The origin of the COMPASS Method

I’ve been reading cards for more than 40 years.

I took my first tarot deck to primary school. I probably shouldn’t have — but I did, and something about the cards made immediate sense to me in a way that almost nothing else did at that age.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a teacher or a book that explained it properly. I just read.

And for decades, that’s what I kept doing.

I read for friends, for clients, for myself. I read through uncertainty, grief, major life shifts, and stretches of profound clarity. I read well sometimes. Other times I read poorly and didn’t know why.

But that was only one part of my life.

Two parallel worlds

While I was developing as an intuitive, I was also working as a journalist.

Journalism is about as black-and-white as you can get. You deal with facts. What happened. Who said what. What’s verifiable. What’s provable. What sits directly in front of you.

For years, I lived in both worlds simultaneously.

In one, I worked with cards, intuition, signal, and perception that couldn’t always be explained or defended logically.

In the other, I worked with evidence, sources, deadlines, and the discipline of removing myself from the story so I could report it accurately.

Most of the time, those worlds stayed separate.

But sometimes, they crossed over.

The police beat

When I was a police reporter at the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin, New Zealand, I started noticing something I couldn’t ignore.

When people went missing, I would instinctively know whether they were alive or dead.

Not always immediately. But the knowing would arrive — clear, quiet, undeniable.

I’d know if they would be found. Sometimes I’d know when. Not with precision down to the hour, but with enough accuracy that I started trusting it.

And here’s what mattered: I had no vested interest in the outcome.

I wasn’t emotionally attached. I wasn’t hoping for one result over another. I was reporting, not involved. That distance — that removal by one layer — meant I could perceive without distortion.

There was no fear clouding the signal. No wishful thinking. No urgency to make the answer be something I wanted it to be.

Just signal. And I learned to trust it.

That’s where the first stirrings of what would eventually become the COMPASS Method came from.

What journalism taught me about intuition

Journalism gave me something most intuitive practitioners don’t get early on: a framework for observing without interference.

In reporting, you learn to arrive without agenda, observe what’s actually there rather than what you expect, distinguish signal from noise, check your assumptions before you commit to a narrative, and stay with ambiguity until clarity forms organically. Those habits are formalised, practised, and required. You can’t submit a story based on what you felt might be true. You have to observe, verify, and stay grounded in what’s present.

I realised that intuition worked the same way.

When I removed my attachment to the outcome — when I had no stake in what the answer should be — my perception became sharper. More stable. More trustworthy.

But when I was reading for myself, or for someone I cared about, or in a situation where I wanted a particular result, that clarity collapsed.

Not because my intuition failed.

Because the conditions that allow intuition to function clearly weren’t there.

The structure started forming

I began identifying what had to be present for a reading to stay stable.

Not steps I followed linearly on paper, but qualities of attention that had to exist — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in sequence — for clarity to hold.

Readings tended to collapse when I arrived too fast, already halfway into interpretation before I’d registered what was in front of me; when I forced meaning early because I wanted certainty or couldn’t sit with ambiguity; when I failed to observe the whole spread before fixing on one card; when projection took over and I didn’t check whether what I was sensing was signal or want.

They stayed coherent when I did the opposite: when I was centred before starting, open to what was actually there, willing to map the whole field before assigning meaning, able to perceive pattern before story, aligned with clarity instead of urgency, patient while meaning consolidated, and able to close the work so it didn’t keep circling in my head.

Those patterns weren’t random. They echoed what I’d learned in newsrooms — and they slowly converged into something I could name.

That structure became the COMPASS Method.

Why I finally formalised it

For a long time, I used this internally. It worked for me, and that was enough.

As I started teaching — first informally, then in more structured learning environments — I realised that intuition can be taught only when there is something concrete enough to practise. Not a slogan about trusting yourself, but a shared language for the conditions under which perception stays honest.

I formalised it because people needed it, and because after four decades of learning it the slow way — across two careers, through thousands of readings and hundreds of stories — I did not want everyone else to need forty years to stumble into the same conclusions.

The journalist and the intuitive

Looking back, I can see how those two worlds informed each other.

Journalism taught me discipline, structure, and the cost of attachment to outcomes.

Intuitive work taught me how to perceive what conventional verification can’t capture — and how to trust that perception when it was grounded in clarity rather than hope or fear.

The work sits at the intersection of both: intuition without mystification, perception without reducing life to a formula, room for ambiguity without collapsing into doubt.

I’ve spent years refining this quietly in my own practice and with students who were ready for more than generic encouragement.

I’ve reached a point where I want the ideas to travel beyond my immediate circle — not because every reader needs a formal framework (many work brilliantly without one), but because some of you have felt the same friction I did: intuition present, but unstable when it matters.

The synthesis is my own — shaped by newsrooms and card tables, missing-persons desks and client sessions, the demand for evidence and the reality of signal. I’m glad it now exists in a form that can be named, discussed, and taught.

When attention is held with consistency, intuition becomes easier to trust — not because it turns infallible, but because it becomes coherent. That coherence spills past the spread into how you notice misalignment, hold boundaries, and stay with uncertainty. The framework doesn’t stay trapped in the cards; it becomes part of how you perceive.

After 40 years of figuring it out slowly, I’m sharing it because the story and the structure finally belong in the same conversation — the reflective path here, and the defined framework in the article where it can stand on its own.