Ace Of Cups

The Fool's journey through the Majors is complete. Now, we move through the cards that are here with us on the ground floor, starting with a deep dive into the Ace of Cups. In this episode, we expand the container of our hearts and emotions, move in the flow of emotional honesty, and look at the ways that suppressing our emotions only makes them come out in ways that don't serve us.

Main themes in this episode:
• why the Minor Arcana feels easier to apply day in our "normal" lives
• Aces as seeds: initiation, opportunity, new beginnings, independence
• Cups as water: emotions, intuition, connection, meaning beyond romance
• Ace Of Cups as stepping into emotional truth
• intuition as a birthright and a whole-body signal
• shadow side: refusal, denial, and emotional blowback
• Rider-Waite symbolism: the cup, dove, five streams, and sacred meaning 

If you like the way I read tarot, consider purchasing my tarot key with easy-to-apply meanings for all 78 cards. Link below

Links:

• Buy my tarot key
• Ace of Cups Blog
• Mary K Greer's Blog
• Background track is Freshly Squeezed by Matt Large
• My Links 

Don't forget to follow and say hi on social media! Howl

Transcript

Welcome To Wolf Child Magic

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the Wolf Child Magic Podcast. My name is Ashley, your tarot reader, Rocky Mountain Witch, and overall Wolf Child, and I thank you for being here with me today. We have a very special episode because we are officially in the minors for the deep dives. I it's I don't even know how to describe and how in sync from an evolutionary spiritual sense I feel with these deep dives. Like I've just been looking back at the deep dives, starting with the fool, and now we have just gone through the world, and I truly see where my own evolution and how I give this material to you, how I set this material up in a way that aligns to my little wolf child ways instead of the ways other tarot readers do it. I'm just seeing all of this kind of come to be, and it's absolutely beautiful. Thank you for being on this journey with me. If you are brand new to the wolf pack, welcome. You are so welcome here. I am so excited to go through the rest of this journey and discuss the minors with you. The minors are pretty special. The reason that the minors are so special is because, as beautiful as the majors are, sometimes it can be kind of hard to work with them because the majors, if we look at the phrase as above, so below, the majors represent the as above. They're cosmic, they're liminal, they're symbolic, they're archetypal. They are encompassing, they've been with us since our own evolution, which makes them amazing in helping us connect to those bigger, more cosmic, timeless, ancient, universal energies, but it can also make them harder to work with for the same reason. They're so huge, they're so big. That how do we work with them when we are here in our day-to-day life, just trying to get through each day, do what our family needs, do what our responsibilities need, our to-do lists. How do we take cards like the hanged man sometimes, or any of the majors? That's just the one that popped out. How do we take any of these cards and bring it down in our day-to-day lives? And that is where the minors come in. Because the minors represent the so below. The minors are here with us on the ground floor, they are here in our day-to-day life, which means that while they may not have that same all-encompassing from the beginning of time archetypal energy, we have a little bit more say in how we go about working with them. We can maybe put a little more influence on the minors than we can the majors. For example, let's say you pull the moon tarot card and you want to do a moon ritual in honor of working with this moon tarot card that came forward for you in a reading. That's beautiful, that's great. You do all the prep, you know exactly what you're going to include in this ritual, you know everything that is going to happen, and then the day of the ritual comes, you've slept, you've eaten, you've turned your phone off, you haven't looked at social media all day, you step into your ritual and you're not feeling it. Like it's just not coming. You know, that energy, that palpable force of connection to the practice, you're you're just not feeling it. That happens. That's what sometimes working with the majors feels like. We can throw everything, every intention, every action, every alignment, all forms of symbolism. We can throw all of that in the kitchen sink to working with the majors. And sometimes it still won't matter. The reason for that, we're not the same every day. Now you could do the same exact ritual on a different day in a different moon phase, and you might feel like it is your most powerful embodied ritual ever. You haven't changed anything, it's just that we're not the same every day. And the majors are so, again, they're so cosmic, they're so in the ether that bringing them down into our physical material worlds and connecting to them through our physical bodies is just not always going to line up, and that's no fault of our own. And I just want to say this is a total side piece, but um, you are not a bad witch, you are not a bad practitioner, you're not a bad reader, you're not a bad nothing if you feel that. Okay, there is such an expectation. I just I know this is a little baby rant, please. I'm sorry, bear with me, but there is such an expectation that proficient witches, proficient practitioners can always get there and they'll get there immediately. Okay, this is just absolute bullshit. I'm sorry. I will do a whole rant on this, I promise you, because it's really hard to engage with the craft, with the practice, with other people sometimes when you're sitting here being honest and saying things like, Yeah, like I really struggled, or um, you're in an online group, you're talking about it on Facebook, and someone else comes in and is like, never had that problem. These people are so much more concerned over being seen as proficient than just building their proficiency, okay? Um, so rant over, simply saying that if you ever feel this in your witchcraft with your tarot, you're doing nothing wrong. Okay, some days again, we're just not the same. We're not supposed to be the same because as we will get into, we are emotional, watery beings. We move in the flow. We move in the flow of life, we move in the flow of the moon, of our day, of what we're processing, what we're going through. Some days are just easier than others in all sorts of ways. So today's episode is gonna be a deep dive into the ace of cups, then we'll go on to the ace of pentacles, then swords, then wands. I'm gonna group them together by numerology. I think that that is personally easier because then we can see and get a grip on the numerology here of one and then apply the nuance of the suits. To me, I find that to be more helpful than moving through the suits themselves because they really take a journey, again, as we'll see. So if we kind of divvy our journey up into all of the aces, then all of the twos, then all the threes, and so on and so on, I have found that to be the most helpful. One tarot deck that does this that again I just love is the Herb Crafters Tarot. And again, I found the breaking up of the guidebook with the miners to be done that way to be so helpful because it allowed me to read the numerology, get a grip on that, and then see the subtleties and the differences and the nuance between the suits, which really layered my readings. So that's how we're gonna do it. Um, I'm gonna do very quick speed round of my housekeeping. First and foremost, if you like this podcast, if you like me, please let someone know in the algorithm. That way it gets out to other people who may like it as well. And it's so appreciated. The events that I have coming up are New Moon, which is the 17th from 6 to 8. This one is done out of my house. I used to do this at the bookstore that was here in Conifer. When the bookstore closed, the group was like, we cannot lose this space, and I just started doing it out of my home because I didn't want to find a place that I had to pay rent on or that there were all these restrictions on. A lot of places won't let you, you know, burn a candle, burn any incense, won't let you have wine, things like that. So I've started doing it out of my house. If you are interested in this, you're in the foothills area of Colorado, if you're in Denver, Lakewood, Littleton, or up here with me in Evergreen, Colorado, or Evergreen Conifer or Bailey, excuse me, and you're kind of looking for a supportive group, please reach out. I'm obviously not gonna be putting my physical fucking address out there. Uh, but right now this is done out of my house. As the group grows, I will look into a more um bigger space, but right now it's just been incredibly beautiful and supportive. Same thing with the wolf pack, which is done on the 25th from one to three. This is where we actually do a lot of spiritual collective work together. We cast spells together, we engage in not only the conversation but the cause and effect of witchcraft. This is where it's kind of boots on the ground. And again, very supportive. It's wonderful. And on the 18th of April from 12 to 5, I will be doing readings at Rocky Mountain Punk during their pop-up. And I'm there all the time now, but I will definitely be there for their pop-up market. So there's gonna be vendors, there's just tons of stuff. It's a great time if you are interested. You can look to my events page below, and all of that will be listed there as well. So let's go ahead and get into the deep dive of the ace of cups. The link in the show notes is there to go to the blog posts. You will always have the blog post content available. One, it provides the outline for what I speak here. I'm not someone who can really just completely riff, if that makes sense. I need a little bit of a guideline, otherwise, my riffs would go everywhere. Um, but it also shows the ace of cups from all the decks that I own. Now I only will be discussing one, maybe two. My collection is simply too large now to discuss all the cards or all the ace of cup cards that I own because we would just be here far too long. And I'm working on tailoring the timeline down of my episodes a little bit. So please click the link to go to the blog. You can look at again all the images, and then you can get this content in written format. It's just a way to kind of cross-pollinate and help you as you are reading this card, using this card, and integrating this card into your practice and therefore your life. So we are officially here, as I said at the very beginning, we're done with the majors. Now we're moving on to the minors. And I mentioned uh before that the majors represent the as above. And if that's the case, then the minors represent the so below. The word arcana, if you are unfamiliar, means secret or mystery. So the major arcana cards speak to the huge major secrets or mysteries of life. The minors represent the minor secrets or mysteries of life. So these cards can feel easier to work with, they can feel easier to learn, they can feel easier to apply. Like if we do a daily poll and we pull the ace of cups, it can feel a little bit maybe easier to just physically apply the invitations of the card to our life because we can say, okay, this card came forward. I understand what it's saying. I can do this, I can say this, I can forge an emotional connection today. There's more of a cause and effect with the miners, I would say. There's just a little bit more of awareness of where we can take the card's invitations and then apply it in real time to our life. So all of the four aces, again, we're gonna go into the cups, pentacles, swords, and then wands. The numerology here of one represents initiation, opportunity, new beginnings, new potentials, powerful independence. We're gonna see some overlap between the aces and the magician a little bit, but the aces are our seed babies in the tarot. They represent the power that's just innate and held within ourselves. And then when we have an opportunity, or the setting is right, or the conditions are right, or we choose to explore what growth means in this space and in this time, that seed starts to sprout, it starts to take root, and it grows and it germinates. But right here, the aces are the seeds of the tarot. They hold the potential, they represent all that power within, and then it emerges, it grows again in a setting, in a place, and a time that allows us to thrive and grow stronger in ourselves. So we have the energy of the ace, and the way that I think can be helpful in reading the cards intuitively, meaning you don't have to immediately go to a guidebook in order to understand what the card is saying, we're gonna kind of break this down here. So before we even get into the suit, we know that working with an ace opens us into themes of initiation, opportunities, new beginnings or potentials, and powerful independence. And if that is all we take, because we don't remember what the cup suit speaks to, that is enough. That immediately is something that we can work with and use even if we're not able to immediately again place it in the suit, which here is cups and in the heart. So we know what aces speak to, just talked about those, and then we bring in the suit, and the suit of cups speaks to the heart. So combining the two together here, we have this sense of initiation within the heart space. We have this invitation to see where we can begin again, where there's a potential, where there's opportunity, or where we can create some independence in the heart space. The cups is all about water, that's the element that rules the cups, and again, it speaks to our heart, it speaks to our emotions, intuition, it speaks to how we connect to others, how we relate to others from an emotional place. And when I say connect to others or relate to others, that doesn't just mean other people. And I also feel it's important, I've said this before, but I will say it again, that the cups does not speak to romantic love. We often think that because love is one of the most powerful emotions that we can feel. It is literally the drive for many of us in the heart is to love and be loved, but that's the key. Some people don't want romantic love, and that doesn't mean that the cups speak to them any less. In the space of water and the heart, we are talking here about our intuition, our emotions, that flow of how we engage with the world from an emotional space, and it's how we connect to ourselves, others, and to other things. So this could include place, memory, animals, moments. It could include myth and story. I know for me, as someone who loves music, when I'm listening to songs that really speak to me on an emotional level, my cups space, my heart space is just radiating because I'm connecting to the meaning of the song, the energy of the song, what the song is speaking to. So water as the element associated with cups represents the gift and the flow of life. That we're not just machines, we're not just logical and rational, that we have this undercurrent within ourselves that moves us to create meaning and connection between ourselves and the rest of the world. If we look at water, water is the gift of life. Water softens, it brings growth, it cleanses, it shapes, and it can even, through its power, morph and create things that are as hard as rock. So with the cups, all of the cups, not just the ace here, with all the cups, including our core cards, the cups invite and ask us to consider how we are connecting to our intuitive flow and how we are emotionally relating to the world at large. Listening back while I was editing, I recognized that I said create things like rock. I meant carve things like rock. I apologize. Water has the power to slowly over time wear down and shape and carve rock. And that is important to take with us because that shows not only the power of water with its fluid motions and its ability to be flexible and adapt, and it can carve something as hard as rock. That's a beautiful invitation for our own emotions. That through our own emotions, with the sense of recognizing where our emotional truth is, but also where we can use that emotional truth and adapt it and take it and make it ours and move with it, not against it, we can carve our reality into a more emotionally authentic place. Now, of course, certain things happen in life that we can't get away from, we don't control, but we can still choose to engage from our hard space in a way that helps us, that serves us, that softens and that cleanses, and ultimately over time, that will help to create and shape and carve our reality, even if in the moment we don't think that we're capable of doing that. So the first way that I read the Ace of Cups, and I didn't mention this, but my link to my tarot key for purchase is available in the show notes. It's a downloadable PDF, and I literally pull from this tarot key when I do each of these deep dives. So if you want my deep dive or my key into what I use to create the deep dive, I should say for every single 78 tarot cards, you can get that with my tarot key. But the first way that I read this card is that it speaks to that initiation in the heart space. When this card comes forward, we are being asked to step into our emotional waters and find the flow. We are asked to connect to the internal spring of our emotions and understand or sit with and witness what emotions are coming through. Are we tired? Are we sad? Are we joyful? Are we lit? Are we listless? Are we grieving? Are we angry? What are we feeling? That's an immediate ace of cups energy. It's just what emotion is within you that is coming forward. And then the ace of cups says, where does this emotion connect to a situation? Like is this something from our past? Is it something that we're moving through? Is it something that we saw on social media? And then it follows with what truth follows this emotion, or what does this emotion want to say? What is this emotion trying to tell us because it's attached to that situation, that moment, that part from our past? And how can we just feel it? Even when it's hard, even when we feel like these emotions might break us, the ace of cups reminds us that we have a heart that feels. If we don't take time to just initiate this connection to our heart, we are ultimately doing ourselves a disservice because the ace of cups and all these emotions that start to come forward, or maybe it's just one, but when we create this initiation, these are all things that can help us create a new, more aligned, positive, or empowered beginning going forward. When we take the time to simply open into our emotions, into our intuition, we find that there is so much more there. And maybe we know it's all there and we're just like continuously shoving it all down, but when We connect to this initiation in the heart and just saying, What is here that I need to feel? Or what is here that I need to witness that is so imperative to helping us align to a beginning that honors this emotion. Now, sometimes, of course, we have to shove certain emotions down. We have to simply move through the moments in our life. We have to survive the day. And then a lot of times we do all of that and then we get back to our home or we get to a space where it's more comfortable and then we just kind of go numb. And I don't say this with any sort of judgment, believe me, because I feel and I do this because sometimes this is how we survive. Sometimes we don't have the capacity to just sit with our heart and then all this stuff starts coming forward, right? We just need to get through a situation, get through a chapter in our life. Like for me, I can tell you heavily this was the cats. When I was going through the grief with the cats, I couldn't even really feel all those emotions because it was too much. And I just had to survive, I had to keep going, I had to wake up, I had to go to work, I had to show up for the grizz. I had to do all these things. So sometimes we do have to do that. However, the problem with that is that when we deny our emotions, we're simply burying them. They will come up sooner or later, they will surface. And often when we are denying that initiation that the ace of cups speaks to, we're denying this beautiful sense of opening the heart even more to compassion, to forgiveness, to love, to awareness. When we can open our heart and see what emotion is coming forward and say, I see why we're hurt here, and it's okay. When we continue to just deny and repress our emotions, they're going to come forward. And now there might be other emotions attached to them, like anger, resentment, a sense of stress or anxiety. The Ace of Cups can sometimes be hard, and we'll get to the shadow side of this. But when we initiate into the hard space and we just say, What is here? And we just allow an emotion to come forward, we're actually helping set ourselves up for that powerful beginning going forward, whether that's just the rest of the day or in a situation. We're allowing that emotion to talk to us, and then it feels heard, and we can kind of integrate it more easily into how we go about our day. When we continue to just deny them, what we are doing is denying a part of ourself that is again so soft and tender and beautiful and wonderful. And through that denial, we can often create other narratives attached to self-worth, attached to how we respond to other people. It creates this disconnection within us, I guess is what I'm trying to say. So the ace of cups invites us to open into our heart in a way that suits us. So it could be journaling, it could be pulling tarot cards, it could be going out in nature, it could be meditating, it could be exercise, it could be doing something for our inner child, you know? But when this card comes forward, we are being asked to gently step our feet into the emotional waters within and feel those emotions in a way that is loving and compassionate so that we can go forward into our day or again, whatever situation we're pulling this card on. We can go forward into that in a way that is also loving and compassionate. The next way that I read the Ace of Cups is that it speaks to a return to the heart, to our intuition, and to this emotional awareness, like we talked about before, kind of building on that. There's this coming home with all of the aces, because again, we're kind of in the space of beginning again, starting something, but with all of the aces, we have to create this awareness of how we begin. Just like when you plant a seed in the soil, you have to create awareness of the right types of conditions that are going to allow that seed to thrive. It's the exact same thing here. When we initiate into the heart space and we start to become more aware of the emotions that we're carrying, it creates this beautiful opportunity to rewrite old emotions and to kind of let flow a new emotional narrative. It allows us to go back and not undo maybe some harms that have been done to us or that maybe we have done to others. But what it allows is for this awareness of going forward, this is the emotion that I put forward. If that's compassion, if that's kindness, if that's forgiveness, if that's boundaries, if that's um a sense of being vulnerable, you know, or it could be a sense of emotional awareness that this is not someone who honors my emotional truth. And so I refuse to be a victim anymore by their actions. When we have the ace of cups come forward in a reading, we are tapping into this beautiful, profound opportunity to build emotional awareness and then rewrite the emotional narrative going forward. And this is so imperative because it it creates a space where we connect to our emotions honestly. We don't try to, like we said before, kind of um shove anything down. We don't try to just say, no, we're all fine. We create this safe space for our emotions to flow, and then we allow the rest of our actions or how we engage with certain people or just some external stuff in our life, start to mirror this new emotional narrative that we're writing. It also allows us to really connect into our intuition. The ace of cups is this drop-in that says, come home to this for five minutes, just see what's stirring there. And this is why I love the ace of cups so much because it's a reminder that even people who are, even though people make time to connect to their intuition, we're always doing this coming back to the beginning, we're always doing this pivot back to just sitting with our intuitive awareness and seeing what comes forward. The more we do it, the the easier it does get. But again, some days we're just not the same. And so when the ace of cups comes forward, it's this reminder of return to home base, return to the beginning and sit with that voice of your heart, your intuition, and allow those emotions to express the truths and understandings that don't come from the rational, conscious, reasoned way we get access to information, right? So when this card comes forward, we're coming home to this emotional evolution and this ancient way of understanding, which is our intuition. And we constantly are reminded with the ace that we just come back and adjust. We come back and we sit, we build awareness and we start to tweak the rest of our world to follow suit. So this card is so beautiful because even though it's like Ace of Cups, new beginnings in the heart, it's actually this deep, deep vein of creating new narratives coming home to this birthright that everyone has. Everyone has intuition because it comes with us. Like we're born with it. It's not like I have it, you don't. We all have it. Again, those who tap into their intuition more may trust it more, but we all have it. And the Ace of Cups is this reminder, kind of this equalizer that whether you've never done intuitive work or you do intuitive work every day, it's this pivot back to home base, and then we tweak and we adjust. And sometimes that tweaking and that adjusting doesn't even mean like an action. The actions are gonna come as we move down the rest of the cups suit. For right now, it's just this turn on of the light switch within our heart and listening to that voice of our heart with our intuition and become aware of what is being said, what song, what poem, what eulogy, what piece of art our heart is trying to get us to paint. You know what I mean? And then allowing the rest of the day or our actions or our choices, our relationships, whatever it is, to kind of be tweaked based on what we do here with the ace of cups. And the last way that I read the Ace of Cups is that it speaks to and invites us to create new emotional or intuitive capacities within the self. To put it another way, this card asks us where we can grow a little bit, where we can bring more of a wholesome attitude or approach to that initiation that we've been talking about. This card, when it comes forward, and this part of how I read this card speaks to where we can expand, ripple outwards as we're creating that initiation, like a finger into water. Think of the capacity as a ripple effect that comes out from that. I almost kind of like to think of that moment from the Grinch where he finally recognizes that Christmas is not what he thought it was. He thought it was all about material gain and waste, and I mean I would still argue it kind of is, but he finally sees that from the perspective of the who's it's actually a way to bring and come together and love community, joy, and support for each other. Because even when he takes Christmas away, they still go out and hold hands around the tree and they sing, and he has this emotional transformation, and then his heart grows three sizes. And I'm not saying that the ace of cups is expansive as that extreme, but you get my point. I think that it's more about how when we allow the emotion that we're feeling to come through, good or bad, whether it's joy, whether it's grief, whether it's anger, whether it's anxiety, whatever it is, and we actually create a little bit of a bigger container to hold that emotion with a little bit more of a wholesome, compassionate, loving, accepting approach. That's what the Ace of Cups speaks to for me. And again, a lot of times that's just simply sitting, not doing anything, but connecting to this internal work of allowing that emotional capacity within us to expand. When this card comes forward, it's a question of how can we grow a little bit in the heart through connecting to our emotions and to intuition. And I also just want to clarify something here. Like I know I've mentioned that intuition is a birthright, but one of the things I just want to say is that intuition doesn't always have to mean like this spiritual meditative download. Intuition can is just merely the ability to acquire knowledge or understand something without going through the channels of logic or reason or this awake consciousness. We can have immediate truths that we understand we know something, it may not happen yet, or we don't have a reason to own that truth yet, but we know it in our bones that this is that this is true, right? It's often talked about as a gut feeling, and I want to be clear and say that with intuition, I place it in the suit of cups merely because when we talk about a gut feeling, that's a feeling our hearts react subconsciously to these unseen emotional um data information that we're receiving, and that can change our heart rate, it can change certain things in the body. But I'm not saying that intuition is only regulated through the heart, it can be regulated through the stomach and that gut mind, it can be regulated to also with the uh with the brain, with the body. Intuition is a whole multi-layered experience, it's not only the cups. I merely place it there because studies have shown that when they would have people look at images, and at first the images are kind of like neutral, um, and then there would be really good images, and then there would be really bad images. Some of the studies show that, like after a little while, before a per before one of the participants in the study would see like a really violent or a really traumatic image, their heart rate would actually start to go up, like their their heart rate would start to increase before they had even seen the photo yet. So that is why I merely place it in the heart that a lot of times it's an emotional thing, but it is so connected to all the parts of the body. So just because we pull a wand or a pentacle doesn't mean that we couldn't be talking about intuition. So I just wanted to make this clear. But again, just kind of going back to the last way that I read this card is that when we are in this space of connecting to a situation, when we are in a space of being out in the world or even meditating in the, you know, the sunny meadow, if we start to make a habit of kind of quickly checking in with our heart, it can actually allow us to make choices and act in a way that aligns to our intuition even more if we kind of start to make it a habit. And when the ace of cups comes forward, again, like we talked about, it's just this coming back to home base. It's this coming back to center, seeing what we're carrying, and then navigating, adjusting, and tweaking from there. Before I move on and talk about the shadow side of the Ace of Cups and then the symbolism, I want to quickly read for you the writings here in the guidebook, which I personally believe is the best guidebook that I've ever read. It's so good. That is the Spirit Animal Tarot. The only other one that is a contender for me as like being up there when I read it, that my mind is like truly blown is the Herb Crafters Tarot. That's another great one. But this one just takes it to another level with me. The author is Dawn Brunke. I think I'm saying that correctly. B-R-U-N-K-E. The animal associated with the Ace of Cups or Ace of Shells is Nautilus, and you will find it on my blog on the left-hand side, kind of right towards the middle of the blog down. But this guidebook is so good. So here is what she has to say about all of the aces, not just the ace of cups, that they speak to opportunity, excitement, and new beginnings. Aces activate dormant energy, initiate new beginnings, and open us to bold creative possibilities. Aces inspire by revealing signs from spirit, windows of opportunity, or portals into new realms. An ace is a gift represented in these cards by its suit symbol, which here the cups are the shells. And then for the Nautilus, it says that the theme of this card is love, intuition, harmony, bounty, I'm sorry, beauty and balance. Intimacy, inspiration, love, and contentment are yours. Just as Nautilus floats freely in the deep sea by artfully concealing itself, we often sense the energy of this card before we see it. A tingle of happiness, a swell of attraction, a knowing that something life-changing has arrived. By accepting the gift, we open and lives and life's healing waters flow through our being. Nautilus offers buoyancy as well as depth, encouraging us to trust emotional awareness as we explore the ups and downs of relationships and the fluid connection between self and spirit. Fine-tune your ability to discern what feels right for you. Desires and passions naturally balance when we are at home within ourselves. With simplicity and elegance, Nautilus displays the beauty of sacred space. The curve and inner worlds and inner world chambers of its smooth shell, unchanged for millions of years, reveal perfect proportion, a natural spiral also seen in the symmetry of cyclones and galaxies. Receiving this card invites you to heed intuition, deepen compassion, and attune to spirit as you pursue heart-based meaning and purpose in life. The message is to trust your feelings, open your heart, and know that you are home. It's an absolutely beautiful guidebook. I love the way Don Brunke writes, and I just wanted to share that with you for your consideration. But now let's talk about the shadow side of the Ace of Cups because every single card has a shadow side. So the shadow side of the Ace of Cups operates in the space of refusal, stubbornness, or denial. Now, again, these are normal at times. I'm not saying that the minute that we do this, we're out of balance, that we're in the shadow side. Sometimes we need to just, you know, push it down. We don't have the capacity in that moment. We're not in the proper space to just, you know, really go into this emotion. That is absolutely something that we need to do. Um, you know, at times. We might be around certain people that just do not deserve to see a more vulnerable side of us because they haven't shown us that they can be supported or that they can be supportive, excuse me, that they can be trusted with our emotions. They've just kind of shown time and time again that they're just not really there for us. Um so we need to pick these times carefully, but we cannot make stubbornness, refusal, and denial of our emotions uh chronic. You know, we can't just keep doing this because it's just easier than dealing with it. I hate to say it, but eventually that bill is gonna come due and it's not going to be um easy. You know, some emotions are never gonna be easy to sit with, you know. It's some things in life are just hard. And we might want to seek some outside help. I can say that my counselor has been very helpful for me and with me in navigating some of my emotional hardships. Um, a tarot reader, hello, can also be very um helpful because we're using the cards as a way to navigate some of the emotional truths in a way that again feels supportive. There's guidance, there's a little bit of clarity. So we might want to seek out some outside help. We also might want to create a ritual of this initiation into the heart space with maybe more positive or neutral feelings or times of our day or times of our life. Um, just kind of creating a ritual in some way so that when we do go into sit with some of these more weighted, heavy emotions, that it might feel a little bit easier because we've been building this ritual up. We have a little bit of muscle memory now of connecting into this space. Also, always again, like going out into nature, journaling, meditating, exercising, um, a hobby, a creative outlet. These are all things that can help mitigate that as well. But the shadow side with the ace of cups comes in when we are just blatantly refusing to sit with our emotions, and then we don't want to have anyone else point them out to us, and so then we go around with the Feeling of a target because we know that these emotions are there, we're carrying the debris of these emotions, but we're not taking time to consider the source, and then a lot of times, what can happen? I'm I'm gonna only speak for myself here. I I invite you to consider this in your own life, um, with people you might know, but I can just say from times in my life with people who have refused to do this, the minute that you would try to engage with them in any way and say, Hey, I'm upset, or you did this and I am hurt by it, the level of not only victim blaming, um, like they're the victim, how dare you point this out, but also the level of the audacity that you have to have an emotion around how I have treated you. Like they just assume that everyone else is going to be fine with their bullshit because they're carrying bullshit because they haven't sat with it. You know what I mean? The problem with that is that it doesn't work like that, babe. You know, um, some of these people, at least in my life, are ones I no longer talk to because to me, I'm like, I will sit and talk to anyone about anything, but it has to be a two-way street, it has to be based in civility and respect, and it has to be based in truth beneath all of that. You know, it has to be based in this recognition of accountability. And people who haven't done their own work with the shadow side of the ace of cups, they're refusing, they're stubborn, and they're in denial. You're not gonna get anything out of them that is based in truth, compassion, or respect because they can't do that with themselves, you know. And even for ourselves, if we're doing it to ourselves, there are times where again, we might need to do that for a while. Again, like with me, when I was processing losing the three my three cats in eight months, I couldn't process all my grief. I just physically did not have the capacity for that. And the minute that I would try to open that container a little bit, it was like a waterfall. You know, I'm trying to like, you know, get a cup of water to sit and process, and it's just all coming. Um, so I had to do a lot of push and pull with my grief. I had to do a lot of that. Um, and some days I was just too tired and didn't even try. So the shadow side of the Ace of Cups is when we just flat out refuse to engage with our emotions and we want um other people to treat us the same way, or um we we create a victim narrative around how we're processing when in reality it's like um being able to sit in your emotional shit is some of the hardest stuff you can ever do. And I say that with love for everyone listening who has ever gone through something hard, which is pretty much all of us, because we've all had moments in our life that have been um that have been really hard. And when we actually have the bravery and the courage and the capacity to sit with that, even if it's drip by drip, um, and the waterfall of our emotions, that that takes a lot of courage. So the shadow side may look easier on the surface, but it is in no way easier, and um it ultimately leads to a lot of blowback, maybe not immediate, maybe not in every day or every moment, but there's a lot of residual debris that comes in when we just you know, again, flat out refuse to sit with our emotions. Finally, let's look at the symbolism from this card and see what they see. As I said, I'm gonna go into one card depiction now, maybe two, but I just don't have the time anymore to discuss all of them because my tarot deck collection is obviously ever growing. I do encourage you to go look at the blog so you can see the different depictions of the card that I'm doing the deep dive on. You can see the depictions from across my decks. You might find one that you really resonate with and you want to pick up that deck and have it in your own collection. I also do encourage you, if you have any tarot decks, to see what you are seeing in those decks and how is the symbolism speaking intuitively to you. If you want to let me know what decks you're working with, I would love to hear and be given a shout-out of a deck. I just I love when we talk about decks like this. It's kind of like book club, but it's tarot deck club, you know what I mean? Uh, the aces I'm going to be discussing the depiction from the Rider Weight. You cannot deny that iconic hand that comes out of the cloud and offers the token suit. It's so gorgeous. Here, like I said, we have the ace of cups. So we see this hand protruding out of the sky. There's this cloud right behind the wrist, and in the hand is this bright yellow golden goblet with an upside-down M. And then there are five streams of water flowing out of the cup into a body of water below with lily pads and lotus flowers. At the top, we have a dove that is placing something, it's like a little circle with a cross into the goblet. We will find out what that is, but I just love the aces from the writer weight with that again, that iconic hand. And here it's just so watery, everything is just so moving and fluid, and liminal, and blues, and grays, and that bright yellow. It's a stunning depiction. So, what we are seeing here from the writer weight is this tribute to bringing the divine through in our emotions and in our intuition. The hand is a representation of an offering of some kind. Uh, like Don Brunkey said again, that the aces represent this connection to spirit, that spirit is revealing these certain signs to us. And here we kind of see the same thing that this hand is offering something to us, it is giving us a gift for us to take with us on our journey going forward. And as we begin this journey, the gift that we have been given is going to teach us things, it's going to help us, and it should be used and integrated into the process. The goblet symbolizes the container of our emotions, like I talked about before, with this capacity. Um, the goblet symbolizes that here, this is our heart space. The golden color speaks to the capability of the heart to form emotional and intuitive connections that are golden and radiant and abundant. That's what we want. You know, I really don't believe that anyone wakes up and just um, yeah, we might, you know, have a bad day sometimes and maybe we are kind of fueling our more negative emotions, but I really don't believe that anyone wants to just have a bitter, miserable, shitty life. You know what I mean? We want this golden, radiant, abundant goblet that represents our heart space. The upside down M on the goblet can symbolize and represent um the words of mother, which is the nurturer. It can also represent the mysteries of living an emotional or intuitive life, and it can also speak to the Hebrew word, which is maim, and this is the word the Hebrew word for water. Mary Kay Greer, famous, famous tarot card scholar, reader, so many books she's written, she's incredible. Um, had this to say on her blog, written in 2017. I will have it in the show notes, in relation to the goblet as a container, it is a major symbol of the receptive feminine. And in Christianity, the womb of the Virgin Mary. Some people think that the upside down M can either relate to Mary, to mother. Um, some say it relates to mystery and again to the Hebrew word for water, which is maim. Um, but she goes on to say uh the womb of the Virgin Mary, the seat of creation and manifestation of love, esoterically seen as the bride. It is a vessel in which things are cooked, making raw materials capable of providing rich nourishment, and even in alchemy, changing lead into gold. It is the cup of transformation containing the waters of life, in which water is changed into wine and then to blood. It is the cauldron of dogda in Celtic myth from which no company ever left unsatisfied. Both the cup and water represent the soul. And then it says the message, the message of the secret tradition in the Christian grail mystery is this the cup corresponds to spiritual life. It receives the graces from above and communicates them to that which is below. The equivalent happens in the supernatural Eucharist, the world of unmanifest adept shift attained by sanctity and grace. We see a connection to the Eucharist again with the dove because the dove is actually holding the wafer that is the body of Christ that we see we know um is synonymous with the Eucharist, and in relation to the dove, she has this to say as well. And with the dove, she writes um, the dove can be seen as the descent of spirit into flesh, of the supernatural into the natural, a theme repeated by the cross on the host, composed of the vertical axis of spirit and the horizontal of matter. The cross which represents Christ's suffering and sacrifice on the car on the cross becomes a blessing. So the dove represents purity and this connection to the divine, or in um a Christian setting or a Christian faith base to um Jesus and to their faith. And then with the dove, we also see it how the divine is kind of coming into the heart. Like there's this offering of we're taking that divinity in, like they believe with the Eucharist, and then we use that divinity to guide us in both the spiritual and the material of our lives going forward. The five streams represent the four physical elements of water, air, earth, and fire, and then ether, and how our intuition is connected to those elements to those elements that form the building blocks of life. With the five streams, Mary Kay Greer says that it could veil, you know, why are there five streams? It could veil a secret. These five streams might, after all, represent the five senses, or the five ways of salvation and five gates of grace from Masonic ritual, the five wounds of Christ, the five points of a pentagram, the five petals of the rose that rest on five leaves, or the four elements plus ether, the quintessence. In terms of symbolism, five yields far more relevance according to Waite himself, and then he goes on to again kind of talk about this. I will let you read that for yourself. But we see it how the five has this very deeply spiritual significance, and with the cup being this heart space, it's representative of our hearts. Whatever you want to take from this, whether it's the five senses, it's the four elements plus ether, um, it's the five wounds of Christ, whatever it is, we see it how from our heart space there is this pouring into bigger bodies of water. So there's this broader connection that we form when we allow and initiate that capacity to grow, that container to grow, like we've been talking about. Because then the five streams flow into this big body of water with lily pads and lotus flowers, and those obviously symbolize this sense of um being able to kind of come up from the depths. The they represent this emergence from the depths into awareness of beautiful things coming through from murkiness or darkness or shadow, and so we see this kind of forever cycle happening as these five streams spill into this deeper body of water. One final thing I just want to note that with the background, it's very calm, it's a lot of gray, except for the blue, those little bits of green, and then of course the yellow. But we have this very placid gray sky, and then all of this vibrancy is coming from the goblet and the water itself. So there's a symbol, there's a symbolic invitation here that when we are connecting from the heart space, that's where this radiance kind of comes through. It's not from our logical, reasoned, rational brain, it's from this felt, embodied, integrative, and kind of alive heart space that moves us and it can brighten our day. It can be this golden radiance that we see. And so we kind of want to move from this vibrancy from within into the external. So that is the deep dive of the Ace of Cups. Thank you so very much for listening. I hope that these deep dives are helpful. I always hope that they provide something for you in reading these cards yourself. That's my goal. I hope that they give you something to use when you are doing your own readings. And with that in mind, I would like to close out this episode and thank my patrons, Bobby McDermott, Lisa Zimmerman, Tracy Lanham, Kim Hartnett, Chris Ree, Miranda Snow, Colleen Toue, Charlie Ruggles, Shannon Konendike, and Danica Favorite. Thank you all so much for your support in me and in Wolfchild Magic. I'm sending a howl to you. And until next time, my dear listener, take care.