Before the camera rolls, the teacher pulls a card. It is an ordinary habit for a tarot reader, but this teacher says she is not one. In the opening lesson of her Osho Zen Tarot course, Dharana Ventura, who introduces herself as a holistic therapist and meditation teacher, draws "We Are the World" as a kind of warm-up, describes the image to her students, and then tells them it fits the moment they are living in. That small ritual sets the tone for the whole first lesson. The Osho Zen Tarot, she explains, is not a traditional deck but a surrealist one, built around archetypes she calls the collective unconscious, and its cards are meant to bring up answers a person may not be able to reach on their own. The lesson is a short orientation: why she teaches this deck, what the course will and will not cover, and the one principle she says matters most. Its scope is modest, but its claims are specific, and they are worth unpacking for anyone curious about this particular deck.
Ventura is direct about her own position. She says she has "some training" but does not read tarot in the usual sense, and that she owns no traditional, modern, or classic decks at all. "I only have the Osho," she says, "which is what captivated me because I love meditation." She describes herself as an Insight Timer meditation teacher, and that background shapes the course. Rather than teaching a card-by-card system inherited from centuries of practice, she teaches one deck through the lens of meditation and self-inquiry.
That choice is the spine of the course. Ventura frames her mission as helping people through healing and by sharing information that supports self-knowledge, and she says she has created several free courses on that basis. The Osho Zen Tarot course, she says, will be "entirely based on the Osho Zen Tarot," with each lesson kept brief and focused so students don't drop off. The promise is narrow on purpose. You are not getting a survey of tarot history or a comparison of decks. You are getting a practice built around one set of images.
The conceptual claim at the center of the lesson is that tarot is made of archetypes. Ventura puts it plainly: "the tarot is nothing more than archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, illustrated, where you connect with your inner self to bring up the answers you need or that the person you are reading for needs at that moment." She returns to the idea early and often. In her telling, the insights she shares "are part of the collective unconscious of humanity," which is why she believes they can reach a wide audience.
"The Zen Tarot is a tool for self-knowledge that can help you reveal answers from the unconscious, those we don't want to see or cannot access in a simplified way."
Dharana Ventura, opening lesson of her Osho Zen Tarot course (published August 2020)
This is a different claim from the one most people bring to tarot. The usual question is what the cards predict. Ventura's framing asks what the image makes visible in you. The card is treated as a mirror for material that is hard to reach directly, the things a person "doesn't want to see" or cannot access easily. Whether you accept the psychological model behind that is a separate question, but it explains why the course is about inner access rather than external forecasting. The deck is a prompt for looking inward, and the reading is the act of looking.
The same logic applies when a reading is done for someone else. Ventura says she teaches students "how to read for yourself, how to read for others," and that her method draws on radiesthesia, a pendulum, and intuition. The lesson does not explain those methods in detail, so students should treat this as a preview of the course's practical side rather than a full account of it. What the lesson does establish is that intuition is central to her approach: the cards open the door, and the reader's own attunement does the interpreting.
The first thing Ventura wants students to understand is that this is not a conventional tarot. "Which is not a traditional deck but a surrealist one," she says, while showing the "We Are the World" card. That image, as she describes it, shows "people from all over the globe stand around a mandala, holding hands, dancing, happy, sharing, and celebrating everything in this life." She reads it as representing the present moment, and she seems genuinely pleased by how neatly it arrived before the lesson began. Whether one sees it as coincidence or design is up to the student, but the description is useful on its own terms: it is a warm, collective, non-hierarchical scene, quite unlike the stiff figurative tableaux many people associate with older decks.
Ventura is also explicit about what the course will not teach. "Here in this course you will not learn traditional tarot, the Marseille tarot, or the gypsy deck," she says. "It is none of that. I will not be covering that." If you already know those traditions, she says, you can link what you know to this course. For a newcomer, the message is clear: you do not need prior tarot knowledge to start, and you should not expect the course to correct or replace one. The deck stands on its own, and the lesson is designed around it.
The deck also comes with a companion book, which Ventura says supplies the meaning of the cards "according to the philosophy of Osho." This is where the course's second source enters. She is careful to correct a common assumption: Osho did not create this tarot. "It was created by Ma Deva Padma," she says. Ventura recommends that students read some of Osho's own literature and says she will provide PDFs of material she has, so the philosophy behind the card meanings is not a mystery. Her reasoning is practical. Knowing the underlying philosophy, she suggests, "makes it easier for you to work with this."
For all the specifics, the lesson ends on a deliberately simple note. Ventura says that whatever you are doing, you should meditate, and she calls this "one of the main principles." It sounds like a throwaway line, but it is the thread that ties the whole course together. The deck is not meant to be consulted in isolation, as an oracle to be asked a question. It is meant to be used inside a contemplative practice, where reading the cards and sitting quietly are two halves of the same discipline.
She closes by previewing the next lesson, which will cover the history of tarot "in context," and by reminding students that the lessons will stay short, with brief videos "so you don't get discouraged or give up." That humility is worth noting. The opening lesson is an orientation, not a deep dive. It tells you what kind of deck this is, where it came from, what it is for, and how the teacher thinks about it. Anything more detailed is promised for later.
Watch the lesson for its premises rather than its techniques. The core ideas are that the deck is surrealist rather than traditional, that its meanings come from Osho's philosophy and the book that accompanies the cards, that Osho did not create it, and that the cards are archetypal prompts for accessing the unconscious. Those four points give you a framework for everything that follows. If you want to go further, the lesson itself asks you to read Osho's literature and to keep a meditation practice running alongside your study. Treat the deck as a companion to inner work rather than a tool for quick answers, and you will be following the teacher's own stated intention.
Start by watching the opening lesson of the Osho Zen Tarot course on Dharana Ventura's channel, and pay attention to the moment she draws "We Are the World" and describes it. Then read the book that accompanies the cards and any Osho material she provides, so the card meanings have a philosophical root you can check against your own reading. Keep a short daily meditation going while you work through the lessons, since Ventura names it as a main principle. When the next lesson arrives and covers the history of tarot "in context," compare it with what you already know, and note where this surrealist deck departs from the traditions she has said she will not teach. Finally, practice reading for yourself before reading for anyone else. The course is built on the idea that the answers come from within, and the only way to test that claim is to sit with the cards and see what surfaces.
