Asking About Life
I will be using the MerryDay Tarot for you here, but Louise Poole, quite a special deck as you will see. :-)
If you know me, one of the things I believe most strongly is that everything in life is there and happens for a reason, that all is set to work out for the best in the end. That anything and everything that happens in our lives is there for a good reason, to enhance things in some way, even though at times we can only see the real reason in hindsight years later.
At times, when I tell people that...well they don't always agree. They tell me they have this or that painful experience and there could not possibly be a good reason. Even though my personal life experiences show that there always is, again even if you can only see the full reason and meaning years later and the positive thing that cane from it that could not have come in any other way.
With all that in mind, I thought to ask here this month a couple of questions about that and see what the cards had to say about it all. Here is what happened:
Question 1: What is the purpose of pain and painful events in our lives?
(I asked this question, just in general, although each specific instance of this in our lives is an individual thing that will certainly have individual lessons to learn from and benefits).
7 of Cups
This card is talking about our feelings when we face something painful, Cups are about our feelings. And the 7's, for me, are about facing difficulties and challenges and not giving up. A 7 in Tarot for me says that if we face what we have to have and don't give up or back down we will gain some true rewards.
So, to start of the answer, this cards says that we learn certain emotional lessons by facing challenges, by being persistent and not giving up. and by following though until we succeed. This card says that not only will we have some deep success in the circumstances of our lives by facing these situations down and coming out the other side,. but also as part of the process we gain some real emotional victories. Certain emotional qualifies, like confidence, trust in yourself and a number of others develop mainly by facing hardships and passing through them to the other side. We learn to trust that we can succeed in life, well...by succeeding over and over. And to have true success, there needs to be some struggle.
The keyword for this card is "Dream Weaver". So part of this answer has to do with our dreams for who and what we want to be, what goals we set and what we want to try accomplish in our lives. The more faith we have in our abilities, which comes in large part by having tried things that felt hard for us and seeing ourselves succeed, the larger our dreams will be. We tend to only set goals for what we believe we can actually accomplish. The more we believe we can accomplish, the more we can try to accomplish and achieve in your lives.
10 of Cups
This is an interesting card here. It is again about our feelings, a card from the suit of Cups. And, well... difficult and/or painful situations can bring up certain emotions. 2 of the 3 cards of this answer are Cups cards, so these emotions we may need to work through are part of answer. Added to this that this is a 10 and the 10's represent the most of the element of the suit it is possible to have. So we are talking here about some strong emotions and feelings. These are meant to come up from time to time for us to have a good look at, learn more about, and all this does enhance our lives in certain ways.
This is clearly a card about closeness, family and dear friends, bonding, and love. This card is pointing out that painful experiences have a bonding effect. They bring people closer together. There is empathy, caring, sharing, selflessness. They can bring family and friends closer together, and once that bond had grown and deepened, it continues long after the event and its emotional impact is gone.
In short. many positive emotions also come up at these times that benefit all concerned.. Empathy, selflessness, connection and oneness, deep caring...all can come up in these situations. When a connection deepens with someone that can last forever. Not to mention that a human being who had never felt pain would not have within him the capacity to feel empathy. You can't feel for someone else's pain unless you first know what pain feels like.
flipped 8 of Pentacles
This is a flipped card, a card that "flipped" out of the deck during shuffling. Flipped cards are important to a reading. They ask you to pay extra attention to their messages, to stop and think them over. When you get a flipped card it tends to be saying that the message has some depth to it. And if you stop and think it over you will see something deeper in it that you may not see at first.
Here is a Pentacles card for you. And it's the 8. The message of this card is very similar to that of Card 1 above. Pentacles, to me, are about our goals and the work required to bring those goals from the planning stages into reality in our lives. The 8's are about our inner strength.
So really this card is talking about the level of our strength to bring what we want to have into our lives, into our reality. I would imagine that, as human beings, we all have this same capacity in similar amounts. But maybe what ti all boils down to is knowing that you have it and knowing how to use it to the best advantage. How to really see our inner strength and to know how to use it in the most productive ways
Since the question was about the actual purpose of painful things and situations in our lives, this says that facing them has this affect on us. We learn about our inner strength by testing it. If everything were perfectly easy with no challenges in our lives, we would never have to make use of any inner strength at all. If we had never in our entire lives had to call on our inner strength, how would we even know we had any?
This card is saying that it is by facing situations that challenge us that we get to test our inner strength. And by testing it we connect to it, we come in contact with it and know it is there, and then we learn to trust it will be there for us next time. And as we do this and the most we do so, ideally we believe our self capable of more and more. And we raise the bar on the goals that we work to achieve and we become more than we previously thought we could be. We grow, because of all this.
Question 2: What is the best way to make the best of them (of any painful situations that come up in our lives)?
4 of Wands (R)
This is a card from the suit of Wands, which is about what you want to or choose to create of the situation. It is also a reversed 4. Reversed 4s, for me, are about taking things slowly. They ask you not to act spontaneously or make any rash decisions, but instead to slow things down and think things out before trying to create any kind of change in your life.
This card is saying that at those times when things in your life feel painful or very emotional, that is not a good time to make decisions or to try to create change in your life. At the very least this card says that acting spontaneously from a very emotional place may not be as likely to help you create what it is you really most want as taking the time to slow down and to take time to think what you really want and plan the best path there.
And what you have here is a very upbeat happy card called "Celebration". If you want to create something in your life that is what you want to create, something that feels good and makes you feel like celebrating. You have to have a clear vision of something before you can set out to create it. This card simply says that if you are feeling some pain, at those times it can be hard to see the brightest clearest most positive vision of what you can create. SO it is best at those times to make decisions carefully and take time to really think things out first. Wait of you can, but don't rush any decisions.
King of Fire
This is another interesting card here. Fire can be about creating or about feeling passionate about things. Since the keyword for this this card actually IS "Passion" it is mainly that here. And Kings are about inner control, about being in total control of our inner thoughts and feelings.
What this card is saying is that we cannot always control or avoid painful situations that come up in our lives. In fact they do come up in the lives of every one of us. BUT, the good news is that we really CAN learn to control our thoughts and feelings about them. We cannot change the world around us but we can change ourselves. We can choose to view the same event in a very painful way or in a much lesser one. We get to chose. And that is a huge thing. And we can get better at getting and maintaining that kind of control from inside of us with practice.
SO much of how much pain we feel has to do with the thoughts we choose, Our feelings come from our thoughts. And our thoughts are something we can get inner control over with practice. A number of people can experience the exact same thing and feel differing levels of pain. It's in the way they think. And that, we can learn to take control over.
The image here shows a sort of snake person. Snake shed their skin and "start over anew" in a sense. This too says that we can just remove an old way of thinking and replace it with a newer less painful way of viewing things if we decide to do so.
flipped 5 of Cups
Another flipped card, asking you to stop and think over its message.
Also find this answer interesting. ;-) We are back to talking about our feelings here, Cups. 5's for me are about tradition, the mores of society, what we were taught growing up by our friends, family and even society in general.
This card asks you to stop and think of how you react to painful situations. How and why? Is the way you react really the way that is serving you best? It is something you decided, after careful thought, will lead you to the best place and be healing for you? Or it is just something you learnt along the way but never questioned?
This cars is really asking when you come across periods of loss and transition in your life how do you feel,. some of this is learnt behavior and may or may not actually be in your highest interest. Eg a desire for revenge can be something you learnt from others in your life. But does it really help or does it just cause the other to take revenge back? Does ti really represent who you want to be or it is just learnt behaviour?
Or some people go "Why me?" whenever something feels painful. When in reality these experiences are not unique to them and are part of the universal experience and likely don't happen any more often to them than to others. They may have learnt to go into "Why me?" mode early in life. But does it really help? Most likely these thoughts cause even more pain and prolong things.
So this is the message of this card. It says that thinking over who you react to pain, where these habits in you came from, and maybe most importantly if the ways you currently react to this kind of thing are making you feel better or worse...of they are healing or prolong any pain in your life...thinking over all this will help you deal better with any future challenges that come.
