Fifty-eight years with the tarot, and a StaarCon 6 session that asks you to stop looking at the cards and start standing in them.
Vicki Santell has been part of StaarCon since the very beginning. She has presented at all but one of them, which makes her something close to a founding fixture of this community. When she sat down with Christiana Gaudet to talk about her StaarCon 6 session, the conversation started with a deck of cards she was handed in 1968 and ended somewhere none of us expected, with a paper plate and an invitation to play.
Walking Into the Cards
Vicki’s tarot story starts in 1968. Someone handed her a deck, she found the images immediately profound, and she has stayed with them ever since. Fifty-eight years later the cards are still teaching her. She describes tarot as an adaptable tool, one that met her wherever her interests happened to take her. Today she works as a shamanic practitioner with a focus on divination, and she does ancestral work as well.
That first encounter set the pattern for everything after it. Vicki did not study the cards so much as enter them. She saw each one as a doorway and put her consciousness through it, absorbing the image rather than reading it. That instinct, refined over decades, is exactly what she is bringing to the Mindful Room in October.
The Minor Arcana …Live!
The Mindful Room is not set up as a classroom. It is open space with chairs and not much else, and that suits Vicki’s plan perfectly. Participants will physically enact Minor Arcana cards, recreating the postures, gestures, and facial expressions in the artwork, then paying attention to what those positions actually feel like in the body.
She is bringing the four tools of the Minor Arcana with her, so people can hold a wand, a cup, a sword, or a pentacle in their hands while they work. She has pre-selected cards from all four suits, focusing on the aces and twos, with some threes if the clock allows. For a 45 minute session, that is a full plate.
The premise is simple, and once you hear it, hard to argue with. Tarot is not only a visual tool. It is a full body tool.
Something to Try Before October
For anyone who cannot be in the Mindful Room, Vicki’s homework is refreshingly low tech. Pick out a few cards. Look closely at the physical expression, the body language, how the body is positioned, the colors, the clothing. Then improvise your props. A stick from the yard becomes a wand. A paper plate with a pentacle drawn on it works fine. Grab a cup from the kitchen. Then start playing.
She is emphatic that this should be fun. It is a game, she says, a little toy. Tarot did start as a game, after all. The results just happen to be profound.
About Vicki
Vicki Santell is a tarot reader, shamanic practitioner, and spiritual counselor who has worked with the tarot since 1968. She blends tarot with extensive shamanic experience and ongoing study of metaphysical, psychological, and spiritual teachings, including Family Constellation, ancestral healing, and inner child work. She is available for private sessions and offers classes occasionally. Find her at VickiSantell.com.
StaarCon 6 runs October 2 through 4, 2026, in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Vicki presents The Minor Arcana …Live! in the Mindful Room on Sunday, October 4th at 2:00 pm, with her recorded conversation released to StaarCast Virtual attendees at the same time. Tickets are available at staarcon.com/tickets.
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