What Came Through the Gate

Lion’s Gate Oracle Deck and Guidebook 

Last year, during our Lion’s Gate gathering, we worked with an oracle deck created by one of my teachers from Africa. The deck held powerful teachings for me, supported my own journey, and offered meaningful guidance to our gathering. However, it was not created specifically for the Lion’s Gate teachings we were exploring together.

When the Gate closed, I knew I wanted to bring the wisdom deeper into the next Gate. Originally, I thought I would write a companion guide—something specific to the Lion’s Gate—while continuing to use the same deck. But as I began writing, the process felt hard and sluggish.

Then, one day, I realized why.

These weren’t my cards, my teaching, or my vision.

They had been, and still are, powerful teachings for me, but I was trying to place my own body of work around someone else’s creation.

Then the thought came: What if I created my own?

Could I do that? How?

I let the chatter and noise settle, stopped trying to answer every question at once, and simply took the next step. Slowly, the Lion’s Gate Oracle began to emerge.

I Didn’t Begin With 64 Cards

There was no moment when I sat down and decided, I am going to create a 64-card oracle deck. It happened much more organically than that.

I began by sitting with the names of the cards. First came the seven pathways, and then I sat with each pathway, one at a time.

I began with Pride Energy.

What am I proud of? Who are my prides? What are the prides I was born into and the prides I have chosen? Who are the people, beings, places, and communities with whom I share belonging?

Then came the Lion Guardians and the Wisdom Keepers, followed, of course, by the Fourfold Wisdoms: Clarity, Focus, Purpose, and Aligned Action.

These are where the day-to-day work happens. The chop wood and carry water pathways, where insight becomes practice, purpose becomes movement, and the sacred meets the ordinary.

Before I knew how it had happened, I was sitting with 64 cards. I went back and sat with each title, tapping into the teachings of the Lions as the guidance for each card began to emerge.

At first, there was so much information. Teachings from every modality I had been connected to came forward, along with layers, associations, practices, symbols, and messages.

But as I read through the first drafts, I realized the material had become too message-heavy and was muddying the water. The teaching was becoming buried beneath everything I knew about it.

So I began to eliminate what was not serving the life force of the teaching and the guidance of the Gate. That process became essential. It was not about making the work smaller; it was about making the message clearer.

As I finished the first draft, I realized what I had created. This was not simply a deck of cards. It was an entire framework and scaffolding for navigating the Gate, both open and closed.

The White Lions Were Already There

The White Lions did not enter this work when I began creating the deck. They had been there for years.

My relationship with them reaches back through dreams, study, my journey to South Africa, my time with the Global White Lion Protection Trust, and experiences I still do not always have language for. Over time, they became connected for me with presence, dignity, discernment, belonging, leadership, relationship, and the responsibility of becoming more fully ourselves.

The Fourfold Wisdoms—Clarity, Focus, Purpose, and Aligned Action—came to me through the White Lions in 2022 and became an anchor for much of the work that followed.

The oracle deck offered them another way to speak. Not as concepts to master, but as practices to live.

A Framework for the Gate

As the deck took shape, I began to see that it was giving form to something I had already been doing for myself and my closest circle for the last ten years. The practices were not new, and the teachings were not separate from my life. The deck was gathering them into a structure that could be shared.

It brought together the White Lions, the Lion’s Gate, the Fourfold Wisdoms, Pride Energy, the Lion Guardians, the Wisdom Keepers, my study of Tantra, the land, Sirius, the elephants, and my own experiences of thresholds, endings, belonging, loss, purpose, and beginning again.

The message became much clearer than it had been when I first began this journey. The cards were not asking me to add more; they were asking me to listen more deeply, remove what obscured the teaching, and trust what remained.

Then the Guidebook Became a Book of Its Own

At first, I imagined a relatively simple guide to accompany the cards: a teaching, a reflection question, and perhaps an affirmation.

But the cards kept asking for more.

Each one seemed to carry layers: the central teaching, the wisdom of the White Lions, its relationship to the Lion’s Gate, how it might speak during the open Gate, and how we might work with it throughout the rest of the year.

The guidebook grew because the work grew. It became less about explaining what a card “means” and more about creating a place where someone could sit with a teaching and discover what it means in their own life.

That distinction matters to me. I do not want these cards to tell you your future; I want them to help you enter more deeply into relationship with your present and support you in navigating the Gate. Not only when it is open, but also during the quieter, less visible seasons when the work continues.

The Magical and the Practical

Much of my life has been lived at the intersection of worlds: the mystical and the ordinary, the sacred and the practical, the unseen and the very real choices we make on a Tuesday morning.

That intersection lives within this deck too. There is Sirius, and there are boundaries. There are White Lions, and there is the courage to say no. There are portals, and there are conversations that need to happen. There is purpose. And then there is the next small action that gives that purpose a body.

For me, spirituality becomes meaningful when it changes the way we live. The Lion’s Gate Oracle was created from that place.

A Gate Is a Threshold

Although this deck was born through the Lion’s Gate, its teachings are not limited to a few weeks in August.

Life is filled with gates: the moment you realize something can no longer continue, the pause before a decision, the truth you finally allow yourself to see, the longing you can no longer dismiss, the boundary that needs to be spoken, the idea asking to become real, and the life that begins appearing when something old is released.

Again and again, we arrive at thresholds. The Gate opens. The Gate closes. The work continues.

Perhaps the real question is not whether the Gate is open. Perhaps the question is: Are we willing to walk through and are we willing to keep walking once we are on the other side?

It Is Ready to Be Shared

What began during last year’s Lion’s Gate gathering has become the Lion’s Gate Oracle Deck and Guidebook.

Creating it has felt less like inventing something and more like listening long enough for something to reveal its shape. Card by card, teaching by teaching, image by image, and page by page.

It carries the White Lions, the elephants, the land, the stars, the Fourfold Wisdoms, the Elimination Code, Pride Energy, and many of the teachings and experiences that have shaped my own life. It also carries the framework I have been living and sharing for years: a way of meeting the Gate with greater clarity, focus, purpose, and aligned action.

The Gate opened. Something came through. And this is what was born.