31 human experiences

This series started from a conversation, a reflection, and a genuine desire to create something that actually meant something. I had created an episode about acceptance and surrender, and after making it I felt this strong desire to continue exploring the different experiences that make up so much of our inner lives. I started thinking about how many things we experience as human beings that we rarely have the opportunity to examine properly. We go through them, react to them, try to understand them, sometimes spend years carrying them, and yet we don’t always stop to ask what is actually happening underneath the experience itself.

Thirty One Days

That became the foundation for 31 days of human experiences. Throughout May 2026, I published one short video every single day, with each video exploring a different human experience through the lens of acceptance and surrender. The format was intentionally short because I wanted each episode to be something people could encounter easily during an ordinary day, but the subjects themselves were given much more consideration than the length of the videos might suggest. I spent time thinking about each theme before creating it, considering what it can look like psychologically, spiritually, energetically and philosophically, and how differently the same experience can be understood depending on the person living through it.

There are so many things we experience that can make us question ourselves. We can wonder why we are still affected by something that happened years ago, why we cannot seem to let go, why we feel a certain emotion so strongly, why we keep repeating a particular pattern, or why something that seems simple to another person feels incredibly complicated to us. There is also a lot of pressure around how we are supposed to move through these experiences. We are constantly exposed to ideas about healing quickly, letting go, finding the lesson, becoming stronger, raising our vibration, moving forward and turning difficult experiences into something productive. Sometimes those ideas can be useful, but I also think there is value in slowing down enough to actually understand what we are experiencing before deciding what we are supposed to do with it.

Choosing the Experiences

I wanted someone to be able to encounter a subject and recognise something in themselves without immediately having to judge the experience or decide whether they should still be feeling it. I wanted the conversations to leave room for complexity because human experiences rarely have one explanation. Waiting can involve anticipation, uncertainty, fear, patience, attachment, surrender and questions about control. Loneliness can have a completely different meaning depending on whether someone is physically alone, emotionally disconnected, surrounded by people who don’t understand them, or simply learning how to spend time with themselves. Shame can be connected to something we have done, something that was done to us, the way we were treated growing up, or an internal belief about what kind of person we are allowed to be. These experiences overlap constantly, and understanding one often means looking at several others at the same time.

There are far more than thirty one human experiences, of course. I could have continued this project for months and still only explored a small part of what makes up human emotional and psychological life. I chose these particular themes because they felt especially relevant, recognisable and important to explore within the larger conversation about acceptance. The series moved through experiences such as waiting, longing, loneliness, betrayal, shame, guilt, abandonment, love, hope, joy and spirituality, among many others. Each one was approached from several perspectives because I wanted to preserve the complexity of the subject rather than reduce it to a single explanation.

The Meaning of Acceptance

Acceptance became the thread connecting everything. The more I explored these subjects, the more I found myself returning to what acceptance actually means. For me, acceptance is closely connected to integration. It involves allowing an experience to be acknowledged as part of our reality instead of continually fighting its existence. That does not mean approving of what happened, deciding that something painful was good for us, or abandoning our desire for change. It means recognising that resisting the fact that something happened can create another layer of suffering on top of the original experience.

When we reject parts of our own experience, we can also begin rejecting parts of ourselves. We can decide that certain emotions make us weak, that certain memories should no longer affect us, that certain choices make us unworthy, or that certain parts of our personality need to disappear before we can become the person we want to be. Over time, this can create a separation between what we actually experience and what we believe we are allowed to experience. Acceptance creates space for those parts to be acknowledged and understood. It allows us to look at our experiences without immediately turning them into evidence against ourselves.

The Tarot Beneath the Themes

There is another layer to the project that I deliberately did not make explicit during the series. Every human experience explored throughout the thirty one days was connected to tarot. I am a tarot practitioner and reader, and tarot provided the structural and philosophical foundation underneath the entire project. Each theme was connected to a card or archetype, and the relationship between the human experience and the card was something I considered while developing every episode.

The waiting is connected to the Hanged Man. Longing and grief are deeply connected to the Cups. Betrayal carries elements of the Moon and the Ten of Swords. Hope belongs naturally to the Star. Joy is reflected through the Sun. Acceptance ultimately leads to the World and its ideas of completion, integration and the ability to hold everything that came before within a larger whole.

I chose to keep this structure in the background because I wanted people to encounter the experiences themselves before being given a tarot interpretation of them. If I had introduced every theme through a card, the card could have become the framework through which the viewer understood the experience. I wanted to reverse that process. I wanted someone to think about waiting, longing, betrayal, hope or acceptance as a human experience first, and then recognise that tarot has been exploring these same patterns symbolically for centuries. In that sense, the project became another way of introducing people to tarot without requiring them to approach it through the traditional structure of learning individual cards and their meanings.

A Different Way Into Tarot

This is also something that reflects the way I understand tarot in my own work. The cards are useful because they give us a symbolic language for experiences that are already part of human life. We don’t need tarot to tell us what waiting feels like, what grief feels like, what hope feels like or what it means to reach the end of something and begin integrating what we have learned from it. We already know these experiences. Tarot gives us another way to examine them, organise them and see relationships between them that may be difficult to recognise when we are experiencing them personally.

Looking Beneath the Experience

The psychological dimension of the series was equally important to me. I wanted to explore how our experiences influence the way we behave, how they affect our relationships, how they shape our self perception and how they can become patterns that we repeat without always understanding why. An experience can exist on several levels at once. Something can be emotionally painful while also changing the way we think, affecting our nervous system, influencing our behaviour and becoming connected to an older experience from our past. Looking at those different layers can sometimes change the way we understand ourselves.

Making the Series

Creating the series also required a lot from me personally. This was the first structured project I made fully visible in this way, and producing something every day for an entire month meant that I couldn’t approach the themes casually. Every experience required me to sit with the subject before I could speak about it. I had to think about what I actually believed, what I had experienced myself, what I had observed in other people, and what perspective I could offer that felt honest enough to be useful. Some themes were easier than others. Some made me revisit things I thought I had already understood. Others made me realise that understanding something intellectually and actually integrating it into your own life are two very different processes.

What Happened Between Us

The response from the people who followed the series became another part of the experience. People shared their own stories in the comments, reached out privately and returned for the next episode. I saw people recognise themselves in subjects they had previously struggled to put into words, and I saw how differently the same experience could be understood by different people. That reinforced something that had been present in the project from the beginning. Our individual stories are deeply personal, but many of the experiences within those stories are shared across an enormous range of human lives.

Returning to Acceptance

The series ended with acceptance because, by the time I reached the final episode, I had a much deeper understanding of why it had been the right place to begin. Acceptance became less about accepting one particular situation and more about understanding what happens when we stop dividing ourselves from our own experiences. We can acknowledge that something happened without allowing it to define everything that comes after it. We can recognise that we feel something without deciding that the feeling represents the entirety of who we are. We can hold contradictory experiences at the same time. We can acknowledge pain alongside gratitude, uncertainty alongside hope, grief alongside love, and everything we have not yet resolved alongside everything we have already understood.

The World

The World was the final tarot archetype for a reason. Its symbolism gave me a way of thinking about completion as integration rather than perfection. Reaching the end of something does not necessarily mean that every question has been answered or every difficult experience has been resolved. Sometimes completion simply means that we can finally see the experience as part of a larger story. We can recognise what it changed, what it taught us, what it brought to the surface, and how it became connected to everything else we have lived through.

31 Human Experiences

The series is now complete and all thirty one episodes are available to watch through Intuitive Muse - Tarot & Spirituality Podcast. You can experience them in order or choose the theme that feels most relevant to you at a particular moment. Some subjects may resonate differently depending on what you are currently living through, and there is no requirement to approach the series in any particular way. You can listen to one episode, sit with an idea, return to another months later, or move through the entire collection as one larger exploration.

31 human experiences is ultimately a record of that exploration. It began with one conversation about acceptance and surrender and developed into a month of looking more closely at the experiences that shape us. Beneath those experiences was tarot, beneath tarot was the language of archetypes, and beneath all of it was the question that first started the project:

what changes when we allow ourselves to look honestly at what it means to be human?