There’s always a lot of pressure at the start of a new year to make resolutions, to promise ourselves grandiose lifestyle changes in an effort to be “better”. We spin ourselves around vowing to become someone we’re not because we’re so dissatisfied with who we are that we can’t stand just loving where we are.
Of course, I’m not immune to any of this. I sat down with my planners and I mapped out my goals for 2022 like a good adult and business owner. But I also felt like I was on a revolving hamster wheel of disappointment and discontent. While the goals aligned with what I used to do when I was a manager, they didn’t reflect what I wanted to feel this year, only what I thought might amount to “success”.
I talk a lot here about breaking free of the expectations of others. It isn’t something that just happens once; it is a continual process of awareness, evaluation and summoning the courage to change. Risking the rejection of others so we can be our true selves is why authenticity is considered such a rare quality.
And yet each of us are reclaiming that territory day by day. Maybe it’s rejecting a job offer that is insultingly low, defying the repetitive nagging in our head that says “any job is a good job”. Or it is declaring our new pronouns to our families. Everyday we make progress toward showing up with our true light. And the more we glow up, the less we need to impress the world with our conformity to their goals.
This week I go back to the Robin Wood tarot deck, which is what I will be using for my year ahead readings all month. And this week it is giving us encouragement to pursue our dreams but a warning to free ourselves from the expectations and assumptions we carry with us.
See more below…
Where we are this week
Knight of Cups
The Knight of Cups is the hopeless romantic who wears his heart on his sleeve. Not because he’s naive or weak. No, it’s because he’s in touch with who he is and understands how to navigate his own emotional landscape. He takes responsibility for how he feels and how he’s contributed to the experiences of others. He seeks reconciliation and harmony with sensitivity for others. I think this is a great card to start the week. We’re in a place of emotional understanding and awareness, able to act with a clear view of how our feelings influence us. We are entering this week ready to take responsibility for our own selves while advancing the cause of Love.
Listen and act with our heart
Messages from our Guides
Eight of Swords
One of the most difficult lessons for us to learn is how we keep ourselves trapped with our own self-limiting beliefs. Because to see these limiting beliefs we have to acknowledge that they are false and harmful in the first place. The difficulty we find ourselves in this week may have more to do with beliefs that we adopted from others rather than any true threat that others may pose. In fact, it’s often our assumptions and uncertain stereotypes that may be influencing the fears that we use to imprison our minds and hearts from truly connecting with others. This card has been coming up a lot lately – acknowledging that we have more control over our experience than we might think, if we only free ourselves from the conclusions we’ve already drawn about our role and experience of this world, but especially the conclusions we’ve drawn about a future that hasn’t been written yet.
Beware of binding ourselves
Messages from Lady Gaia
Queen of Pentacles
The Queen of Pentacles has made a few appearances the past few weeks and was in this exact position just the week before last. Again Mother Earth is begging us to watch our consumption of resources – she stands there with her hands on her hips impatiently saying, “I said what I said”. We are told to stop acting like the earth owes us some big favor of nurturance when we have abandoned our partnership with her in favor of a self-centered alliance of slow-burning destruction. Here, she shows up to remind us that we pursue our new year’s resolutions, as we try to improve ourselves, that we need to very clearly put a watchful eye on the mindlessness of our society of self-absorbed excess. After devastating fires in Boulder last week, we have an up-close-and-personal view of the promises of climate change. If we continue as we have been, if we don’t make collective efforts to curtail our use, we take giant steps toward the point of no return. I don’t mean to be doom & gloom, but our intentions MUST include a better partnership with Mother Earth. We are the only ones dragging our feet about this – allowing toxicity to build by the minute.
I said what I said…
Messages from our Ancestors
Two of Pentacles
I have used at least four different decks in the past few weeks. Each of them keeps bringing this up ni nearly every reading, no matter how much I shuffle. So, obviously the message here is about continuing our work of balancing our real world responsibilties with our hopes and dreams. We actually have been doing much better at this, but we need to work on the safety nets that exist to help us if we fall off the tightrope we’re walking. For those of us, like me, who have started new business, are pursuing our dreams while managing the real world responsibities of family, rent, insurance and student loans, this is a timely message for us. Our ancestors re not only acknowledging our hard work (which they are VERY familiar with), but they are also assuring us that they can help build a stronger, more supportive safety net if we fall or get out of balance. Work with them to achieve this because our dreams are their dreams too. They don’t want ot see us fail.
A more supportive safety net
Messages from our Future Selves
Nine of Pentacles
Our future selves tell us that the intentions we planted at the start of this year, the intentions we whispered in the darkness of the new moon now ending, are the seeds of leadership that will create the abundance and bounty we expect. We’ll see these dreams come to fruition because we’ve done the work of tending to our own inner garden lately. We’ve removed the obstacles that prevented us from manifesting what we wanted in the first place. We’ve made the adjustments we needed to truly nurture our dreams into reality. Yes, fulfilment is ours.
Fruits of our labor
Message from Mother Mary
Six of Swords
A lot of us had to leave behind the old parts of ourselves that were hanging on to juvenile expectations and other people’s dreams. We’re liberating ourselves from attachemnt to anyone else’s point of view, from the expectations of a world that forced resilience on us when we were too young to recognize it wasn’t our fault. Dreams that we constructed to soothe a child’s lonely, wounded soul will never truly fulfill us. Instead, Our Lady Mother Mary, invites us to join her on a voyage far away from the hurt expectations and defiant disregard of those who sought to control and define us, instead of nurture and understand us. We don’t have to be tethered to the past any longer. She invites use to join her and enter a new world of being – a space where joy, love and understanding can truly be ours again. It is safe to let go and trust.
Moving on to better shores
Final advice:
Five of Wands
Avoid unnecessary conflict
Five of Pentacles
Confront our assumptions about poverty
Right now, there’s a lot of tender energy and vulnerability in the air of this new year. We’ve have such a rough time of it, now is a really good time ot cool it on the unnecessary conflict. Do you need to go full nuclear when someone looks at us wrong? Or can we step back and decide to let it flow off our back. Let go of the conflicts that don’t really matter and find new ways to engage in the ones that do. Recognize the influence that shame and guilt have on triggering reactions that get us fruther away from the connective harmony we say we want. Right now we need to choose our battles wisely. For our sake and others’.
This minute the five of pentacles comes up in a reading I can feel my stomach clench with fear and shame. I remember what food and income insecurity felt after I lost my job. I remember being on Medicaid and food stamps and the infinite number of hoops I had to jump through to get my family fed and seen by a doctor. So many of us are flirting on the edge of disaster every day, which activates our trauma in ways that I think we’re only barely starting to understand. My experience helped me better understand my clients when I started doing disability applications for folks who were unhoused. It helped me better recognize our shared responsibility for each other. It disproved that “people only ever want a handout” or that they were there because of “bad choices”. Sometimes, there was just no other choice because of systemic traumas that kept creating more barriers to access and care. The final advice of the card this week is to address our relationship with poverty, including and espeically our assumptions about the motivations of the people living in poverty. Their stories, our stories, are deeper than we can imagine. Are brave enough to imagine a world without poverty or lack?
Blessing:
May the coming year remind us of our inherent emotional truths, freeing us from illusions of control to empower us to reduce the excesses of our lives in an effort to preserve the natural harmony of earth. May we final balance in our everyday, seeking the guidance of those who truly support us to make our dreams come true. May we be willing to let go of the old to embrace what abundance for all can truly look like.
I am with you always in love 💖
So may it be.
La Madonna Rosa 
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