Finding solid ground

​How Lenormand Changed the Way I Understand Intuition

Divination cards fascinated me from childhood.
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The images drew me in, but so did everything surrounding them: the fortune teller behind a small table, the crystal ball, the crystals, the cards spread across a cloth, the mysterious rooms, the dramatic signs promising a glimpse into what might be hidden. If I saw a fortune-telling sign while walking along a boardwalk at the ocean, I noticed it. If I was in Salem and passed a shop advertising tarot readings, I wanted to go inside. If I was traveling somewhere and saw a neon sign announcing fortune telling or a sandwich board offering a fifteen-minute tarot reading for five dollars, I was intrigued.

I never walked past a tarot reading. I loved tarot readings. I loved sitting across from someone, watching the cards being laid out, listening to the interpretation and feeling the anticipation of what might be revealed. I loved the imagery, the mystery and the possibility of what might unfold. There was something about stepping into that little world for a while that captured my imagination.

I loved the pageantry of it, too. The gowns, the mysterious rooms, the candles and crystals, the theatrical atmosphere, the feeling that ordinary life had been left outside the door. As a child, it felt like carnival, and I loved carnival. Fortune telling and divination seemed to have their own particular kind of magic.

But the pageantry also became part of the reason I kept cards separate from my own work.
That distinction matters to me because I wasn't judging the people who embraced that aesthetic. If someone loved creating a beautiful, mysterious or theatrical environment around a reading, that was their expression. I understood the attraction because I felt it myself.
What I couldn't see at the time was that the pageantry and the practice could exist separately.

I had seen cards presented in a particular way so many times that I unconsciously attached the presentation to the tool. In my mind, if I were going to read cards, I would somehow have to become the person who read cards. There was a role to play, an atmosphere to create, an image to embody. The mysterious woman behind the table, the dramatic gown, the crystal ball, the darkened room, the smoke and mirrors—it all belonged together in my mind.

And that wasn't me.

At the same time, I was developing as an intuitive.
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Eventually I would understand that I was developing as a medium as well, although I didn't have that language for it in the beginning. I didn't sit down one day and decide to become a medium. It was simply there. It felt as though it had always been in me—in my bones, in my blood, in my soul.
I was learning to understand what intuition felt like. I was learning to recognize those moments of knowing that arrived without an obvious explanation. I was learning to recognize impressions, images, feelings and information that seemed to come from somewhere beyond ordinary thought.

I was also beginning to feel safe in that part of myself.

The more I experienced and practiced, the more secure I became. I was becoming more comfortable talking about it. When someone asked, “How do you know these things?” I didn't want to dismiss the question anymore. I began to think about it. I began to wonder whether intuition was something that could become more natural through attention and practice, whether perhaps everyone had some connection to it, and whether the difference might be in how much we allowed ourselves to listen.

The more I learned, the more natural it became.

As I became more secure in what was happening within me, I needed a way to understand the difference between having an ability and learning how to use it. Music gave me a language for that.
Some of the greatest songwriters seemed able to take a fragment of thought, a few words, a feeling or a melody and turn it into something whole. The finished song could sound effortless, but there was a process underneath it. I thought about John Lennon and the fragments of language that could become songs. I thought about the young Billy Joel sitting at the piano, practicing the instrument long before he became Billy Joel.

That helped me understand what was happening with my own intuition. I wasn't suddenly becoming intuitive. I was becoming familiar with something that had already been there. I was paying attention to it.
I was practicing.
​I was learning its language.

And with that came a growing sense of security. I became more comfortable with myself and more willing to talk about what I experienced. I didn't need to fit someone else's idea of what intuition or mediumship was supposed to look like.
I was beginning to understand that my relationship with it could look like mine.

During this time, as if by Divine Intervention, the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck found its way into my hands, and it changed me. 

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

At first, I simply held the cards. I looked at them. I spent time with the images and became curious about what happened inside me when I looked at one card rather than another.
I wasn't trying to perform anything. I was simply paying attention.

Then the cards began to speak to me—in the language I had already begun learning through intuition: images, feelings, impressions, associations and knowing. I could hear them. I could see things in them. I could feel things in them. I began to understand how one image could open the door to another thought, another feeling or another layer of information.

I learned how the cards could blend. I learned how one card could change the way I understood another. I learned how their relationships could create something neither card expressed alone. Eventually, I discovered that the cards could speak to the person sitting across from me.

My readings changed.
They became more alive, more expansive and more electric.

“Tarot didn't replace my intuition. It gave my intuition somewhere to go.”

And something else happened that mattered just as much. I finally understood that I didn't have to become someone other than myself in order to use the cards.
I didn't need to create a mysterious atmosphere or adopt the persona I had associated with card reading for so many years. I could sit in a comfortable room with colorful chairs and tasteful surroundings and work with the cards exactly as I was. I could be myself, and the cards still spoke.

“And the cards still spoke.”

That was when I began to understand the difference between the pageantry of cartomancy and the practice of cartomancy. The pageantry could be beautiful, playful, theatrical and mysterious, and for some people it could be a genuine part of how they expressed their work. But it wasn't the tool itself. The costume wasn't the connection. The atmosphere wasn't the intuition.

The cards were a tool.

Once I understood that, I could finally begin to see cartomancy for what it was rather than what I had assumed it was.
And as I began working with Tarot, I also began to understand something about the relationship between the unseen and the tangible.
Mediumship offered a profound connection to those on the other side.
It opened a space for love, remembrance and the recognition that love doesn't simply disappear when a physical life ends. The human essence we carry, the relationships we form and the love between us can continue to be experienced long after someone has left the physical world.

That work became deeply meaningful to me.

But mediumship also brought me face to face with something very human: we want something we can see.
When I sat with someone in grief and told them that I was connecting with their father, and that he was showing me how much they had been looking backward lately, remembering the past and struggling to move forward, they might recognize the truth of what I was saying. They might nod. They might feel it. But there was still something intangible about it.

Then imagine that same conversation with a deck of Tarot cards in my hands.

I might shuffle the cards and have the Six of Cups appear. Suddenly there is an image in front of us. There is nostalgia, remembrance, childhood, the past, the things we carry with us. The client can see it. They can look at the card themselves. Something changes in the room.
Perhaps we pull another card. The King of Cups appears, and now the conversation moves toward emotional maturity, compassion, steadiness, the ability to hold what has happened without allowing the past to determine everything that comes next.

The message hasn't become more real because a card appeared. The card has simply given the person something tangible through which to experience the message.

“The cards gave form to something that could otherwise remain difficult to see.”

That distinction became important to me.

The same thing would happen with Lenormand.
A Dog might appear, and for one person it could speak to friendship, loyalty or a trusted relationship. For another, it might be unmistakably connected to a beloved animal.
A client might see that image and suddenly recognize something that words alone could not have reached.

That is the power of an image.
We can hold it, look at it, recognize something in it and allow it to become part of the conversation.

This is one of the reasons I came to value the different systems of cartomancy rather than seeing them as competing with one another.
Tarot has its own language.
Lenormand has its own language.
Oracle cards offer something different again.
Each system provides a particular way of bringing something intangible into a form we can see and engage with.

For me, that became one of the great gifts of working with cards.

Mediumship could open the connection to what could not be seen. The cards gave us something we could see. Together, they created a bridge between the two.

I had spent years looking at the pageantry surrounding cards and never recognized the extraordinary simplicity of the tool itself. A card is something we can hold in our hand while we explore something our minds may have difficulty seeing, naming or understanding.

The more I understood Tarot, the more curious I became about the other systems that existed within cartomancy. Tarot had opened the door, and I wanted to see where else it might lead.

Eventually, I found Lenormand.

Lenormand surprised me.

There was something wonderfully direct about it. The images were familiar: a house, a tree, a mountain, a key, a heart, a letter, a road, a ring. The system didn't ask me to make the images more complicated than they were.

It invited me to look.

Every time I looked, I discovered something more.

A mountain could be a mountain, but depending on the question and the cards around it, it could become an obstacle, distance, endurance, something standing in the way, something that couldn't simply be moved because we wanted it gone.
A key could be a key, but it could also become access, an answer, an opening, something that unlocks what has been closed.

The image gave me somewhere to begin.
The surrounding cards gave it context.
The question gave it direction, and intuition moved through the space between them.

That was what captivated me.

The images were simple enough to understand and rich enough to explore. They created curiosity, and curiosity opened the door to intuition. Looking closely at an image led to questions. Questions led to associations. Associations led to connections.
With practice, that process became more natural.

The card gave me something concrete while intuition moved around it.
That was when I began to understand the importance of cartomancy in a completely different way.

Cards could provide solid ground.

Intuition could be fleeting. It could arrive as a feeling, an image, a word, a sensation or a sudden knowing. Sometimes it was unmistakable. Sometimes it took practice to recognize. A card gave me somewhere to begin. It provided a foundation and became a building block.

I could learn the language of the system while learning my own intuitive language. I could practice, observe, notice what arose and become more familiar with the ways intuition communicated.

“The cards didn't create intuition. They gave it somewhere to land.”

That was one of the reasons Lenormand mattered so much to me.

It was structured without being rigid, simple without being shallow and clear without being empty. It gave enough information to begin while leaving enough space for discovery.

That balance mattered to me.

We often assume that richness requires complexity. We add layers, theories, symbolism and explanations because we believe that more must mean deeper. But some of the richest things begin with the simplest ingredients.

A chocolate chip cookie can be extraordinarily rich, but its ingredients are simple. Flour, butter, sugar, eggs and chocolate chips. The ingredients aren't diminished because they are simple. The richness comes from what happens when those simple ingredients come together.

“Simple ingredients could create extraordinary possibilities.”

That was how Lenormand began to feel to me.

As I worked with the system, I began to understand why I wanted more people to discover Lenormand. It wasn't because I believed it needed to replace Tarot.
Tarot remained, and remains, a deeply loved part of my work.
Tarot was the teacher that opened the door for me and changed the way I understood cards.

I loved discovering that there were different systems, different languages and different ways of approaching an image.
Each one offered something of its own.
But Lenormand seemed less represented. There was so much information available for people who wanted to learn Tarot, while Lenormand often seemed to sit farther outside the conversation.
Yet I had found a system that was clear, practical and remarkably rich, and I wanted more people to have the opportunity to experience it.

I began thinking about the people who might be fascinated by cards but never discover what they could actually offer. People who might see the elaborate symbolism, the terminology, the history and the mystery surrounding divination and decide that it was too much. People who might believe they had to know everything before they could begin.
I understood a version of that myself. I hadn't been intimidated by the cards. I had been held back by the belief that using them meant becoming someone I wasn't.
Once I understood that it didn't, I was free to discover the tool itself.

And I wanted other people to have that freedom.

I wanted someone to be able to sit down with a Lenormand deck without believing they had to perform an identity, memorize an encyclopedia or understand everything before they were allowed to begin. I wanted them to be able to look at an image, become curious about it, learn the language of the system, practice with it and gradually discover what their own intuition was saying.

Because intuition didn't necessarily have to be something we went searching for.
It might already be there.
The cards could simply give us a way to begin recognizing it.

Eventually, I found myself thinking not only about what Lenormand had given me, but about how I could explain that experience to someone who was just beginning. How could I teach the cards without burying them under everything that had accumulated around them? How could I give someone the solid ground I had found?

That was where Bare Bones Lenormand began.

The need wasn't to create another complicated system around Lenormand.

The need was to create a way into it.

I wanted to strip away what wasn't necessary without stripping away the depth. I wanted the system to be clear and approachable while respecting what made it powerful. I wanted to return to the essential ingredients and allow the richness to come from the way those ingredients worked together.

That became the philosophy behind Bare Bones Lenormand.

I began with the cards themselves because learning the cards is the foundation. From there comes learning how they work together, how they create stories, how combinations change meaning and how a larger picture begins to emerge as we learn to see beyond the individual images.

The cards are the beginning, not the end.
They provide the ground from which the rest can grow.
That is what I wanted Bare Bones Lenormand to offer: not a performance, not a prescribed way of being intuitive and not a demand that someone become something they aren't.

I wanted to create a clear path into a system I had come to value deeply, so that another person could sit down with the cards and begin their own relationship with them.

The cards, whether Tarot, Lenormand or oracle, gave me something solid to stand on while I learned to listen.

What began as childhood fascination with the mysterious world of fortune telling eventually led somewhere I never expected. The crystal balls, dramatic rooms and theatrical atmosphere had once captured my imagination. I loved that world for what it was, but eventually I discovered that the real magic wasn't in the costume or the atmosphere.
It was in the relationship between the image and the person looking at it, in the questions that arise, in the connections that form and in the quiet recognition that sometimes follows.

The cards gave me something tangible while I learned to listen to what could not always be seen.

I could sit in my own room, in my own way, wearing my own clothes, comfortable in who I was, and work with the cards. I didn't have to put on a costume to hear them.
I didn't have to become the woman I had imagined behind that table when I was a child.
The cards hadn't asked me to become someone else.

They had simply invited me to listen.

My name is Jennifer Belanger, and I am an Intuitive Practitioner and Spirit Medium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I offer in-person, emailed, and virtual sessions, and you can learn more about my work at my website, Energy Touch Intuition.


If this story has sparked your curiosity about Lenormand, you can learn more about Bare Bones Lenormand and the books here.
Bare Bones Lenormand →
Bare Bones Lenormand

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