the five of cups reversed in work, career, life and business ✨

Grief comes (and goes) in waves 🌊

Maybe the grief is over. And maybe it isn’t. But there has been a clearing.
And maybe right now, there is just enough space that you can breathe again. There may be just enough space that you can feel (something other than, if even alongside, grief) again. 

And now it’s time to refill those 3 cups that were emptied. Perhaps the universe is filling them for you. Perhaps you’re being asked to co-create and fill together. Perhaps you already know exactly what to do to fill your cups. 

And. Just because there is a moment of respite, doesn’t mean that grief has left you. 
And. Just because the grief hasn’t fully passed, or it “isn’t time yet”, doesn’t mean you can’t replenish yourself. 

It doesn’t mean you can’t ENJOY yourself
It doesn’t mean you can’t laugh, giggle, and have fun. 

You can.
And you’re being invited to. 

themes: duality, grief, sorrow, joy, nourishment, replenishing, redirection, respite, acceptance, reconciliation, recovery, return

how this plays out:

• Maybe you were laid off months ago, the job market is bleak. You’ve grieved, you’ve gotten angry, you’ve moved in and out of all the feels, and now a tiny glimmer of joy or energy appears in front of you. Feel it. Follow it. 

• Maybe you’ve been at a crossroads and all you know is that you can no longer go on the way you had. You’ve been wallowing in sorrow for what once was. You have no idea where you’re going, but you begin to feel moments of being at peace. 

• Maybe you were passed over for a promotion you'd spent three years working toward. You're disappointed, you’re angry, and you’re questioning whether you even want to stay. But there's a project you've been curious about, one that has absolutely nothing to do with getting promoted. For the first time in a long time, you're excited about your work again (which doesn’t mean that you’re not still upset).

• Maybe you devoted years of your life into building a business that ultimately wasn’t it. You're still grieving the money, the time, the identity, and the future you imagined. AND, you've started making things again, just because. Now maybe you're remembering what it feels like to create simply because you love creating. (note: resist the urge to jump into monetization)

• Maybe your team went through a brutal round of layoffs. You lost colleagues you loved, morale is low, and everyone is still a little shell-shocked. But then someone cracks a joke in a meeting, and for the first time in months, everyone genuinely laughs, and it feels good.

• Maybe actually nothing has happened, for a really long time, because you haven’t been taking the actions that require momentum toward the life you seek. And there is a grief for all the time lost. And there is also a bit of energy and enthusiasm for making a change. 

⬆️ Some of these are fairly big examples. They don’t have to be. How this plays out is that the waves of grief have somewhat subsided, if even for a moment. And the invitation is ⬇️

the invitation: to refill and replenish yourself.

Sometimes we feel guilty when grief subsides (when the wave retreats back to the ocean), and we feel like we need to jump back into grieving, or anger, or sadness or being a victim of sorts. The invitation is to say no thank you to that guilt, and to be fully present in this momentarily opening. It’s to realize that joy (or excitement, or a smile, or a laugh or inspiration, or forward moment) is not a betrayal of the past, of your experience, or of grief in general.

The invitation is to hold multiple truths — that something has been hard, lost, perhaps unrecoverable AND that life is calling you into present joy, creation, movement and peace.

Note: Sometimes what has been lost cannot be recovered — a death, a relationship, the job, the opportunity, the deal, the imagine future, the disappointment. It’s true that whatever is lost might genuinely be gone (for good — at least in the way that it was present before).

AND, your capacity to experience joy has not been lost with it.

When we see the five of cups, we are invited to experience both. To continue grieving as it arises, and to move forward, to refill, to renourish.

There is a quite from a poem that I love, by Janne Robinson. It goes something like “even when we are standing still, the earth is moving.”

And right now, you are being invited to rejoin that movement.

About the cups suite:

The cups of tarot represent the human journey and experience of developing emotional awareness, connection, intuition and ultimately maturity across these realms. The cups are vessels that can hold the entire range of feeling and emotions (from despair to joy and everything in between) and they really bring out the wisdom when it comes to matters of the heart. Therefore, the cups also rule our relationships and how we relate from parenting, to romance, to friendship, to partnership in work and business, to how we work and collaborate with others, in addition to our core wounding and default emotional states. They invite us to move fluidly through our relational roles, out of performance and into integrity, truth and authenticity.

Some themes throughout the cups suite include:

safety, self-tending, compassion, empathy, boundary work, creativity, wisdom, intuition, expression, clarity, murkiness, healing, softness, fluidity, connection, how we relate to self and how we relate to others, integrity

Note: Integrity is not a matter of the mind, but rather a matter of the heart.

A major question offered by any of the cups could be “what is the most loving thing that I can do for myself right now?” And a part of growing through the journey of the cups is to be able to answer that question honestly and then to honor it with action.

Read about the 6 of cups (upright) and the 7 of cups (upright).

Find more tarot insights in our journal.

And book an intuitive strategy session here.