soul Language of Tarot Cards

11:12 How Did Joining the Club Helped You?

13:09 Sharing & Creating with Other People

17:07 AD – Download the Mystic Mondays App https://www.mysticmondays.com/pages/app

17:33 Creating is a Very Lonely Process

20:26 Feeling Security Within Yourself

22:45 Letting Others Learn from Past Mistakes

24:37 Earning Money by Expressing Yourself and Helping Other People

28:35 You Have All The Time

30:30 You Never Know What Can Happen

31:53 Closing Statements

32:34 End of Episode – Make Sure to Leave a Podcast Review!

32:51 End Screen

Welcome to the GRACED Podcast! A space for everyday magic for your everyday life. We do this through rituals, aligning yourself to your soul’s purpose, and creating Alchemy to heal our mind, body, and spirits so that you can bring in more love and joy, manifest your desires, and believe in your dreams. Listen and watch over at grace.com/podcast and on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok and all the places you can find me on social media. Now let’s dive into today’s episode.

💖 Introduction

Grace: Welcome to the GRACED podcast, a space where we talk about everyday magic for your everyday life.

Today’s guest is Justine Shu, who happens to be one of my Create Your Deck Club students. In this episode, we’ll hear more about Justine’s experience inside the Create Your Deck Club, which is inside the Mystic Mondays Coven.

We talk about the link between our spiritual journeys and how they’re often tied to our creative expression, especially when it comes to the world of tarot. How to maintain creative sovereignty, making our own creative choices, when it is so easy to be influenced by others, including our teachers.

If you’ve ever wanted to create your own deck, check out the Create Your Deck Club and join our membership with deck creators from all over the world. If you’re curious or even hesitant about how to get started about getting started. The first step is to get going and what better way to do that than to surround yourself with other deck creators who are on the same journey as you. You can check out more information about the Create Your Deck Club at mysticmondays.com.

Now let’s dive into this episode.

✨ Interview Begins with Justine Shu

Grace: Hi Justine, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, definitely. So today we’re talking about your experience with the Create Your Deck Club so far, and I just wanted to ask you how has it been being a part of the Create Your Deck Club?

Justine: Being part of the Create Your Deck Club has been really nourishing and just really supportive.

Every time I’ve been joined a Zoom call. It’s been really exciting to meet other creators from around the world and it feels very intimate and safe and just, Really exciting to connect with other tarot creators and artists. Because I think creating any sort of piece of art, creating your own tarot deck, while there’s so many tarot decks out there, can feel a bit really daunting, but it can be isolating at the same time because it feels a little maddening.

You’re just like, In this artistic process by yourself, creating a tarot deck, like what does that even mean, sometimes in different phases. So to have a group of people to reflect back and hear their stories and hear what they’re struggling with and to hear what they’re tangibly and practically working on, just the combination of everything is really helpful to partake in.

Grace: Yeah, it’s such a great group of people, getting together and I feel like the commonality of creating a tarot deck or an oracle deck is really special because you can’t really explain that to somebody else in your life who’s not really doing those things and I find that, when I’m making a deck and I know that other people in the group have shared it.

When they’re creating cards, they’re going through lessons of the cards, too. So it’s a very spiritual thing that you’re bringing into your practice as you’re creating this, so it’s hard to explain to the other people in your life who might not be going through that process, too. So yeah, thank you. 

✨ Joining the Create Your Deck Club

Grace: I’m glad it feels safe and intimate, and I’m curious, what drew you to join the Create Your Deck Club?

Justine: Well, I’ve been following Mystic Monday for Years. I don’t even know how long, but it feels like a very long time. So, I’m familiar with your work, I’m familiar with your face, and I’ve been subscribed to Mystic Mondays and your newsletters for a long time. And so when I saw that you were offering your invitations up to join, I just felt an intuitive pull, even though at the time I wasn’t even thinking about creating a tarot deck.

I was focused on other creative, personal projects, but tarot is one of my soul languages, and one of my passions, and one of my loves, so I was just like, why not? I feel this pull. It really felt like an intuitive pull, and Also, the fact that you are a fellow woman of color, that is also what drew me in for me myself on my own personal spiritual journey.

There haven’t been many other people that look like me who are doing similar things and have similar perspectives. Specifically, even just in the tarot world. To have that reflection and to have someone who might have similar experiences in the world was a huge drawing for me, personally. And right away, when we met, I could tell that the way you hold space for people, just how grounded you are in your approach and how You just really respect people’s spiritual sovereignty, which is really important to me.

I knew that this was a really important group to be a part of.

Grace: Oh, I love that. It warms my heart. Yeah.

✨ Spiritual Sovereignty

Grace: Spiritual sovereignty. Can you tell us more about what that means?

Justine: Yeah, it’s something I’ve been thinking about and really exploring and diving deeper into the last few years. I grew up with a heavy religious background and broke away from that in my early 20s and shut down spirituality for a while there and it was actually tarot that brought me back in and it was a little portal that brought me back into spirituality.

So where I’m currently at with my own spiritual journey is I think it’s just important to really acknowledge and recognize one’s own spiritual authority and your own Wisdom that each of us has and I think that’s what draws me into tarot and reading tarot for other people or working with tarot is like I’m just a mirror and I just reflect back what you already know and these cards and interpretations just help bring that out and I think the more people who are in their centers therefore in their spiritual Sovereignty and authority can then be better citizens of the world, like we can actually be better collaborators and work through hardships together, the struggles, in just like a more cohesive and aligned way.

✨ The Soul Language of Tarot Cards

Grace: Yeah, definitely. I also love the language that you used, describing tarot as soul language, and there is something about using tarot cards where when you’re looking at the cards, images can really evoke a lot more than just words. It can evoke other images, it can evoke language from your spirit guides, it can evoke emotions and feelings, and I think there’s just so much in there that your soul can decipher that perhaps a normal language couldn’t.

And that’s really important because when you’re creating a deck, you’re also inscribing and inserting your soul into a deck. And so it’s very personal, whatever you’re creating. And everybody has their own different journey with the cards, and I think the most important thing is To just allow yourself and your journey to shine and speak through the cards in a way that feels the most authentic to you because the way that you see, let’s say, the Fool card is probably different than how I’m making the Fool card.

Even though there’s so many different expressions of tarot decks nowadays, each one still has a special voice and a special gift to share, because it’s sharing a piece of you that can then help somebody on their journey, whether it’s a past version of yourself that you’re making this deck for, which I find a lot of people tend to make Cards and decks and other, I think, spiritual kind of products for a version of themselves that needed that, that didn’t have that.

Justine: So beautifully said. I think that’s been a major takeaway in the last few months in, through the Tarot Deck Club is That, I’m creating this to get to know myself, as well as creating this as a service to people who see things the same way or need things the same way that I do. So it’s like, I just love Tarot, in that you can just work with it in so many different ways.

It’s, there’s a standardized, aspect to it but in no means that is there any dogma and so again it really invites people to into their own spiritual sovereignty to get to know their own version of intuition and their own gifts and you know the Fool card it can appear in one season in your life and then be interpreted in one way and then five years down the road in a different season in your life be interpreted in a whole different way so that alone is Fascinating to me, and how something I also have really taken away from the club is how healing the process is in creating your deck.

Because when I first joined, I was like, I don’t know if I should be doing this right now, and it’s been a while. Personally, I’ve been working through so many scarcity wound, not being enough, I don’t deserve to create a deck, there’s so many decks out there, what do I have to offer? So you would like, think, joining a club of people who are also creating their own deck, there would be Some level of competition or comparison, but that has not been the case at all.

If anything, it’s expanded my perspective on everything to allow for a more abundant mindset. And that there is enough for everyone in this world. I truly do believe that and it’s something I want to keep carrying because I think it’s important to energize that. And seeing how all of the unique people in the club have their own versions and goals and intentions with what they’re trying to produce or create, it’s just it blows my mind!

Yes, there truly is enough for everyone, and multiple decks can feed so many people because they’re so We’re all unique beings, so why wouldn’t these tarot decks also mirror that?

Grace: Yeah, that’s a really beautiful way of sharing that, and I really feel that too. I feel like everyone has a unique perspective of looking at something, and that is a really cool thing about tarot, is that the Fool card can transform no matter what phase you’re in.

You can look at that in a different way. when you’re in a different phase of life and I feel like that’s part of the transformative part of tarot that people can use their entire lifetime. 

✨ How Did Joining the Club Helped You?

Grace: So how has being a part of the Create Your Deck Club helped you in your deck creation process or in life in general?

Justine: It’s a good question. Joining the Create Your Deck Club was also a commitment to my own artistic practice. Also a commitment to develop, to like maintaining an abundant mindset. So it’s a commitment to show up how I truly want to be, which is as an artist. When I first initially joined the club, I wasn’t sure, like I didn’t have any ideas of what this deck even was going to be.

I thought I was going to create a tarot deck, but what has actually been Germinating has been maybe potentially more of an Oracle deck, which I’m very surprised by, but I’m just going with it. It’s just helping me hold space. The Create Your Own Tarot Deck club is just it feels like just these pillars.

Like a safe container that’s this beautiful container that’s holding space for me while I dream and envision in Germany what this potential deck will be. It could be 10 years from now, who knows? Because I think that ideating phase or like that part in the creative process where you’re just gathering ideas and Putting together your Pinterest boards, or sketching ideas out, or just dreaming.

It can be very vulnerable, and very insular, and very sensitive, and I love that personal creative process. But there’s something about, I think, creating a tarot deck because it’s meant to be shared, for the most part. Maybe you could create a tarot deck for yourself, and that could be something too. But for the most part, we’re creating tarot decks to be shared with other people.

So there’s just something special about this that, even in these initial stages, I’m already opening it up and sharing in ways that I feel comfortable with. That is also feeding the process, if that makes sense.

✨ Sharing & Creating with Other People

Grace: Yeah, definitely. I feel like life is a mirror in a lot of ways, where you walk out and you see symbols.

If you’re open to seeing symbols you might see a dolphin, and that might mean something to you, and because it has meaning, you put it in your deck, or something like that, and I feel like the breadth of symbology that we can accumulate in our lifetimes, we can also embed into our decks to also give meaning to the Someone else on their journey.

And I think life lends itself to your creative process in that way because your experiences will reflect in the cards because your experiences have meaning to you and what your filter is trying to create and communicate through your own experiences. And I feel like the experiences that you have then find expression through artistic mediums, so it could be through this deck, it could be through singing, it could be through a lot of different things, but I feel like with a deck there’s definitely an intention of sharing that spiritual journey with somebody else who could also use your wisdom because of your experiences through your cards.

And I feel like sometimes when we come into this for the first time I feel like the scarcity beliefs of whether it’s like, well, I don’t have time for this, or I don’t have money for this, or I don’t have enough wisdom for this who am I to even create my own deck? I think that’s very normal, especially You’ve never done this before, and you want to feel assured that you are on the right path, and that, this would be worth your time, and etc, etc, whatever you want to come up with, because I think the mind wants to come up with, I don’t want to call it excuses, but if this is like something you really want to do, and if you’re always going to find a reason not to do something, but if you listen to that intuitive pull like you did, something in you said yes, even though logically you could come up with reasons to not do this, There was something pulling you more towards your spiritual truth or your spiritual sovereignty, as you said, where you wanted to express that side of yourself.

You wanted to, commit to your artistry and sometimes committing means Doing something you’ve never done before, being a part of something you’ve never been a part of before, or, being in a group of people and being able to show a vulnerable side of yourself, having never met these people in real life, but still, there’s an energy With everyone here who wants to commit and have the same intention of creating something that is bigger than oneself and sharing their gift and light and journey within these cards.

I feel like everyone that is drawn to be a part of the Create Your Deck Club is here for a reason, here to support one another, here to share their light in their own special and unique way, and I know you mentioned competition, but absolutely, there’s no competition at all, because everyone has just a very special and unique way of expressing themselves.

And I feel like that is really what lends everyone in the group to gain, I think, a wider breadth of perspective, because we’re all so different, but we all share that common interest of, tarot and oracle decks and how to create our own. Totally.

Justine: I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Everyone is so supportive, and everyone is present, and something that has kept Coming up for me, since Leo season maybe, is just we don’t heal alone.

We need each other, and it just, this club makes me think of that. We could create alone, but why not create with other people who are also creating the same thing? It just makes it that much more delightful and fun and fulfilling.

✨ Creating is a Very Lonely Process

Grace: Yeah, absolutely. I know earlier you mentioned isolation, and I actually, that’s something I went through.

I kind of wish that I had a Create Your Deck Club or a group of people who are creating along with me, because when you are creating, it can be a very lonely process, especially if you’re going through some spiritual stuff at the same time, and you’re like, learning the lessons of the cards, and that can be a lot for anyone.

And I agree with you, I think You know, going through moments of isolation has also taught me where I’m like, having a group is exponential to growth, because we’re not designed to do it alone. I mentioned dolphins earlier, and dolphins have pods, and so, this is like a pod of people who are gathered together to create something really special.

And, Even though I feel like creating a deck is such an individual journey, because you’re really deep in your own process of what you want to express through these cards, but it’s also, very group centric in that you don’t have to go through it alone. Totally.

Justine: You don’t have to, and it’s again back to agency and choice and sovereignty, like these are things that we can choose for ourselves.

I’m so curious for you, because you’ve mentioned a few times how you’re experiencing or learning specific or all of the tarot cards as you’re creating. Are there any cards that pop out or circumstances that pop out when you’re creating your first, or actually really any deck?

Grace: Yeah, I really connect with the Magician card because it’s one of my Tarot birth cards, and I do notice lately I’ve been really good at manifesting food.

Like, if I’m thinking of a food, it’ll just come into my environment somehow, and I’m like, wow, I definitely manifested that, I just thought about it, and it just came to me. Yeah, with the Tarot deck, I feel like a year before I actually made my deck, Tarot Reader had told me that I was going to make a deck.

And at the time, I was receiving a lot of Tarot readings myself because I found that to be therapeutic in my own spiritual journey of awakening and things like that. So it actually took, Some time for me to plant that seed, you know, the seed was germinating in my brain okay I want to make a deck, and I’m clearing space, and I need time to do this, and so I remember having a tower type of year, the following year, where like, all these things happened, where That were out of my control, I ended up moving three times without wanting to, security deposits stolen, etc.

And I remember, moving into my secure apartment at the end of the year. I locked myself in my apartment in December of that year and I just knocked out the first 22 cards. 

✨ Feeling Security Within Yourself

Grace: But I feel like Sometimes when you’re about to make a major life transition, some tower moments tend to happen. And I think that was it for me, where I think the bigger lesson behind that was really feeling security within myself, feeling safe within myself, and a lot of ancestral stuff can come in.

So, you know, I have an ancestral history of people being refugees My parents are refugees so it’s not even that long ago where people were fleeing their homes just to feel safe or just to get away from war or things like that and I think that when people in our lineage do not face their trauma then it passes down the lineage and you know I do feel like part of my role in this lifetime is to help clean up the bloodline so part of cleaning up the trauma of Having to flee different places and etc, etc, I think came up that year.

But a lot of it, I feel like, life throws you things to prepare you for the next chapter of life. Whatever that was, whether it was feeling safe within myself, no matter what is happening around me, not relying on external factors to affect me. Because that can happen quite a lot, whether you’re, listening to the news, or having a reaction to someone cutting you off in traffic.

I think it’s a lesson in still feeling at peace, no matter what is going on around you. And I’m still put through those lessons, but I do feel like everything happens for a reason, I do believe that. And ultimately, I feel like those experiences helped me to become stronger. So, I suppose two cards are coming up now, because Tower moment happened right before I made my deck.

But I think that actually was a catalyst for me to take it seriously, and to sit down and actually make my deck. The first 22 cards, and then the following year, there was another Tower moment after the Kickstarter was crowdfunded and shipped out the cards actually scratched when they shipped out, and I didn’t expect that to happen at all, and, some people were really mad about it, and I felt really bad because I had no idea that was gonna happen, and that was another Tower moment, and, I feel like that prepares me to be prepared the next time I do it, or the next time something happens.

✨ Letting Others Learn from Past Mistakes

Grace: But I do feel like the Tower allows you to rebuild structure, and I don’t think at the time, because I was just starting out, I didn’t have much structure in building the Tarot deck that ended up turning into a business. But a lot of this about creating the Create Your Deck Club also is I wish I had these resources back then of like, how to do this, and how to avoid most of your stock getting damaged so that people aren’t pissed at you because you didn’t know that was going to happen, or how to order a test sample deck so that you could potentially avoid these potential challenges There are a lot of things that went well in my journey, but there are a lot of things that didn’t go well, too.

And hopefully, the lessons that are in the portal can help people avoid the same type of mistakes that I made.

Justine: Yeah. I love hearing more of the in depth story. Out of your voice. Because I know stories are shared in little sound bites across your courses. Or we talk about it in the Zoom calls, but to hear it in, at length.

And at its depth I think is very impactful, especially the connection with the ancestors and the ancestral lineage healing that happens through even just feeling safe in your body and having the privilege and the opportunities to fully feel our emotions and let them go. And so that we can thrive and not just survive.

Then going through hardships of your own and then passing that on to almost like the descendants or like The people who are walking a similar path and are building that for themselves and their own personal journeys, yeah, I just, I really respect the type of work and the way, the approach.

And I’m just selling products.

✨ Earning Money by Expressing Yourself and Helping Other People

Grace: It’s definitely not just a product. I feel like it’s very much an authentic expression of you, and I feel as a collective, we’re moving more into how to make money while also being really passionate about what we want to express and selling things in a way that’s very authentic to what we want to do that is also beneficial to the collective growth of the planet.

That’s what I feel like this is about. This is not just about, and there’s no shade to anybody who’s making money the way they need to make money. This is absolutely a way to honor a part of yourself that feels deserving of getting paid for something that you feel like is a unique expression of yourself and that you want to authentically express and that you want to help people with.

And making a deck, also, there’s a lot of work that goes into it, no doubt, but when you have a finished product, then you can sell that finished product exponentially. And then we can get into quantum selling. Where, a lot of the times, I think healers, there’s just not enough time in this 3D field. For one to one sessions all of the time, especially if you want to help people at maximum, where people at scale want to come across what you do and your product and things of that nature, and I think you learn a lot when you do one to one type of healing work.

However, you are just stretched far too thin when you try to do it for a lot of people for most of your time. And I think that’s another benefit of creating a deck because you could be helping people when you’re sleeping and not even know about it. You could be recharging at the same time while someone is using your cards and diving into the wisdom that you imparted into the deck.

And, I feel like that’s another level of the benefit of just like sharing what you’ve made across multiple different platforms, multiple different locations in the world, if that’s what you want. Because there’s also many different avenues that you can take when creating a deck. There’s traditional publishing, there’s self publishing, you could do a Kickstarter.

There’s just multiple ways you can approach it, so there’s also no one size fits all type of way to make a deck. There’s pros and benefits of it all, and luckily, I’ve been in self publishing, and I’ve also done the traditional publishing route, so I can speak to both of those avenues. Actually, at the time of this recording, I’m actually wrapping up a Kickstarter, so there’s differences in the first time that I did a Kickstarter, and this time doing Kickstarter because there’s a six year difference, and the platform has changed, I think the landscape has changed as well, and so I think it’s important that just to be aware of what’s going on in the world in terms of, like, how people are receiving decks.

I think at the time when I first created the Mystic Mondays Tarot and launched that on Kickstarter, the landscape was different in terms of there just weren’t a lot or many modern tarot decks at the time. So I think that really helped the Mystic Mondays stand out. And nowadays there’s so many beautiful, unique, Dex in the world, and I love that I think a general intention inside of our group is the intention to heal and the intention to really, dive into your personal individual journey while, being open and willing to share those vulnerable parts of yourself inside of this group and the group.

✨ You Have All The Time

Grace: I think most of all, there’s no time limit in terms of sometimes it can take years to complete a deck. And and sometimes it can take years to learn aspects of yourself, to be on that journey with yourself. And the time thing, I feel like giving yourself time is a gift in itself because we’re often so pressured in our modern day lives to Do something quickly and to, get it done by X amount of time and sometimes it just doesn’t work that way.

And I think the luxury of being in the Create Your Deck Club is also, you have all the time to create your deck the way that you want to create your deck in a way that feels really authentic and nourishing for you.

Justine: I think that’s exactly it. I think the Create Your Tarot Deck Club The intention of it is around authenticity, because I think with especially with so many design tools out there right now, anybody could sign up to say Canva, create a tarot deck, self publish it, and then just say, hey, I created a deck.

We all have encountered decks that we really connect with, and we’ve also encountered decks that we don’t really connect with, and we’ve Encounter decks that are just like, you can tell the essence of it is missing, or the soul is missing it’s just a business card or something like that, or like a postcard.

It’s a marketing collateral. It makes my heart a little sad that’s where it is, but it is also shows how Tarot has evolved in the just probably the last decade alone. And Your club, it just naturally draws in people who are healers, who want to be of service, who are devoted to their craft, and really care about sharing something meaningful with the world, which, everything,

in my opinion.

Grace: Same. It’s important!

✨ You Never Know What Can Happen

Grace: It’s really important to share these Aspects of ourselves, but also to share our journey, through the cards, because you never know who that’s gonna help, or who really needs to hear that message. And, it could be potentially life changing for someone to come across that specific card that day, or, find your deck in a store, or find your deck online, or something like that.

And, yeah, you just never know. I never thought I’d be doing this, by the way. I’m a testament. Two, you never know what can happen, but Tarot does that, and especially if you choose to make your own deck, I feel like it can be really life changing in a lot of ways, and a lot of beautiful things can unfold.

Not just the Tower moments, but also the World moments, and the Chariot moments, and the Magician moments, and there’s just so many beautiful things that can come of it if you just say yes. Like you did!

Justine: Yeah! Totally. And not to knock on Canva and even AI tools. I know people who are using AI to create tarot decks right now.

They’ve been open about it. It’s not the tool. It’s not about the tool. It’s about your intention. I just wanted to clarify that.

Grace: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah, I feel like it’s really interesting, and that’s A really great conversation to have about intention and AI. Yeah, it’s like a whole other conversation.

✨ Closing Statements

Grace: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Justine. This was absolutely amazing. I’m so glad that you’re a part of the club. You’re such a great addition, adding your presence, your feedback, and your authenticity. So, I just want to thank you.

Justine: Thanks for having me. I just feel relieved. Lucky. Hashtag blessed to just be part of this club and, yeah, also be part of your journey in a very indirect way.

Grace: Yeah, for sure. Well, you are here. You are here in a direct way, so.

Justine: Well, I feel hashtag blessed to be part of your journey.

Grace: Same. Likewise. Okay, thank you. Bye.

Justine: Thank you. Bye.

✨ End of Episode – Remember to Leave a Podcast Review on Apple Podcasts!

Grace: Thanks for tuning in to this episode with Justine and hearing about her experience as a member of the Create Your Deck Club, which is part of the Mystic Mondays Coven. Check out the Create Your Deck Club and more information at mysticmondays.com.

Sending you grace today and every day.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode. Remember to subscribe and check out more Grace Podcast episodes for how to apply everyday magic to your everyday life.

See you next time!

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