07/03/2026
I’ve never properly told the story of how Tiny House of Tarot began.
Two years ago I walked away from a career I had spent thirty years building. For a long time that work had carried me through some very difficult years of my life, but eventually it became clear it wasn’t where I was meant to stay.
So I quit.
Around the same time I started volunteering in a local charity shop, which shortly afterwards became a paid job. Something quietly began to change.
I found myself back in real conversation again. The kind you only really get when people are relaxed and talking about ordinary things — their memories, their lives, what matters to them.
For the first time in a very long time I felt properly connected to life again.
The previous decade had been heavy.
I lost my husband in 2014.
My dad died about eighteen months later in 2015.
My mum passed away in 2023.
Without really noticing it happening, my world had become smaller and smaller.
Grief does that.
Somewhere in the middle of that healing chapter, with a little more space to breathe, I started doing something I had been putting off for years — clearing through my parents’ belongings that had been sitting in storage.
Anyone who has had to do that will know exactly what I mean.
I had always felt that when the time was right, I would know.
One afternoon — quite spontaneously — I found myself putting action to the task. Perhaps it was simply that I felt peaceful enough in that moment.
Whatever the reason, I knew I was ready.
While I was reaching up to pull a box down from a high shelf, a pack of tarot cards — my dad’s cards — slid off the top and struck me squarely on the forehead.
Hard enough to break the skin.
I remember standing there with my hand on the wound, looking down at the cards scattered across the floor.
For a moment everything seemed to pause.
And I recieved an experience that took me beyond what I could explain.
Every experience I had ever had with tarot seemed to rush back into focus.
Thirty years of it.
And with it came a feeling I can only describe as life suddenly making sense all at once.
The thought arrived with absolute certainty.
Return to read again.
Return to what you know...what you have always known.
You shall teach this and deliver truth, freedom and love.
It felt like a wild idea. Even ridiculous.
And just as clearly (and simultaneously) the name arrived.
Tiny House of Tarot.
Not long afterwards I wrote a post on a personal profile that had carried a lot of my life through those difficult years. But I didn’t want to build whatever came next under my own name.
That belonged to another chapter.
What I wanted instead was a space — something broader, something that could grow beyond me.
That was the beginning of Tiny House of Tarot.
But the story really started thirty years earlier.
In 1994, in a small room in the Corn Exchange in Manchester.
A friend and I had gone there for a tarot reading. Something happened in that reading that I still struggle to explain properly. It wasn’t about someone telling me my future.
The cards seemed to speak to something in me in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
When it finished my friend asked how it had gone.
I remember saying,
“I don’t know yet. But I’m going to make it my life’s work to understand how tarot could speak to me the way that it just did.”
Not long afterwards I was given my first tarot deck.
No handbook.
And this was long before the internet.
So I did what people had to do in those days. I went into a real bookshop and spent a small fortune on books — most of them on my credit card.
That decision took me down a rabbit hole that would last three decades — exploring science, spirituality, theology and metaphysics, trying to understand what it was that had spoken so clearly through those cards.
Before long I was reading for other people.
In the summer of 1995 I travelled around Greece and paid my way reading tarot for people on the beach.
Back in Manchester I read tarot at the Manchester University Medicine Ball at Manchester Town Hall, perched in The Bees with a queue stretching across the floor and beyond the disco lights and the thumping music.
Eventually I took a second job to help pay off the books I had bought.
Three nights a week I finished my shift at HMV and headed to a building near Victoria Station where I earned three pounds an hour reading tarot on the phonelines for English-speaking clients around the world.
When I went for the interview I brought my tarot deck with me, assuming I would be asked to demonstrate how I worked.
Instead I was shown the reading room.
An old warehouse. Uneven floors. Crumbling paint. Dim light.
A long U-shaped desk lined with about twenty dial phones.
And beside every phone sat a stapled set of badly photocopied notes.
Scripts.
Each caller’s question had a prepared set of responses and the reader simply followed the script.
I remember feeling horrified.
Did I take the job?
Yes.
Because I felt like I had been sent there to do things differently.
I read the cards the only way I knew how — truthfully, honestly, and with love. My body, my deck, and the connection with spirit that had drawn me toward it in the first place.
Working there opened my eyes very quickly. I have seen the dark side of this business. I have seen fraud and vulnerable people manipulated into spending more than they could afford and receiving more of the same.
And it was there that something else happened too.
The seed was sown for a different vision.
A tarot school.
A place where the pure, truthful teachings of the cards could be shared with those who wanted to approach this work with love, honesty and integrity.
Tarot is not about dependency.
It is the exact opposite.
∞l
The work is about clarity, understanding, guiding people back to their own footing and centring their spirit in the middle of life as it actually is.
But that seed, if I’m honest, was something I forgot I had planted. A seed I assumed had died.
Life moved on.
And like most lives, it brought love, loss and heartbreak — for me, in more forms, and more often, than I ever expected.
Love.
Divorce.
Baby loss.
Widowhood.
Grief that changes the world around you, and deeply alters the way you feel about yourself.
At times it felt as though I was living on a completely different emotional frequency to the people around me.
And that grief was wrapped up in the faces of those who appeared to have the things I thought I might never experience again.
Looking to be validated.
Throwing myself into my work.
Compromising parts of my true creative nature for the sake of material security.
Moving houses. Towns. Cities. Countries.
And somehow, wherever I went, I kept meeting the same version of myself.
Years passed like that.
Life shaping me. Defining me. Pulling me in directions that at the time felt necessary.
But the path I stepped onto all those years earlier never truly disappeared.
Somewhere along the way I remembered the seed that had been planted all those years earlier.
Seeds can sit in the dark for a very long time.
They wait quietly beneath the surface until the moment the conditions are right for new growth to appear.
When the space finally opened in my life, I recognised what had been there all along.
So I gave it my attention.
I nurtured it.
I allowed it to grow.
And what eventually emerged was Tiny House of Tarot.
A place where the cards are read honestly, where teaching is shared openly, and where conversation matters more than performance.
Where people come together to learn, reflect and find their footing in the middle of real life.
Everything I do in the Tiny House sits in direct contrast to what most people think tarot is.
People carry assumptions. They form opinions. They make judgements.
That is part of being human.
But if you set those aside for a moment, something else becomes visible.
This work is not theatre.
It is not manipulation.
∞l
It is a conversation.
Between the cards.
The person sitting across the table.
And the deeper current of spirit that runs through both.
Thirty years. It's so clear now...
It simply led me here.
Lizzie x
