My name is Amanda. I am the voice behind Ananda Milea Tarot. I am a second generation American settler on unceded Ohlone territory, also known as the greater bay area. I was born and raised in an immigrant enclave on the east side of San Jose, California. I am a Filipino Spanish in Chinese descent. I am also a mother, an aspiring master gardener, and I read the tarot. The first thing is confidant. I think many of us can relate to this. From the moment we get our first pack of cards and we’re studying the signs and symbols, we’re already diving deep and asking really intimate questions about ourselves or our loved ones or trying to inquire into things. Maybe we’d feel otherwise too embarrassed or too vulnerable to ask someone else. And bridge, I’ve had good fortune of being able to connect with folks from other parts of the world, and I’m someone that really identifies as a homebody. I love my space. I love being in relationship to a place that has known me for a long time. And so the tarot has kind of been this portal into outer worlds and this bridge that allows me to connect with people that I perceive as very different from me and to find common ground despite having very different earth beneath our feet. It’s been really fun kind of seeing you get this little peek into other people’s worlds, inner and outer worlds, and you start to realize that we’re not much different. Doesn’t matter, really, where we’re standing. We’re all kind of experiencing similar struggles. We all kind of have similar visions. And I think once you have a clear idea of where you want to be in the world and where you want to go, those people start to pop up. And they’re not always in your immediate physical space. Sometimes they’re halfway across the world, but upholding a very similar very similar vision to your own. Big question I get from a lot of people is, well, is your name Amanda, or is it Ananda? Who is Ananda Milea? This is the name I have given my higher voice. I believe it’s who I’m channeling when I am working with the cards, when I’m writing, when I’m holding space for someone. Ananda is a play on my first name. Amanda Milea is my middle name. What I really love is a story of who Ananda is. He was one of buddha’s cousins and followers who was known for his memory. In ancient cultures, children who had the best memory were the wisdom keepers. The ability to recite someone’s lineage or their, you know, that’s I feel like a part of my identity that I’m really trying to call out to and bring into this life. And so Ananda convinced the buddha that women are capable of being enlightened to, you know, knock the buddha. But when one of his mothers and her close group of friends wanted to be followers of the Buddha, he wouldn’t let them, even though they had devoted themselves, they had shaved their heads. And so when Ananda saw them crying, he approached the Buddha and said, you know them. We got to let them be a part of this. And when I read that, it really just resonated with me. I identify so strongly with being a woman and the experiences, the oppression we’ve endured, and I wanted to bring that story into my practice. I work with folks from all backgrounds, all identities, but I do find a very special connection when I’m with women, especially mothers, because that’s what I identify with. After college, I went straight into advertising and marketing. And all throughout college, as I was pursuing a business degree, I always knew, like, this was not what I wanted to do, but I just never knew I had a choice, that there was things outside of that path. While I was still in advertising, I went on a two week plant medicine journey in Peru, and it was really such an amazing experience for me. I learned so much about myself and a lot about who I didn’t want to be. And upon my return, my company that I was working for at the time had a late Christmas party in the middle of January, mostly because I was gone and we were a really small team. I think there was, like, 14 of us, so they wanted to be sure that I was a part of the celebrations. And so even though I was really not in this headspace to be celebrating, to be drinking, to be in a bar in the middle of San Francisco, I felt this obligation to be a part of it. And I’m really glad I pushed myself to go, because there was a tarot reader that was hired for the night. And even with all my like, I was in the Andes, I was in the Amazon jungle. I was seated with shamans, and in connection with the spirit world, it was like, what can this woman tell me that I haven’t already seen for myself? But really what she gave me in my first reading was that final push to walk away from a life that I would never mind. And I had pulled the magician card, and she was really excited for me. She said, there’s a magic to you, and I think you need to explore it more. Study astrology, pick up a tarot deck. So here I am seven years later, and I feel like it’s been like a full circle journey. I’m on the other side of that view right now where I’m reading cards for people in corporate who aren’t sure not just corporate in a job they’re not sure they want to stay in, if they’re questioning their life path or questioning, like, is this who I want to be? I’m pulling the magician for other people and seeing their reaction to the card. And it’s really just been like this really beautiful adventure and seeing myself through people, through other people and understanding what it’s like to be on that side, what it’s like to stand at a crossroads of your life and really reclaim yourself, reclaim your autonomy. Give yourself full permission to take a huge risk. There are things, there are practices. I have the first one is gardening. And I feel like every day I get up, and the first thing I need to do is get my hands in the dirt. Gardening is like earthing from my fingertips. And for those of us that work with the tarot, our first point of contact with the cards, even before we get, like, a visual perspective of it, is touching it’s quality within that card. And I think movement is so important for anyone that does any kind of healing work or dabbling in esoteric arts, because our biggest tool is our body. This is the portal between other worlds. It’s how we receive information. I was a little stumped by this question, so I decided to pull a card for myself. This is the card that I pulled. What I love is really disregarding all tradition and reclaim your autonomy. That’s what my relationship with a tarot has been a reclamation of myself and my truth. Of course, if we’re reading for someone else, it’s important that we can create a boundary so that we’re not over imbuing our personal experience answers into someone else’s reading, that we have the capacity to listen and to receive and to meet whoever or whatever is in the presence of us and say, okay, like, I see you. I honor you, and I want to show you what you might be able to see in this card.