I‘ll be honest. I walked into this one with a raised eyebrow and a mind full of questions that were equal parts curious and cheeky. A Tarot Scientist with a PhD, 14 years of practice, and a waiting list of people whose lives she has quietly, irrevocably changed. I had never interviewed anyone quite like Dr Priya Kaul, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

What I didn’t expect was this: warmth that arrives before the conversation does. She asked, with genuine care, whether she could call me Rajeev. She wondered aloud whether I would do justice to her answers, to the soul she puts into every word. I told her I would try. What followed was one of the most alive conversations I’ve had in a long time. Part fireside, part reckoning, part something I still haven’t entirely found the word for.

She needed only my name and photograph before we began. By the time we sat down, she already knew more about me than I had planned to share. I found that either deeply reassuring or slightly unsettling. Possibly both. Read on, and you’ll understand why.

Over to Tarot Scientist, Dr Priya Kaul…

Rajeev Mokashi: Astrology has been around forever and everyone has an opinion on it. Where does Tarot stand, and what makes it different?

Dr. Priya Kaul: Astrology navigates life through the science of planets. I respect that deeply. But I also believe our karma can influence our lives and even rewrite the effects of planetary energies. A planet sets the stage. What you do on it, that is entirely yours.

Tarot is different. It is a guidance-based tool, not a prediction machine. It listens to where you are right now, in this moment, and offers clarity that helps you make better decisions. Not from fear. From understanding.

The stars suggest. The cards reflect. You decide.

Hope Creator. That is not a title you earn lightly. How do you know you’ve actually brought hope into someone’s life?

People don’t find me early. They find me after everything else has stopped working, the astrologers, the therapists, the well-meaning advice from people who love them. By the time they reach me, they are exhausted in a way that sleep cannot fix.

Somehow, life brings them to me at precisely that point. I’ve stopped questioning why.

I measure hope the way you measure light. Not in units, but in presence. When I see that small, stubborn spark return to someone’s eyes, when they begin to speak again with something that resembles a future, I know. That is the only scoreboard I keep.

A name. A photograph. That is all you need from a client. Should I be flattered or slightly nervous?

Both responses are perfectly reasonable. Every reader works differently. For me, the moment a photograph arrives, the conversation has already begun. The client simply hasn’t heard their side of it yet.

Most of my clients are international, or in cities far from my own. Distance has never been a variable. No date of birth required. No time of birth. Just your name and your face. The rest arrives, as I can only describe it, divinely guided.

The reading starts the moment I have your photograph. You just don’t know it yet.

You wake at 3:30 in the morning. By choice. What exactly is happening at that hour?

Brahma Muhurat. The hour before the world remembers itself. No noise, no distractions, no competing frequencies. I sit in the stillness and receive what I call down loadings, intuitive guidance that arrives the way clear water arrives when you stop stirring the glass.

By the time my clients reach out later in the day, I have already been briefed. When they speak, I connect with their specific energy and receive what belongs to them. Not borrowed wisdom, not textbook interpretation. Something living and particular to that person in that moment.

It is, simply, how the work works.

The wellness world is crowded with healers, coaches and gurus. What separates the real from the rehearsed?

For me, everything started with loss.

In 2011, my father died. Suddenly, without warning, without the courtesy of preparation. The questions that followed weren’t spiritual in any conventional sense. They were raw. Is communication beyond physical life possible? Where does a soul go? Is grief a wall or a door?

I was sceptical. I had a regular job and no interest in any of this. But grief is an extraordinarily efficient teacher. Through what I can only describe as divine guidance, I experienced mediumship and connected with my father’s soul. That experience didn’t give me a career. It gave me a purpose.

Everything since has been built from that moment. One conviction: this knowledge should not be rare.

The real ones didn’t choose this work. This work chose them. Usually through loss.

14 years of faith in healing. Has it ever been genuinely tested?

Once. A client from Bangalore called me. Her mother was in the ICU. Doctors had quietly communicated to the family what they already feared. She had attended one of my healing sessions four years prior. In a moment of desperation, she remembered. She called.

I scanned the mother’s energy and told the daughter what I felt: her mother’s time had not yet come. She had years ahead of her. I began my healing work. Six days later, her mother was discharged. She is today living healthily in Ahmedabad with her daughter. That daughter, as it happens, is a doctor. The medical team used the word miracle.

I don’t use that word myself. I only know that after that day, faith stopped being the right word for what I carry. It became something quieter. And considerably more certain.

Switchwords. Do they actually work or are we simply willing them to?

I don’t recommend anything I haven’t lived through myself. That is my first and most non-negotiable rule.

Let me explain it simply. Most people who struggle financially aren’t struggling because money isn’t available. They are struggling because of what they believe about money deep down. The fear of never having enough. The feeling of not deserving it. The worry that has become so familiar it feels like fact. These beliefs sit quietly in the background, and they shape everything.

Switchwords work at that level. They are specific words or combinations of words that, when repeated with intention, begin to shift the way your mind and energy relate to a situation. Think of it less as magic and more as reprogramming. The way a song can change your mood without you understanding exactly why. The word reaches something the logical mind cannot always access on its own.

Once that inner shift happens, what you attract on the outside begins to change too. I have seen it work, consistently, across 14 years and hundreds of people. Results don’t lie.

How do you explain Tarot to skeptics who see it as superstition?

A dentist friend’s husband once challenged me. He wanted to know whether Tarot is something a sensible, thinking person should take seriously.

I said: when you have a toothache and you walk into a dentist’s clinic, you sit in the chair and you trust. You trust the diagnosis, the X-ray, the treatment plan. You don’t demand that the dentist prove the existence of cavities before she’s allowed to examine you. You give her the benefit of her training, her experience, her years of getting it right. And that trust is what allows the healing to happen.

Tarot works the same way. You don’t have to arrive as a believer. But if you have chosen to seek guidance, give the process a fair chance. Come with an open mind rather than a closed case. That small shift, from resistance to openness, is often all it takes for something genuinely useful to come through.

AI can now answer almost anything. Are we slowly talking ourselves out of our own instincts?

To some extent, yes. And I say it without drama, because it is simply true. AI operates through logic and accumulated information. Intuition operates through something else entirely. Through lived experience, through loss, through the particular wisdom that arrives only after you’ve sat in the dark long enough for your eyes to adjust.

No algorithm can sit with your grief.

It cannot feel the weight of what you’re carrying. It can provide answers, but it cannot provide the thing that makes an answer matter: genuine human presence, warmth, and the sense that the person across from you actually understands.

That gap is not a flaw in technology. It is the reminder of what makes us irreplaceable.

Someone reading this right now is quietly falling apart. What do you tell them?

We have three hearts. The mind, which thinks and analyses and will happily keep you awake at 2am with its helpfulness. The heart, which speaks in the language of love and compassion and reminds you that you are not alone. And the gut. That quiet, stubborn, almost inconvenient voice that knew the answer before the question was even fully formed.

Your ancestors speak through it. The universe nudges through it. And it has never, in the history of anyone who has truly listened to it, been entirely wrong.

So, if you are falling apart, don’t ignore the gut. Don’t let the mind’s very impressive list of reasons override the heart. Be still. The answer you are looking for is already inside you. You simply need to be quiet enough to hear it. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It has been waiting.

This conversation, for all its warmth and moments of unexpected stillness, is not easy to walk away from unchanged.

In a world that is increasingly noisy and certain that the next app or algorithm holds the answer, Dr. Priya Kaul represents something quietly radical. The belief that the answers most worth having are already inside you, waiting patiently for you to slow down enough to hear them.

Tarot, as she practices it, is not fortune telling. It is a mirror. A conversation between where you are and where you could be, guided by someone who has spent 14 years learning to listen at a frequency most of us have simply stopped listening for. That is the real story behind the cards. And why, once people find her, they tend not to leave.

For more stories like this, stay tuned to TheGlitz.