About Leigh Spencer
Tides of Knowing is structured work on symbolic interpretation, intuitive literacy, and reflective tarot practice, for readers and thinkers who sense that symbolic work runs deeper than memorised meanings, aesthetic spirituality, or performance intuition.
It was built from decades of lived observation across journalism, business, education, mentoring, and tarot practice.
For more than forty years, Leigh Spencer, a fourth-generation Matakite (seer), has worked with tarot as a symbolic language of perception, pattern recognition, and human insight. Alongside that work, she spent three decades as a journalist, broadcaster, editor, educator, and business strategist, developing a parallel discipline grounded in clarity, discernment, and the ability to recognise what sits beneath surface narrative.
The journalist disciplines the intuitive.
The intuitive reads what the facts alone cannot reveal.
That intersection now forms the foundation of Tides of Knowing, The COMPASS Method™, and the wider practice environment evolving through The Deck Compass™.
The Work
Tides of Knowing is a long-form editorial and educational platform exploring tarot, symbolic systems, perception, intuitive development, and relational reading practice.
The work is grounded in the understanding that tarot is not simply a collection of card meanings. It is a language of movement, relationship, pressure, pattern, timing, contradiction, and signal.
Much of modern tarot culture focuses heavily on interpretation as information retrieval:
“What does this card mean?”
But real reading rarely unfolds that way.
A spread may be technically correct while remaining emotionally flat. A reader may know the meanings and still lose the thread. Symbolic signal may emerge clearly for one moment, then disappear under pressure, over-analysis, emotional projection, speed, or performance.
Tides of Knowing explores what happens in those spaces.
The site brings together long-form articles, field notes, interpretive tools, teaching frameworks, live practice structures, and reflective methodologies designed to strengthen symbolic perception over time.
Why This Method Exists
Over decades of observation, one pattern became increasingly clear:
Many readers plateau not because they lack knowledge, but because they have never been taught how perception itself behaves inside a reading.
Most intuitive training teaches symbolism.
Far less teaches how attention shifts under pressure, how relational dynamics alter interpretation, how readers unconsciously override signal, how projection enters symbolic space, how intuition and structure support one another, and how to recognise the difference between noise and coherence.
The COMPASS Method™ emerged from that observation.
Not as a performance system.
Not as a predictive shortcut.
But as a perceptual framework for staying connected to signal while navigating symbolic complexity.
Journalism, Business & Pattern Recognition
Before building Tides of Knowing, Leigh Spencer spent decades working across journalism, publishing, business, mentoring, and digital strategy.
She worked as a journalist, broadcaster, and magazine editor for more than thirty years, including serving as Editor of Dogs Life magazine in Sydney, Australia. That work developed a deep respect for clarity, structure, questioning, narrative patterning, and the responsibility involved in interpretation.
Alongside media work, she owned her first bricks-and-mortar business at twenty-six and has worked online for more than two decades across evolving digital environments.
She has also worked as a Ngāi Tahu business mentor, supporting emerging businesses and strategic development.
Those experiences deeply shaped the foundations of this work.
Because symbolic perception does not happen outside life. It happens inside complexity, ambiguity, responsibility, emotion, timing, relationships, and decision-making under pressure.
That grounding is central to how Tides of Knowing approaches both tarot and intuitive development.
Tarot as Perceptual Practice
At its core, tarot is treated here as a living symbolic dialogue rather than a fixed meaning system.
A card does not exist in isolation. It changes according to relationship, placement, sequence, tension, emotional atmosphere, narrative movement, and the perceptual state of the reader themselves.
This is why so much of the work within Tides of Knowing focuses on relational interpretation, symbolic interaction, movement between cards, coherence across spreads, perceptual integrity, reflective practice, and embodied discernment.
The aim is not simply to “read cards correctly.”
The aim is to develop deeper symbolic fluency, intuitive steadiness, and interpretive trust.
The COMPASS Method™
The COMPASS Method™ is an original interpretive framework created by Tides of Knowing.
It was developed to help readers organise attention, remain connected to signal, and navigate symbolic complexity with greater clarity and coherence.
Rather than relying on memorisation or rigid formulas, the method explores how perception behaves dynamically within real readings.
The seven conditions of the framework are:
- Center
- Open
- Map
- Perceive
- Align
- Sense
- Seal
Together, these form a practical structure for relational reading, symbolic interpretation, reflective practice, and intuitive refinement.
The Deck Compass™
As the methodology evolved, it became clear that readers needed more than theory alone.
They needed a live environment where symbolic perception could be practised, tested, reflected upon, and strengthened over time.
The Deck Compass™ was created as that practice space.
It functions as a developing ecosystem for real reading practice, reflective learning, symbolic application, structured interpretation, perceptual refinement, and intuitive confidence.
Some members enter primarily as Readers. Others arrive primarily as Seekers. Many move naturally between both.
Who This Work Serves
This work tends to resonate most strongly with readers who already sense there is something deeper occurring beneath surface interpretation.
Often they are:
- experienced readers who still second-guess themselves
- intuitive practitioners seeking stronger structure
- symbolic thinkers drawn to relational interpretation
- readers who feel the signal before they can articulate it
- practitioners wanting greater coherence and trust in their readings
- people interested in perception, narrative, archetype, and symbolic intelligence
Many arrive after years of study feeling technically knowledgeable but perceptually disconnected.
Others come from highly intuitive backgrounds and are looking for stronger frameworks capable of supporting what they already sense.
Tides of Knowing sits at the meeting point between those worlds.
Training & Practice
Training through Tides of Knowing is designed to be thoughtful, rigorous, relational, and grounded in lived practice rather than performance culture.
The focus is not on creating dependency, certainty theatre, or scripted interpretation.
It is about developing discernment, symbolic fluency, perceptual trust, reflective capacity, interpretive steadiness, and relational awareness.
Teaching environments may include live cohorts, guided practice, interpretive frameworks, reflective tools, field notes, structured reading environments, and symbolic analysis.
A Note on Experience
This work has evolved across decades rather than trends.
It has been shaped through thousands of readings, years of observation, editorial discipline, business leadership, mentoring, symbolic study, and long-term engagement with how human beings seek clarity during periods of uncertainty and transition.
Tides of Knowing continues to evolve as a living body of work exploring perception, symbolism, discernment, intuitive practice, and the deeper structures that sit beneath meaningful interpretation.