Today's Tarot: Ace of Cups (emotion, intuition, love)

Yay! It’s another of my favorite cards in the deck. The Ace of Cups represents that first blush of love, or the spark of intuition that leads you in the right direction. It’s always the awareness of what you are feeling right when you are feeling it. It is one of the most optimistic cards in the deck. When you feel those feelings and allow yourself the self-love they inevitably represent, that is when grand adventures in life take place. When you don’t, when you ignore or disregard them, that is another  story.

We are disturbingly good at disregarding our feelings. We have them, but we either shy away from them or deny them outright. The Ace of Cups doesn’t let us play that debilitating game. It states, for the record, that not only are our feelings valid, but we need to *pay attention*. When you have an emotional reaction to something, anything, that reaction is giving you information. If you don’t pay attention to what you are feeling and if you don’t honor it, then you are going to cause some sort of dis-ease in your body/mind/heart/spirit system. I can pretty much guarantee it.

So, today, pay attention to your feelings. They are trying to tell you something. And if you follow the path on which they lead you, you will learn, grow, stretch, and fly.

Moving on, I want to give you a quote from A Winter’s Bones. “Never asked for what ought to be offered.” It’s not a fuzzy wuzzy love quote, but I hold that it is true to a great extent. If you feel like you are standing, hat in hand, and hoping/begging/pleading for someone to give you time, attention, love, and if you feel like you are always in that place of wistful anxiety with that person, I would ask you to consider whether or not you need to have that person in your life.

If you look at the image of the card, below, you will see that it is a chalice that is filled or being filled with water. Water, in this case, is our emotion or love. When the Ace is right side up, it is being filled and full of bountiful, beautiful emotions and the spark that ignites them into love. When it is reversed, that cup is upside down, and our emotions and love are being poured out into nothingness until we are empty. So, in addition to feeling the love inside yourself for yourself and others, inherent in the card is a caution not to waste your emotions where they are not wanted or deserved.

If you feel like that is happening, if your intuition taps you on the back of the head, or in your belly that something is off, don’t ignore it. Instead, acknowledge it, feel it, and then do something about it.