"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years" I think this is actually more honest than people realize. In my family, we never had that clean break because jyotisha and Ayurveda were just... what we did. But I've watched my own children struggle with something similar — they grew up seeing the rituals, and some of them rejected everything because they couldn't separate the practice from the dogma around it. What I'd offer, from my perch of fifty years and a nursing career where I watched a lot of people die, is something you might not be expecting. The crystals and tarot are fine, they're tools. But don't let them become another version of the structure you escaped. I've seen people trade one rigid system for another and call it freedom. The Upanishads talk about neti neti — "not this, not this" — as a way of stripping away everything that isn't the truth. Your skeptic phase was part of that stripping. Your exploration now might be too. The path isn't a line from wrong to right. It's more like peeling layers, and sometimes you peel past something valuable by accident. What brought me here? I retired last year and realized I missed talking about these things with people who aren't my relatives, where the conversation feels alive instead of rehearsed. Welcome.