Thank you all for your patience last week. I hate it enough when I miss a deadline; I hate it more when I miss it due to my own emotions. But even before Mercury retrograde started it was cautioning me to both slow down and reevaluate the purity of my motives before acting. Considering that it thwarted me for three full days in trying to make last week’s Messages of Divine Love post, I really needed to take a step back before putting my foot in my mouth. (Click here to see what I said about it on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CiN8JfFjt9p/)

If you’ve been here for a while you know that I’ve struggled with self-worth for much of my life. Perhaps because I’ve always lived at the intersections of multiple identities and communities, the prevailing message in my life was that I had to prove my worth. Prove my intelligence, prove my compassion, prove my sexiness, prove my humanity, prove my rationality, prove my eager innocence or seductive guilt. Unknown and untested, I was hungry to prove myself and earn the appreciation that was missing from my own heart.

Gotta tell ya, now that I’m in my forties, nothing is more tedious and insulting than having to prove myself to each new person who comes my way. I’m just not interested in justifying why I chose to do something the way I did. Can we accept that after thirty years of experience with my calling and over twenty in public policy, law, and conflict resolution, I know a few things? And once I saw the superficial, capitalistic, patriarchal, colonizer game that is being played with the literal lives I was representing, the people already at the end of their rope, I also started to see the idea of scrambling to receive the appreciation of others as a waste of my time and talent.

I catch myself overexplaining here all the time. That need to be “understood” is so driven by a sad inner child who was isolated by how my ADHD handled criticism. So I find myself overachieving in my transparency about my process. I’m not doing it because it’s trauma-informed or the right way to share my talent, but because I’m still chasing the approval of others, waiting for others to tell me I’m worthy of sharing my talent and my message. So long as I’m seeking the approval of those higher than me in the pecking order, I will never truly be seen for who I am or what I bring to the world. Instead of sacrificing myself over and over to the altar of someone else’s acceptance, I need to provide that approval for myself.

That’s what last week’s comedy of failures taught me. I could have beat myself up for not measuring up to other tarot/oracle readers; but instead, I gave myself space for forgiveness and compassionate insight. And it made all the difference. It made criticism easier to handle and made difficult discussions more apt to resolve. But most of all, it forced me to slow down and focus on myself, recognize and wrestle with my own anger and bias – a great theme for this Mercury Retrograde.

This week I worked with the Psychic tarot, the deck I use for my own weekly chakra readings. We start off this week with declarations of our worthiness – how deserving of love we are. But we also end it with reminders not to take unnecessary risks, especially just to prove our worth. Don’t go out on a limb to satisfy someone else’s vision of who we should be, instead, step up as the sovereign “we” to find ourselves worthy of the love we seek.

See more below…

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Undercurrents & Final advice

The Fool here honestly surprised me. Given all the messages of shining worth and deservingness above, I wouldn’t have expected to see this caution sign. And then I remembered all the trouble I had with last week’s post just days before Mercury Retrograde even started and woo boy, it made a lot more sense. This season is unusually disruptive. We’re more prone to conflict over details and communications. We’re still feeling the Full Moon in Pisces influence, so we’re also still prone to impulsive flights of fancy – like quitting our day job to become a massage therapist without a stitch of savings or realistic idea of the cost of training and licensing. This is a caution that the undercurrents right now do not favor risk takers who embark without a reason, a purpose, or a detailed plan – even then it’s not likely to go well. Remember – we don’t have anything to prove. If it seems like a good idea now, it will be an even better idea three weeks from now when we’ve had time to at least research the landscape of our new direction. Ask yourself “What would a reasonably prudent person do?” to keep yourself in check this week.

We also might need to check our motives this week. Are we doing things for the right reasons or will our actions just bring us right back around to old patterns, addictions, and maladaptive coping that we thought we left behind? We’ll have to come face to face with the devil in ourselves this week. Don’t get drawn into old gossip or reckless arguments – both of which are operations of the ego instead of the heart. Recognize where we are our own worst enemy and remember to choose to love and accept others in the way we want to be loved and accepted by the world.

Blessing

Bless us as we experience the fullness of our own divine love this week. May we use our newfound spiritual strength to shine our light into the dark corners of the world, to give hope and emotional nourishment to those who still feel unworthy of their own acceptance. May we serve a model of hope, prudence and sincerity in the weeks and months to come.

I am with you always in love 💖

So may it be.

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