About Shira.
I am a mixed SWANA femme, who is a queer, disabled, former (mostly) sex worker living with complex PTSD. I believe that magic and witchcraft, first and foremost, was created and used to support our collective wellbeing, resistance, growth, safety & protection.
Tarot is one of my Spiritual Partners and it has guided and anchored me throughout my life. I have used Tarot as a technology for transformation, activism, healing and magical practice since the 1980's when I was a teenager. I was drawn to my first deck as though I was Colbalt and Tarot was a magnet. I ate, breathed and slept with the cards. I felt my entire world shift with the portal that the cards created. I recently learned that Tarot's Minor Arcana suites were based on the Mamluk deck that was created by Southwest Asian and North African people. Now I understand that pull to the Tarot was the cards calling me back to a part of my own story and tradition of magic.
I have been reading professionally since 2008, including as a shop witch at Psychic Sister in Olympia, Washington. I primarily work with pendulums, tarot, candles and numerology. I come from three generations of witches and mediums from Eastern Europe who divine through dreams and spirit communications on my mother's side. My father's side has practiced numerology rooted in our mixed SWANA heritage.
Bio:
Shira is a long time community organizer originally from Philadelphia and New York City and has been living in Chicago since 2002. She is currently the Transformative Justice Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization and runs the TJ Help Desk. Shira is the co-founder of Just Practice Collaborative, a capacity-building project for organizations and community members working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm, reduction, and collective liberation, and the former executive director of Young Women's Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. As a lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, she has been working on community accountability for nearly 35 years and has helped young people of color start their own organizing projects across the country. Shira is the co-author of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Mariame Kaba, and the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction.