Journeys | A Conversation With… Tamara Driessen

Tamara Driessen – otherwise known as Wolf Sister – is an intuitive healer who infuses mystic practices into everyday life.

How do you describe what you do?

I work as a crystal healer and tarot reader, and I’m the author of two books. Everything that I do kind of comes back to working intuitively and guiding others to live more intuitively.

What was your earliest experience with crystals?
It goes back to childhood. I bought my first crystal at the Natural History Museum on a school trip when I was about eight. Everyone else was buying giant rubbers or postcards, but I was just drawn to this rose quartz. I would take it everywhere with me. It wasn’t till I got a bit older that I started learning that crystals had powers. I read in a magazine that if you wore a garnet ring you’d get a boyfriend, so saved all my pocket money for this ring. When I got a boyfriend a couple of weeks later, I was like, “Whoa, this stuff works.”

You grew up in Essex and started out on a different path to your current career. Can you tell us about that?
I fell into hairdressing after I finished school. It was never meant to be my forever job. I’d always been into spirituality so I would go to workshops on angels and chakras at the weekends, but that was something I didn’t really tell a lot of people about because they thought it was a bit woowoo.

How did you make the leap from hair to healing?
When I was 28 I had a bit of a healing crisis – a breakdown/breakthrough – and realised that doing things everyone else’s way wasn’t working for me. I went to the doctor to try to get some help and she wanted to give me antidepressants. I didn’t feel that was the right thing for me, and her response was, “If you don’t want to help yourself, I can’t help you.” That just lit a fire in me. I said to myself, “Cool! I better explore my other options then.” That’s when I leaned back into crystals. I ended up going for a reading with a psychic who said I was supposed to be doing spiritual work, and everything clicked into place. I went to Bali and apprenticed with a shaman there, then came back home and started building up my practice and doing events. I gradually phased out hairdressing. After I got my first book deal, I handed in my notice at the salon.

How did your identity as Wolf Sister come about?
When I started meditating, I thought basically I was the world’s worst meditator! I was supposed to be switching my mind off and not having any thoughts, but I was always seeing animals. Then I started looking up every animal’s message and guidance for us. I paid more attention to the animals that came to me during meditation, and the wolf was the predominant one. The wolf was about releasing old habits or things that no longer serve you and becoming your spiritual self. When I was training with my shaman, there was an initiation ceremony at the end. I thought I was going to get a shamanic name and it was going to be amazing, but I was told it would just come to me. I got back from Bali and needed a name for Instagram and my blog, so I came up with a list of just the cringiest names! I had one option that had “wolf” in it as a placeholder. And then “Wolf Sister” just came to me when I was on the tube. It was like, “Of course!”

What are some things you do to maintain your energy day to day?
Every morning I meditate, and I meditate before I go to bed for about 20 minutes. Every night at about 8pm I uninstall all social media apps from my phone, and I won’t reinstall them until after I’ve meditated the next morning. It makes such a difference energetically. Otherwise my office ends up being 24 hours. Most days I also do a practice from a book called The Artist’s Way. It’s called morning pages, where you do three pages in a journal of whatever’s in your head. It helps me get clear on whatever’s swirling around, what to let go of and where my energy needs to go.

Do you have a crystal you’re relying on a lot now?
One that I keep reaching for at the moment is a crystal called kunzite, which is a really good for heart healing and helping you to access higher states of consciousness. It’s like a higher vibrational version of rose quartz.

We love your first book The Crystal Code. What can you tell us about your second book?
It’s called Luna, so it’s all about moon rituals and how to align with the phases of the moon. It’s about the astrology of the moon and how we can use that to find more balance, self-awareness and manifestations – in other words, how to make more good things happen in our lives.

You mentioned that intuition is important in your work. What do we need to know about intuition?
Intuition is that inner knowing within yourself, regardless of conditioning or people-pleasing or what you think you “should” be doing. Intuition leads you down a different path that maybe isn’t familiar or well-trodden. Our intuition is always guiding us to connect with our higher self without programming or limitations. It’s very reassuring and nurturing and encouraging. Everyone has it, everyone is intuitive, but not everyone knows how to work with it. I see intuition like a relationship with a best friend that you just haven’t hung out with that much. You need to spend time to build trust, because a lot of the time it’s giving us information that doesn’t have proof or an experience to back it up. A lot of people I work with are very indecisive. But the thing is that they do know what to do, it’s just buried under so much other stuff. Things are piled on top like worries about money, worries about change, guilt, other people’s perceptions.

It almost sounds like you’re a personal trainer, but instead of helping clients flex their physical muscles you help them work out their intuition. Is that a different approach from other healers?
Everybody works differently. But I find with tarot reading, I’m only telling someone what they’re already thinking. And with crystals, they’re a reflection of your subconscious. My job is to give people the permission slip to go for it, to follow their intuition.