StaarCon 2023 Intensive Sessions
StaarCon 2023 was our first conference to feature multiple intensive sessions!
There were four intensive sessions on Friday, January 20. Our Friday intensive presenters were Nancy “SageShadow” Hendrickson, Ciro Marchetti, Amie Emberharte and Brenda “Lady Lenormand” Elizabeth.
Our headlining presenters each provided a two-part intensive. Sheilaa Hite presented Saturday afternoon, and Mary K. Greer presented Sunday afternoon.
Create Healing with the Major Arcana
Presented by Amie Emberharte
Use the tools of tarot, magic, meditation, and art to activate powerful healing. During this hands-and hearts-on immersive workshop intensive we will uncover the transformative power within each of tarot’s Major Arcana cards. We’ll explore creative ways to proactively embrace healing for the Self, others, and beyond. This eclectic and holistic experience is designed to set greater wellness into motion and provides insights and practices for the ever-growing toolbox of beginner and advanced practitioners.
Digging Up the Royals
Presented by Christiana Gaudet & Nancy Hendrickson
This is a 4 part intensive session.
Headliner Sheilaa Hite will explore using the tarot to examine past lives, clarify present lives, and forecast future lives. In this presentation, you’ll learn what to look out for and how to interpret the various combinations, cards, and spreads that inform, clarify, and forecast the arc of a person’s journey through many lifetimes, thus allowing them to more adeptly direct their destiny.
This is a 2 part intensive session.
Integrating Tarot Card Meanings in a Spread
Presented by Mary K. Greer
Integrating card meanings is the true art and heart of a tarot reading. It’s about seeing through to the central pattern or gestalt of the spread: the organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts. We’ll acknowledge the many ways in which this is normally accomplished, while focusing on exploring a few unusual methods. You’ll find that practicing these special techniques results in programming your brain by forming the neural links that are then experienced as automatic pattern recognition–what we call intuition. I guarantee these techniques will take your readings to the next level. Bring your cards.
Introduction to Lenormand
Presented by Brenda Elizabeth
Join Brenda Elizabeth, creator of Lady Lenormand card decks, for an intensive that will take you through the entire process of learning to work with Lenormand.
It Takes Three to Tango
Presented by Ciro Marchetti
For centuries the tool of tarot has been delivered via cards with printed imagery, each containing scenes, characters, patterns, and symbols to serve as visual devices to communicate their meaning. But their true potential is realized when those images are transformed in the mind of each individual reader. This symbiotic duet between designer and reader is what provides the real magic and infinite possibilities. But now there is a third participant to the dance.
Session 1: I will use various cards to demonstrate the creative balance between established traditional representations and personal directions, in order to achieve new imagery that embraces more contemporary social values and circumstances.
Session 2: I will also be showing segments from various animation projects that incorporate brief additional dimensions of time to what were previously static printed images of frozen instances. The purpose of these segments is for relaxation, meditative preparations for a reading, and also for general reference to various tarot associations.
Session 3: The introduction of a new dance partner in the form of AI, artificial intelligence. AI will, like it or not, have a profound effect on the creative and production process, commercial repercussions, and no doubt also raise some interesting discussions within the community regarding the spiritual considerations of using such decks.
To better understand the significance, I will demonstrate the basic process behind the production of such imagery and be giving away to the in-person attendees sample signed prints of what may well be the very first samples of what will be an interesting, questionable, but inevitable future.
We will end with an open discussion regarding AI, where we can share our views, enthusiasm, or concerns, regarding its significance.