A quiet enough room to hear yourself properly.
Anima Ventus is the practice we built on the north coast of Spain for the questions that become harder to hear when everybody has an opinion, including the four people currently living inside your own head.
We work with tarot, archetype, breath, and voice.
Different doors. Same room.
Julia
Julia has read tarot for fifteen years and given thousands of readings. She is also a classically trained vocalist who has sung on opera stages and in rooms small enough to hear someone set down a glass.
Those two things are less separate than they sound.
She learned to read in the north of Spain, inside a Spanish tarot tradition that has its own history and its own logic and very little in common with the version that reached the English-speaking world. Alongside it came initiations in vocal healing and in the older practices still held in northern Spain, where the Celtic layer never entirely went away.
What that produces in a session is unglamorous. She reaches the centre quickly, without hurrying the person who had to live their way there. She explains what she sees rather than announcing it. She will tell you when she is uncertain, which is more often than performance would allow, and she will not ask you to hand over your own judgment because a card arrived at an interesting angle.
Her ear works the same way in both rooms. A voice reveals where someone is holding something before they have said what it is. So do the cards. Both are ways of listening to what is underneath what is being said.
Mike
Mike is an artist, writer, and breath guide. The twenty-two archetypal images behind Twenty-Two Rooms: The Art of Reading Your Own Life took him three years, drawn by hand, one dot at a time, several million of them.
Pointillism has a rule built into it. The picture cannot be read from the distance at which it is made. An inch away there is only damage — marks, gaps, a mess with no visible intention. You have to walk away from your own work to find out what you have been doing.
Useful information for an artist. Considerably less convenient once he noticed it also described the way he had been living.
He came to breath through yoga, cold exposure, and the high-intensity protocols, training in the Wim Hof Method, XPT, and Sacred Breath Academy. He is a certified Energy Medicine Practitioner through the Four Winds Society. What those years mainly taught him was how easily intensity gets mistaken for progress, so the work now begins with capacity and consent and follows what the breath is actually doing.
The drawing and the breathing turn out to be the same discipline. A dot and a breath are each a single small thing, repeated, accumulating into something you cannot see while you are inside it.
Mike works with the larger pattern, and with the particular trouble of being able to explain that pattern perfectly while continuing to obey it.