Welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast. I'm your host, Josephine Hartman. I'm an intuitive healer and certified Akashik Records reader and teacher, driven by the purpose of helping others become more powerful by reconnecting to the healer within.

To explore my work or connect with me, you can visit josephinehartman.com.

If you feel called to support the podcast, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.

I so appreciate your presence here, and I'm honored to serve as a guide or companion on your path for a little while.

Now, on to the episode.

My guest for this episode is Lauren McGill, a spiritualist diviner and root worker living in New Orleans.

In her work as a woman of rivers, she utilizes the taro for insight, growth, and healing. Lauren is also currently studying

art therapy, a practice she intends to integrate with ancestral healing modalities of

breathwork and herbal medicine making.

To tune in to weekly collective tarot readings through Lauren's Instagram,

you can go to Woman of Rivers or visit her website for booking to check out her spells deck

and to do some conjure work at womanof rivers.com. As always, I will have all of those links

in the show notes so you can connect. And here is our interview. So let's just start at the beginning

and tell me a little bit about your backstory and how you first came to spirituality and spiritual pursuits.

Well, I think that my story is very relatable because it began with an illness, unfortunately.

I was just exiting my undergrad experience, and it was not what I thought it would be.

I sort of left that situation really excited for freedom.

But unfortunately, my body and my mind were not in the same place as my heart.

And so after a few years of some really difficult experiences with doctors being gaslighted, for lack of a better term,

really, and for, you know, being black and being a woman and just, you know, trying to

advocate for myself, and it wasn't clicking. And so when I found the taro, I was in a place where I was physically ill.

I was depressed from my experience in art school.

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